The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

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  * The mind-body split here allows the formulation of two seemingly distinct entities (mind on the one hand, body on the other) to be worked into an analogy of humans as mind, ecosphere as body. Thus the poisoning of the ecosphere becomes the mind poisoning the body, without which it too will perish. Dick realizes, on the contrary, that mind and body are an indivisible whole. It therefore follows that the poisoning of the ecosphere means that it is his body being wounded by the activity of other humans, a conclusion consistent with his view of himself as an avatar or surrogate of Christ. The connections here are implicit rather than explicit, but they help to explain why he sees the "investiture by Christ" as the crucial element in seeing the ecosystem as sacred.—NKH

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  * This notion of reversing signs and reading backward comes remarkably close to the position of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), a German philosopher who helped found the modern study of religion by pioneering its central theory of projection, that is, the notion that all statements about the deity or the transcendent are in fact statements about human nature and its needs, wishes, and fears. In his The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach performs reversals and backward readings very similar to those Dick calls on here, reading, for example, the biblical notions that "God created man in his own image" as "man created God in his own image," or "God is love" as "love is God," and so on. Whereas the later Feuerbach was certainly an atheist and a materialist, it is not so clear that the early Feuerbach was. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Feuerbach can be read as a modern Gnostic thinker who sought to reverse and reduce orthodox claims back to their original base in human nature, which he, paradoxically, considered to be infinite and divine. So the divine projection is "reduced" to its projector, who is secretly divine.—JJK

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  * There is no way to overestimate or repeat enough this exegetical fact: for Dick, writing and reading are the privileged modes of the mystical life. Writing and reading are his spiritual practices. His is a mysticism of language, of Logos, of the text-as-transmission, of the S-F novel as coded Gnostic scripture. The words on the page, on his late pages at least, are not just words. They are linguistic transforms of his own experience of Valis. They are mercurial, shimmering revelations. They are alive. And—weirdest of all—they can be "transplanted" into other human beings, that is, into you and me via the mystical event of reading. Here, in this most stunning of Dick's notions, the cheap S-F novel becomes a Gnostic gospel, words become viral, reading a kind of mutation, and the reader a sort of symbiote.—JJK

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  * Another "defeat is victory" paradox. Though Dick does not seem to have made the connection himself, these statements are reflective of Martin Luther's "theology of the cross"—the idea that God conceals his glory within the humiliation of the crucifixion. Compare Luther's notion with, for example, Dick's earlier statement in the Exegesis that the deity "will be where least expected and as least expected" ([16:14]). Here there is an added level of complication, with the evil in which good hides itself pretending to be good: a classic example of the Dickian "fake fake."—GM

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  * Does the divine camouflage itself to allow us our freedom? Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit articulates the epic quest of self-knowledge through the lens of German Idealist philosophy, scolded readers and told them to go back to the Greek Mysteries if they fell prey to the world's ultimate camouflage: "the truth and certainty of the reality of objects of sense." For those who believe that everything simply is as it seems, Hegel recommends that they "be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learnt the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine." This scolding, too, just might be an act of agape, as Hegel points to the same sacred site as Dick: Eleusis, where the quarry, again, would seem to be prior thought formations that must be destroyed. The Exegesis asks us to look beyond the camouflage of everyday reality toward the One—"the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine."—RD

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  * This quotation is from Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion (1958), an important overview of Gnosticism that shows the force and persistence of the idea of enlightenment by a ray of divine light. For Jonas, this direct contact with the divine divinizes the soul in turn and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely, the view that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally, but requires the divine illumination reserved for the few. In the epilogue, Jonas shows how postwar existential philosophy and particularly the work of Heidegger can be seen as the modern transposition of this Gnostic teaching. Here the world is no longer the creation of a malevolent God, but simply the series of phenomenal events that are causally explained by natural science. Of course, these explanations don't solve the problem of nihilism; they shift and deepen it, leading the modern self to oppose itself to an indifferent or hostile nature and to try to secure for itself a space for authentic freedom. For Jonas, although Gnosticism embodies a powerful temptation for a soul thirsty for God in the desert of the world, it is a temptation that must be refused. For Dick, things are not so clear.—SC

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  * Novelists have always wrestled with the great Selling Out to Hollywood Moral Dilemma, but I'm not sure any have ever escalated (or plunged) it to such a metaphysical (or hysterical) paroxysm. These passages are also at odds with claims made by others that Dick told director Ridley Scott the movie was exactly the way he imagined the novel; clearly he had other feelings. For better or worse, however, there's no underestimating the impact of Blade Runner, not merely on the public recognition of Dick but also on the perception of his writing. The movie gave a visual identity to work that never was especially imagistic (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said comes closer visually to Blade Runner than does Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Even for those readers who were familiar with Dick's work before the film, recollection of his books now takes a visual form that is equal parts Dick's imagination and Scott's advertising background in London. In a way that, of all people, Dick might understand—that what's perceived is a collaboration between who has created it and who has perceived it—Dick himself has become a collaborated invention. All that said, and his histrionics aside, props to Dick for the artistic integrity and courage to resist Hollywood's efforts to usurp the original novel and re-"novelize" it.—SE

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  * Picking up again on the theme of tragedy, here Dick discusses Hamlet in terms of the duality between the usurper king (Claudius) and the true king (Hamlet himself, both the murdered father and the mourning son, who share the same name), who is "mad" and a fool. It is not difficult to imagine some identification between the character of Hamlet and Dick himself; after all, "mad" Hamlet declares that the world is a prison (act 2, scene 2). And the idea of a usurper on the throne is consistent with the Gnostic bent of Dick's worldview, where the false king of Empire has marginalized the true king through an act of murder. Dick identifies a similar dualism in the opposition between Pentheus (the illegitimate king) and Dionysos (the true king) in Euripides' The Bacchae.—SC

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  * The very fact of Dick's obsession with forming this overview of his work is noteworthy: though I question whether it's healthy—there's a point beyond which a novelist is better off not thinking too much about what he's doing or why—in retrospect it's astonishingly prescient; we know that in a few months Dick will be dead. Did he sense it as well? Is the pell-mell urgency of the Exegesis driven not only by madness or revelation (whichever you believe) but by a ticking of the universe's clock in his ears? The ego behind all this is off the charts and accounts for how Dick can for
mulate a cosmic view that places himself at the center; without it, however, we probably wouldn't have Flow My Tears, Scanner Darkly, or Transmigration, never mind the Exegesis (which was more crucial to its author than to the reader). So the flip side of what must seem megalomania to a reasonable person is the audacity on which nothing less than artistic survival depends, the defiant assertion that, in the face of his own obscurity, in the course of a life during which the Library of America hadn't yet found the foresight or cultural imagination to acclaim him (and wouldn't for another quarter-century), he mattered.—SE

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  * In early November 1981, Dick made a difficult personal decision, choosing to stay in Fullerton to be near Tessa and Christopher rather than moving to the Bay Area to continue a relationship with a married woman. This decision is framed here in terms of biblical morality. 2-3-74, he says, transformed him into someone who could not continue down the path the relationship was leading him. Though elsewhere Dick is deeply concerned with free will's absolute victory over determinism, he presents this as a decision made by God on his behalf, asserting that he really had no choice. Compare this with his statements on the assistance he gave to Covenant House, which he described as a "new act" not governed by normal rules of incentive or even causation. In any case, it's clear that Dick believed that a pre-1974 PKD would have made a very different decision in this situation.—GM

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  * The moral vision that ties all of Dick's work together is rooted in the redemptive power of empathy. This emotional connection—the ability to experience the feelings, particularly the suffering, of others—counteracts the temptation to withdraw from the risk of loving others and into the safety of ourselves. When Dick's characters struggle to determine what's real, they ultimately have to rely on the people who care about them; stable reality in Dick's work is always predicated on the sincerity of the emotions that pass between people. In his fiction, Dick famously asks two questions: what is real, and what is human? It could be said that his work provides a single, connected answer to both: what is real is what we perceive when we are emotionally engaged in the world, and what is human is what allows us to make an empathetic connection to the world. Tagore's connection to the biosphere, in which the young boy takes on the suffering of the planet in the form of wounds that riddle his body, is a profoundly empathetic relationship. Similarly, when Dick learned that Anwar Sadat had been assassinated, he crushed a soda can and dragged the edge against his inner arm until he drew blood. For Dick, the reality of that moment involved pain, and truly connecting with that moment involved sharing the suffering.—DG

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  * In this abridgement of the Exegesis, we have included all references to The Owl in Daylight, Dick's last, unfinished project. What follows is his most extensive account of the novel's plot elements. Characteristically, this material differs considerably from the account of Owl that Dick gave Gwen Lee and Doris Sauter in January 1982; that account draws considerably from folder 53, especially the entries beginning with [53:E-1].—PJ

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  * This entry commences with a short burst of wild handwriting.—PJ

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  † Dick is voicing a common theme in paranormal literature, particularly as it found expression in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1940s and '50s, which he collected and adored. This literature in turn was deeply influenced by the American writer Charles Fort (1874–1932), who popularized any number of paranormal themes, including the phenomena of fish, periwinkles, nebulous biological matter, and rocks falling from the sky. Reflecting on such things, Fort speculated that we are like fish in an ethereal sea upon which a more advanced civilization is dropping crap. Later, the pulp fiction editor Ray Palmer (1910–1977), whose Amazing Stories magazine was a staple in the 1940s S-F world, posited something he called the "atmospherea," basically an ether-like extension or "ocean" of the earth in which various occult critters and objects swim and fly, including those that came to be known in 1947 as "flying saucers." Numerous writers have since identified the latter manifesting mysteries as extradimensional as opposed to extraterrestrial, much as Dick does here.—JJK

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  * This is the ever-popular "ancient astronaut" or paleo-contact thesis, which reads the history of religions as a coded story about humanity's interaction with extraterrestrials, which were mistaken within our mythologies as gods from the sky. There are multiple forms of this theory, some of which have us as biological hybrids intentionally created through primate-alien interbreeding (a theory that returned in a darker form in the 1980s through hypnosis-related abduction narratives and subsequent fears of an alien hybridization program). The origin of this complex of ideas is often attributed to Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? (1968), though in fact it had already existed for decades among various English, American, and French intellectuals, not to mention a whole host of occult groups. The public intellectual and science advocate Carl Sagan even voiced a version of the thesis as a thought experiment in 1966, speculating, for example, about an alien base on the far or dark side of the moon. Dick would have been very familiar with these ideas, as they were very much "in the air" in the 1970s.—JJK

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  * A strictly materialist or historical understanding of the human being is not part of the solution. It is part of the problem. It is part of the trap. To make any real sense of our place in the cosmos and, more importantly still, to change that place, we must be open to genuine transcendence and the abolition of time through its conversion into space. Does this make any sense to our sense-based understanding and its three-dimensional categories? No. If it did, it would not lie outside these three dimensions, would it? In the end, then, Dick's gnosis as expressed here is not an argument or a thesis. It is a revelation. And this, of course, is exactly what he claimed.—JJK

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  * According to Henri Bergson, the discourse of the mystic "is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable." Deep readers of the Exegesis will be tempted at times to arrest the flow by succumbing to the same impulse that Dick himself gives in to over and over: the impulse to declare, "This is it! This is the key to the Exegesis!" Well, here is my key: that inquiry—skeptical and speculative and interminable as the Exegesis (or life) itself—is truly divine.—ED

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  * By its very nature, the Exegesis has no conclusion. And yet here, so close to the final pages Dick wrote, he hits upon a definitive truth of his experiences and their interpretation. Whatever the reigning theory of the moment, Dick is always concerned with deliverance, liberation, rescue. Whatever bonds might restrict the individual being—karma, astral determinism, sin, demiurgic imprisonment—Dick wants to see them broken and the being released into an absolute, ontological freedom. The Exegesis is a record of a human soul in search of salvation.—GM

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  * Given its placement toward the close of the Exegesis, we cannot help but read this poetic condensation of Dick's visionary experiences as a green flash on the horizon as the sun sinks down. Shorn of theory, of the need for theory, his words are reduced to the frog-plop haikus of barest memory, to "fish sign and light." These glints return with an admission: Dick was not blasted with sci-fi laser pinkness after all, but simply a sunbeam that left a phosphene glow. Jacob Boehme was also illuminated, according to some accounts, by light bouncing off a pewter dish, and he is the most Dickian of mystics: a melancholic peasant-class cobbler who rode the dialectic into the divine abyss. He is pared here with a fiction, Mr. Tagomi. If Angel Archer is the greatest of Dick's characters, Tagomi is the most singular. Toward the end of The Man in the High Castle, he sits down on a park bench to examine a small silver triangle that eventually "disgorges its spirit: light." The jewelry's "shimmering surface" gives Tagomi
a brief glimpse of the real world—or our world anyway, the one outside the alternative history that enfolds him. And now, near the end he cannot see, Dick glimpses that light again, the quiver of gnosis from another (fictional) time that also shines, for a moment, into your eye. The medium is the message, but don't try to figure it out. As Tagomi tells the dumb cop who interrupts his vision, it is "not a puzzle."—ED

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  * Given the central role that Dick's dead twin Jane Charlotte Dick played in the novels of the 1960s and early 1970s, it is significant that she surfaces here through a miswriting, a slip of the pen that inscribes "sister" instead of "savior." Dick interprets this as the "ultimate abolition" of his karma, a final erasure of his guilt over her death. ("Somehow I got all the milk," he said of her inadvertent death as an infant through malnutrition.) Given his intense identification with Christ during this period, the slip also aligns her with Christ and consequently with Dick's feeling that Christ is in him and, in a certain sense, is him. Hence the slip also signifies the "ultimate restoration of what was lost."—NKH

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  * Ultimately the value of the Exegesis lies not in its ideas but rather in the glimpse it provides into a creativity at once visionary and fractured, at once coming apart and striving heroically, in the only way a novelist can strive for such a thing, to keep himself together as a life nears its end in shambles, haunted by a dead twin sister whose own life was a month long, and defined by bouts of psychosis, a diorama of drugs, five marriages, suicide attempts, and financial destitution, real or imagined stalking by the FBI and IRS, literary rejection at its most stupid (which is to say destructive), and a Linda Ronstadt obsession. One takes the Exegesis seriously because one takes Dick seriously, not the other way around—because it's his fiction that constitutes as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last sixty years, and because it's his fiction that persuades us that Dick may be someone we remember who has yet to exist, writing books published around the time of the printing press, which was invented before the wheel and after voice-mail.—SE