In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Philip K. Dick’s «Exegesis»
Edited by Lawrence Sutin
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis
Clothbound: ISBN 0-88733-091-6
Softcover: ISBN 0-88733-093-2
Copyright © 1991 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick
Cover art © 1991 by Ilene Meyer
Preface copyright © 1991 by Lawrence Sutin.
Afterword copyright © 1991 by Terence McKenna
Introduction copyright © 1991 by Jay Kinney.
“A PKD Chronology” is by Paul Williams
A shorter version of the Introduction appeared as “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick” in Gnosis Magazine, issue # 1, Fall, 1985. (Gnosis Magazine, P.O. Box 1 42 1 7, San Francisco, CA 94 1 14.)
An Underwood-Miller book by arrangement with the authors and The Estate of Philip K. Dick. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without explicit permission from the author or the author’s agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages. For information address the publisher: Underwood-Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601.
For information about the Philip K. Dick Society, write to: PKDS, Box 6 1 1 , Glen Ellen, CA 95442.
Book design by Underwood-Miller
Softcover type designed by Daniel Will-Harris
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Catalog Number 89-20532
Contents
Preface: On The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin
Introduction: Wrestling with Angels: The Mystical Dillema of Philip K.Dick by Jay Kinney
A PKD Chronology
One: Direct Accounts of Personal Experience
Two: Theoretical Explanations
Three: On His Writing Techniques and the Creative Quest jor Truth
Four: Interpretations of His Own Works
Five: Plot Outlines and Explorations for Works-in-Progress
Six: Political and Ecological Concerns
Seven: Two Self-Examinations
Eight: Three Closing Parables
Afterword: I Understand Philip K. Dick by Terence McKenna
List Of PKD Works Mentioned (With Dates Of First Publication)
Glossary
Preface: On The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick has too long remained a terra incognita. As a practical matter, that is hardly surprising: The unpublished form of the Exegesis consists of over eight thousand pages without a unifying numbered sequence, most of which are handwritten in a scrawling script, and all of which were arbitrarily sorted into ninety-one manila folders following Dick’s death in 1982. Thus, while the 1980s saw the posthumous first publication of numerous Dick mainstream novels of the 1950s, the Exegesis remained out of view as an archival nightmare. But one with a curiously legendary status.
For readers of Dick’s work had already encountered mention of an “exegesis” in VALIS (1981)-a brilliant novel on the impossible quest for mystical truth in the pop-trash wonderland of modern-day America. In VALIS, we are told of a journal kept by fictional character Horselover Fat, the alter ego of fictional character Phil Dick. Horselover Fat has gone through an intense mystical experience a/k/a direct encounter with higher wisdom, one that has transformed his life and caused many to question his sanity.
Horselover Fat can barely make sense of it himself, and at times he is tormented by the thought that it was a delusion—or even an outright breakdown. Hence his pressing need to keep a journal, to make a record of his theories, his doubts, his joys, and his fears. As fictional character Phil Dick explains:
The term “journal” is mine, not Fat’s. His term was “exegesis,” a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture [. . . .]
VALIS is an indispensable introduction to the world of the Exegesis; readers of the present volume would benefit greatly—and most likely derive considerable pleasure—from a prior study of it. The first eight chapters of VALIS, which are largely autobiographical, portray the central events of February−March 1974—“2-3-74” in Dick’s standard shorthand form—and the year that followed. These events cannot be easily summarized, consisting as they do of a tumultuous stream of visions, hypnagogic voices, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. Readers may consult chapter ten of my biography, DIVINE INVASIONS: A LIFE OF PHILIP K. DICK (1989), in which these events are placed in an orderly chronological sequence by way of letters, interviews, and quotations from VALIS and from the Exegesis.
On March 21, 1975, Dick wrote a vivid and concise account of the visions that had enthralled him one year earlier. Its fervent tone indicates just why Horselover Fat—and the real-life Philip K. Dick—felt that the term “exegesis” was justified as a title for his journal speculations:
I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken
March 16, 1974: It appeared-in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns—and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.
March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I—and it—had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, “This cannot exist; it cannot exist.”
March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same instant, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power l saw suddenly the universe as it was; through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing.
March 20 until late July, 1974: It received signals and knew how to give ceaseless battle, to defeat the tyranny which had entered by slow degrees our free world, our pure world; it fought and destroyed tirelessly each and every one of them, and saw them all clearly, with dislike; its love was for justice and truth beyond everything else.
August 1974 on: It waned, but only as the adversary in all its forms waned and perished. When it left me, it left me as a free person, a physically and mentally healed person who had seen reality suddenly, in a flash, at the moment of greatest peril and pain and despair; it had loaned me its power and it had set right what had by degrees become wrong over God knows how long. It came just prior to the vernal equinox or at it. The Jews call it Elijah; the Christians call it the Holy Spirit. The Greeks called it Dionysus-Zagreus. It thought, in my dreams, mostly in Greek, referring to Elijah in the Greek form: Elias. Gradually its fierceness turned to a gentle quality and it seemed like Jesus, but it was still Zagreus, still the god of springtime. Finally it became the god of mirth and joy and music, perhaps a mere man, Orpheus, and after that, a punning, funning mortal, Erasmus. But underneath, whenever it might be necessary again, Zeus himself, Ela or Eloim, the Creator and Advocate, is there; he never dies: he only slumbers and listens. The lamb of Jesus is also the tyger which Blake described; it, which came to me and to our republic, contains both, is both. It—he—has no name, neither god nor force, man nor entity; He is everywhere and everything; He is outside us and inside us. He is, above all, the friend of the weak and the foe of the Lie. He is the Aton, He is The Friend.
—PKD March 21, 1975
As both VALIS and the Exegesis indicate, Dick was very much a
ware that these events would inspire skepticism, and even scorn, in many persons. Whether or not one is prepared to grant them the authentic status of a genuine mystical vision, or prefers instead to diagnose them as the byproducts of psychosis or other mental abnormality (Dick himself took both positions in the Exegesis, though the former view clearly predominated), this much is certain: they transformed Dick’s life, spurred him to eight years of devoted labor on the Exegesis, and became the central subject matter of his final novels: VALIS (1981), THE DIVINE INVASION (1981), and THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER (1982), termed collectively by Dick as the “VALIS trilogy”.
The very nature of this subject matter-which probes so incessantly at the essence of reality and the prospects for divine intervention in the world—is singularly offputting to a good number of modern day readers. After all, “metaphysical” has become, in common parlance, synonymous with “futile” and “imponderable”. For such readers, who are likely to recoil instinctively from the more abstract portions of the Exegesis, it may be salutary to recall that a skilled metaphysician (which Dick certainly was) can provide quite exact and useful delineations of experience. As Ezra Pound observed of the scholastics of the middle ages: “a medieval theologian took care not to define a dog in terms that would have applied just as well to a dog’s tooth or its hide, or the noise it makes lapping water.” Dick was passionately concerned with metaphysical issues; he handled the theories and terminologies of the great philosophical systems with the same loving care as a craftsman might give to his favorite tools. As a result, Dick’s analyses frequently cast light on the dilemmas of absolute knowledge and ultimate being: the light cast is the presentation of multifold possibilities where once stood only “official” reality. It would be a pity if a reader were to conclude that Dick was “crazy” because he questioned so much and so frequently. After all, Dick never pretended that he had found The Truth (or not for very long, at any rate). Readers who refuse to worry over whether or not the Exegesis persuades them on any particular points may find that it illuminates any number of prospective paths for further exploration.
It is my hope that the selections included in this volume will establish that the Exegesis deserves recognition as a major work in the Dick canon. But it must also be conceded that the Exegesis is a sprawling, disconnected journal-part philosophical analysis, part personal diary, part work-in-progress notebook for the final novels—that was produced in the course of lengthy nighttime writing sessions over a period of eight years. There is no evidence that Dick ever intended it for publication either in his lifetime or on a posthumous basis. The very fact that the bulk of the entries were handwritten rather than typed indicates the “workshop” nature of the Exegesis, for Dick was a gifted high-speed typist who composed his novels and stories directly on the typewriter. The Tractates Cryptica Scriptura that forms the closing “Appendix” of VALIS, and is described therein as excerpts from the “exegesis” of Horselover Fat, was written by Dick especially for VALIS. While the Tractates does recapitulate a number of prominent theories posed in the real-life Exegesis, it is a separate work-polished distillations intended to fit within the framework of the novel—and not a genuine selection of quotations from the Exegesis itself.
It is instructive to note certain key distinctions between the Exegesis and Dick’s published fictional works. Dick himself stated that his fiction addressed two major questions—What is real? and, What is human? The former question is clearly the guiding enigma of the Exegesis. That is not to say that the latter question was not equally important to Dick, but rather that it did not puzzle him nearly so greatly. As Dick wrote of his story “Human Is” (1955), in his “Afterthoughts by the Author” to THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK (1977) story collection, “I have not really changed my view since I wrote this story, back in the fifties. It’s not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It’s how kind you are.” As to what was real, Dick changed his mind far more frequently, as the Exegesis amply testifies.
Further, the Exegesis shows little of the wild, dark humor that is a hallmark of Dick’s novels and stories. In VALIS, the spiritual peregrinations and frustrations of Horselover Fat are presented in the artful pratfall tradition of the picaresque; but the Exegesis seeks not laughable ironies but rather ultimate truth. The selections in this volume confirm that Dick genuinely believed that, by sufficient pondering and analysis, the truth of 2-3-74, and of reality itself, might just be revealed to him. Despite the vivid experiential nature of 2-3-74, Dick kept faith in intellectual analysis—and not in further experience a la meditation or an attempted recreation of the factors that led to 2-3-74—as the key to truth. This analytical mode of writing seldom cracked a smile, although its sheer frankness and sense of wonder often makes for fascinating reading.
Happily, the Exegesis is well served by judicious selection and excerpting. The reader is enabled to follow of Dick’s speculative flights on 2-3-74, the ongoing events of his life, and the nature and meaning of his own fictional works, while being spared the repetitions and digressions that naturally accompanied a journal labor of such duration. It should be reemphasized that Dick worked on the Exegesis primarily in the dead of the night. This was his preferred time for all of his writing activity, but in the case of the Exegesis he was not writing for editors and readers, and hence he drove himself to the end limits of all of his speculations without even a wayward Phildickian science-fiction plot to confine him. Certain of the Exegesis entries were written under the influence of marijuana, but for the most part Dick was “straight” during the 1974−82 period in which the Exegesis was written.
The basic principle that guided me in making the selections for this volume was to seek out the most intriguing and stimulating portions of the Exegesis. I did not seek to provide a representative sampling of all topics discussed therein, for the simple reason that certain topics—for example, the meaning of the March 20, 1974 “Xerox missive”—inspired, in my view, much heat but rather little light. Speculations on the “Xerox missive”—a xeroxed letter addressed to Dick that he felt might be a test of his political sympathies posed by U.S. or Soviet authorities—take up quite a number of pages in the Exegesis. The subject is discussed at some length in my biography of Dick, for the simple reason that it has biographical significance. But the aim of the present volume is to present writings of literary, philosophical, and spiritual significance. Nonetheless, it may be safely said that the principle theories and ideas of the Exegesis are well represented herein.
Another factor that entered into the selection process was the ongoing commitment by the publisher, Underwood-Miller, to produce a multi-volume set of Dick’s collected letters. Dick included, within his Exegesis papers, copies of a number of his letters that discussed in some detail the events of 2-3-74 and after. As these letters will be published separately, they are not included in the present volume.
Let me conclude with some brief remarks on the individual chapters. I recognize that the eight chapters constitute something of a rough and ready division of subject matter, and that a given excerpt might arguably fit in more than one chapter. What I regarded as the central topic of the excerpt governed my choice of chapter placement.
Chapter One is devoted to experiential accounts. Readers will note that, for Dick, the line between recollection of experience and analysis of its ultimate meaning is, most often, very thin.
Chapter Two contains theoretical explanations largely of a philosophical or theological nature. Readers may be interested to learn that the philosophical and theological aspects of Dick’s writing—as evidenced particularly in VALIS—have already begun to earn serious attention in both scholarly and esoteric circles. See, for example, the discussion of VALIS and THE DIVINE INVASION in “Afterword: The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism,” in THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY IN ENGLISH, ed. James M. Robinson (Harper & Row, San Francisco) (1988) (ironically, Dick quoted from the 1977 edition of this work in VALIS), and the entries for “Homoplasmate,” “Plasmat
e,” and “VALIS” in E. E. Rehmus, THE MAGICIAN’S DICTIONARY (Feral House, San Francisco) (1990).
Chapter Three will be of especial interest to readers ofDick’s fiction, as it contains quite luminous accounts of his writing methods and preoccupations.
1950s and early 1960s (with the exception of CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST, written in 1959) receive virtually no attention in the Exegesis. As for his science-fiction works, Dick turned to them in the hopes of seeing some relation between their content and that of the events of 2-3-74 and after. It is striking that Dick was capable of reading his works—and being surprised by them—quite as if they had been written by someone else.
Chapter Five consists of plot notes and outlines for novelistic works-in-progress during the period 1974-81. It will be obvious to readers of the ultimate published works that the notes and outlines were highly provisional viewpoints on the plots and characters to come.
Chapter Six casts light on Dick’s political and ecological concerns, as influenced by the events of 2-3-74 and after.
Chapter Seven consists of two self-examinations, one rather intensive, one rather brief. The former demonstrates (as does the novel VALIS) that Dick could be as critical of his own beliefs and preoccupations as the most skeptical reader. The latter is intended to underscore what should be evident from the whole of this volume: there is no fixed dogma or belief system set forth in the Exegesis.
Chapter Eight closes with three rather lovely parables.
Datings of the excerpts are by myself, based on internal textual evidence. All editorial emendations and interpolations of the text are bracketed and in italics. While obvious spelling errors have been corrected without indication, Dick’s occasional stylistic inconsistencies as to capitalization and the like have been preserved.
May the reader enjoy these writings of Philip K. Dick—brought to light at long last!
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