The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Page 114
21. Dick was a signatory to a "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" petition that appeared in the February 1968 issue of Ramparts, a New Left magazine that opposed the Vietnam War.
22. Drugs consumed in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; see Glossary.
23. Numerous dates have been proposed as the "actual birthday" of Jesus; it is not clear how Dick arrived at this date.
24. (German) Help. I am so lonely. When will you come, my salvation? (Drawn from Bach's Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake.)
25. Jn 16:33.
26. Rom 8:22.
27. From Mrs. J.C. Yule, "I Am Doing No Good!" in Poems of the Heart and Home (1881).
28. Mt 13:31–32; Mk 4:30–32; Lk 13:18–19; also Gospel of Thomas, saying 20.
29. Jerusalem Bible.
30. (Latin) Voice of God.
31. (Latin) Mind.
32. In Maze of Death, Dick provides this definition: "Mekkis, the Hittite word for power; it had passed into the Sanskrit, then into Greek, Latin, and at last into modern English as machine and mechanical."
33. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was an inventor, engineer, and legendary eccentric best known for his development of alternating current; an important figure in outsider science.
34. George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose theory of immaterialism contends that physical objects exist only in the mind of the perceiver; famously refuted by Samuel Johnson kicking a stone.
35. Most likely a paraphrase or misremembered quote; compare Wisd of Sol 10:13–14.
36. Most likely refers to the Apocryphon of John, a Sethian Gnostic text in which a shape-shifting, post-Ascension Christ appears to the apostle John. Jesus pulls a similar trick in the Acts of Peter, the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, and other texts.
37. Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Maze of Death.
38. See Job 38:1–42:6.
39. Francis M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (1937).
40. See TMITHC in Glossary.
41. Katherine Kurtz (1944–) is a fantasy author most noted for her Deryni novels.
42. Also "Ayenbite of Inwyt," translated as "Prick (or Remorse) of Conscience," from Kentish Middle English. Dick's spelling suggests his familiarity with the term is via Joyce's Ulysses.
43. 1 Thes 5:2.
44. A paraphrase from Luther's Commentary on Galatians (3:19).
45. Klingsor is an evil wizard in Wagner's Parsifal.
46. Dick seems to be confusing Edwin Herbert Land's (1909–1991) two-color projection system with Land's later "retinex" theory of color constancy.
47. Jn 15:13.
48. Jn 16:33.
49. Dick's two-source cosmogony later makes an appearance in the "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura" that append the novel VALIS, where it is explained that our universe is a hologram formed from the mixed signals of two hyper-universes, one male and one female, one alive and one dying or dead.
50. John Sladek's short story "Solar Shoe-Salesman," a Dick parody first published (under the name Ph*l*p K. D*ck) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (March 1973).
51. Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was a countercultural author, philosopher, and friend of Dick's; his book The Cosmic Trigger features interesting parallels with 2-3-74.
52. In Reason in Science (1905), the Spanish-American pragmatist philosopher George Santayana wrote: "To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming under the control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the comparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth."
53. Dick is referencing Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."
54. Nicholas Roeg's 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth, an inspiration for the film Valis in VALIS, stars David Bowie as the extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton.
55. Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was a social scientist and cyberneticist who wrote the popular 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. He spoke of immanent Mind in a naturalistic, nontheistic manner.
56. Brian Aldiss was a science-fiction author and critic who favorably surveyed Dick's work in his 1973 study The Billion Year Spree.
57. A paraphrase of Mt 10:29.
58. Parsifal, act 3.
59. The Journal of George Fox, ch. 2.
60. The first phrase is from Jn 1:15, where John is referring to Jesus, not Jesus referring to the Paraclete; the latter meaning is better captured in the second citation, from Jn 16:7.
61. See note 30, page 64.
62. Acts 2:1–40.
63. In The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Schopenhauer uses beehives and ant colonies as an example of the "will-without-knowledge" working in nature.
64. Friend of Dick's during the late 1960s. In the note that begins A Maze of Death (1968), Dick writes that the novel "stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."
65. Wilbur Mercer, the messiah figure of Mercerism, the empathy-based religion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). See Androids in Glossary.
66. This is a reference to page 17 in the current folder (included herein), which Dick returned to note here after composing.
67. Paul Tillich (1886–1965), a German-American theologian and philosopher. This paraphrase probably draws from the introduction to Tillich's Systematic Theology (1975), which discusses "the power of being which resists non-being."
68. This refers back to the page upon which Dick noted the current discussion, creating a self-referential loop. See note 66, page 369.
69. Pen name of American S-F writer Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966); several scholars have speculated that he was the fantasy-haunted patient Allen in psychologist Robert M. Linder's best-selling The Fifty Minute Hour (1954).
70. R. Crumb (1943–), American illustrator and founder of the underground comix movement; anxiety and obsession drive much of his work.
71. (German) Eternal femininity. (Probably inspired by the last line of Goethe's Faust, "Das Ewig-Weiblich/Zieht uns hinan" [The eternal feminine draws us upward], which is also featured in Mahler's Eighth Symphony.)
72. Roger Caillois's The Mask of Medusa (1964) challenges orthodox biology by suggesting continuities between animal mimicry and human behavior.
73. Microscopic species of green algae that forms spherical colonies.
74. In his poem "Brahma."
75. (German) Worldview.
76. 1 Cor 15:51–52: "Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet."
77. (Latin) Voice of God.
78. From the entry "Macrocosm and Microcosm" in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5.
79. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins (1961).
80. In a September 2, 1974, letter to the FBI, Dick warned the agency about SF critic Darko Suvin and "three other Marxists": Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner, an Austrian SF critic and the "official Western agent" for Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem, whom Dick accused of being a "total Party functionary."
81. See note 54, page 336.
82. (Latin) I am made to tremble, and I am afraid. In that day, save me, Lord, who takes away the sins of the world. I believe but I am afraid. (All but the final phrase from the text of the traditional Requiem Mass.)
83. An alien creature who can invade and inhabit other life forms. Appears in Dick's first published short story, "Beyond Lies the Wub," Planet Stories (July 1952). Wubfur appears in a number of Dick's works.
84. Telepathic, gambling-obsessed, silicon-based aliens from Titan, Vugs exert control over Earth via a game called "Bluff" in Dick's novel Game-Players of Titan (1963).
85. Heraclitus, fragment 54.
86. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."
87. The chief archon or evil demiurge of the Ophites and Sethian Gnostics. Also spelled Yaldabaoth.
; 88. See note 65, page 367.
89. Also known as the Hymn of the Soul, in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.
90. Also known as the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, an Old Testament pseudepigraphical work from the fifth or sixth century C.E. that tells the story of Adam and Eve following their expulsion from Eden.
91. See the fictional essay "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum.
92. 1 Cor 15:51–52.
93. (Greek) Fan or fan-like shape. Dick associated rhipidos (one of the Greek words that came to him in his hypnogogic visions) with the fins of the fish, a symbol of Christ.
94. See note 58, page 128.
95. Though Dick generally refers to his more recent novels in the Exegesis, here he offers a list of short stories from the 1950s, with the exception of 1968's "Not by Its Cover."
96. See note 39, page 303.
97. (German) Watch out!
98. (Latin) All roads lead to death.
99. Poet Robert Bly (1926–) asserts that Jesus was an Essene in his innovative anthology Leaping Poetry (1975).
100. See note 41, page 83.
101. Diane Pike, wife of Jim Pike.
102. See note 115, page 203.
103. These comments show the unmistakable mark of Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery (1975).
PART THREE
1. (Latin) I fear this knowledge.
2. Communist Party.
3. Rosicrucians.
4. "Bichlorides" is a puzzling term that Dick received from the voice, and which he discusses in earlier pages excluded here.
5. "The Waveries" is an amusing apocalyptic tale of an electromagnetic alien invasion, written by Fredric Brown and appearing in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945; Dick loved the story.
6. "Bright White," a pop folk-rock hit by Shawn Phillips, from the 1973 album of the same name.
7. The titular hero of Siegfried, the third opera in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, tastes dragon's blood and gains the power to understand the language of birds.
8. Curious paraphrase of Heraclitus, fragment 52.
9. Though Dick apparently enjoyed all these artists, he truly adored the pop singer Linda Ronstadt (1946–), a dark-haired girl who lived large in his fantasy life and who inspired the character Linda Fox in The Divine Invasion.
10. (German) Here is Zebra again.
11. In the novel Ubik, Ella Runciter exists in half-life, a state of cryonic suspension that allows her to communicate with the living for a short period of time after death.
12. Paraphrase from Coleridge's essay "Shakespeare's English Historical Plays," which appears in The Literary Remains of Samuel Coleridge, volume 2 (1836).
13. Extensive paraphrase drawn from Una Ellis-Fermor's essay "The Equilibrium of Tragedy," which appears in Shakespeare's Drama (1980).
14. Ormazd (or Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) are the two warring gods in Zoroastrianism, the world's first dualist religion.
15. Real Elapsed Time.
16. Orange County Medical Center.
17. Folder 44 begins a continuously numbered entry of more than 1,200 pages. It was broken up into 200-page sections by Paul Williams and ends with folder 49, in January 1980.
18. Charles Platt interviewed Dick in May 1979 for his book Dream Makers, and Dick had made his own recording of the interview.
19. Covenant House was a homeless shelter for runaway children founded by the Franciscan friar Father Bruce Ritter. Dick donated a large sum to the shelter in 1979 after seeing a 60 Minutes segment about it; in some Exegesis entries he theorized that this action, in time-reversed causation, caused 2-3-74.
20. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was an ordinary mortal before being adopted by God at baptism; promulgated early on by the Ebionites, the view was later declared a heresy.
21. Inscription found at the end of "I," a holy book described in the anonymous The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz (1616), one of the earliest Rosicrucian publications.
22. (German) I am the savior.
23. Paul discusses these "planetary powers," who play a role similar to the Gnostic archons, in Gal 4:3 and 4:9.
24. This phrase illustrates the "fish-hook" theory of atonement, first proposed by the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa. In this view, Jesus was the human bait and Christ the divine hook; with these, God caught and defeated Satan.
25. Jn 15:13.
26. (German) A mystery.
27. Marcus Antonius Felix was the Roman procurator of Judaea province from A.D. 52 to 58. The apostle Paul was tried before him; see Acts 24.
28. Jason Taverner, the protagonist of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. See Tears in Glossary.
29. A reference to Adam Kadmon, the primal cosmic anthropos of Jewish Kabbala.
30. The exhibit was "Adventure Thru Inner Space," a corporate-sponsored attraction that ran in Tomorrowland until 1985.
31. "Via negativa" (the "negative way") refers to apophatic theology, according to which God is absolutely ineffable. Human beings can understand and describe what God is not, but not what God is.
32. The Milesians were a pre-Socratic school of Greek philosophers who sought the unchanging and singular material principle (arche) of all things.
33. (Latin) Literally, "nature naturing"—i.e., nature in its creative or active, life-giving aspect.
34. (Latin) Literally, "nature natured"—i.e., nature in its already created or passive aspect. Both terms are associated with the philosophy of Spinoza.
35. (Latin) The capacity to reflect God.
36. (Latin) The son of God.
37. (German) Primal fear.
38. A paraphrase; the first half is from Prov 8:22 and the second from Prov 8:30.
39. (Latin) It is not, and I believe. Possibly a misquote or paraphrase of a famous Latin phrase that is itself a misquote—credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd)—from Tertullian, who in fact said, credibile est, quia ineptum est (it is to be believed because it is absurd).
40. A peculiar 1977 Robert Altman film about porous identity, starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule, based on a dream Altman had.
41. (Italian) Simple light. (The description of God in Paradiso 33:90.)
42. (German) A loving father must dwell above the starry canopy. (From Schiller's "Ode to Joy," a version of which appears in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.)
43. "Cylum" is most likely Dick's version of the Latin world caelum, sky.
44. The episode appears in 1 Kgs 18:16–45.
45. Mal 4:5–6.
46. 1 Kgs 19:12.
47. 1 Kgs 17:13–16.
48. (German) Awaken!
49. Beyond the Tragic Vision is Morris Peckham's 1963 history of nineteenth-century Europe.
50. Olive Holt was the name of one of Dick's childhood babysitters.
51. Citation extracted from "Talmud and Midrash," Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.
52. (Greek) Grace, kindness.
53. The citation is from Ex 2:22; Stranger in a Strange Land is also the name of Robert Heinlein's influential 1961 novel.
54. "It was the devil's envy that brought death into the world, as those who are his part ners will discover. But the souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God, no torment shall ever touch them." The Book of Wisdom, also known as the Wisdom of Solomon, is a deuterocanonical book and not part of the Protestant canon; Dick likely knew it from the Jerusalem Bible, the Catholic translation cited here.
55. Presumably, a Quaker periodical.
56. (German) Cries of lamentation.
57. (Latin) Highest good.
58. This folder and the following folder consist of typed, individually numbered, and dated pieces.
59. Dick theorized that Thomas might be a thought control implant installed by the government; in this formulation, Thomas was referred to as Pigspurt.
60. An illustrated book of poetry for children by Blanche Jennings Thompson, published in 1925.
61. Jn 15:1, 4–5.
62. In this typewritten excerpt, Dick makes it clear that he is also keeping handwritten notes at this time, though these are not extant. They may include or constitute the 497 numbered, handwritten pages that presumably precede the page numbered 498 that initiates the following folder.
63. Lk 17:24; Mt 24:27.
64. Rom 2:29.
65. (German) Oh woe.
66. (Latin) Mystery of conjunction. (A Jungian term for the alchemical uniting of opposites.)
67. In Divine Invasions, Lawrence Sutin describes "Mello Jell-O" as a "disorientation drug" that Dick claimed had been stolen from the army and that may have motivated the 1971 break-in; possibly a reference to the notorious military deliriant BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate).
68. Acts 24.
69. (Sanskrit/Pali/Buddhist) Right conduct.
70. Paraphrased citations from "Taoism," Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.
71. (German, obscure) Two cells (Zelle) live in my chest.
72. Phaedo 62:B.
73. Edward Hussey's The Presocratics (1972): any map that includes a true representation of itself within its borders must lead to an infinite procession of maps-within-maps.
74. A koan attributed to the Ch'an master Yunmen Wenyan (862 or 864–949); it appears as case 21 in the Mumonkan.
75. (Chinese) Non-doing. (A manner of according with the Tao.)
76. For more on the self-assembly of the Cosmic Christ, see the Jerusalem Bible's footnote at Eph 1:10.
77. Prajapati is a primal Vedic deity, lord of animals, and protector as well of the male sex organ.
78. See note 42, page 549.
79. The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977).
80. From Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides, The Bacchae.
81. Henry Vaughan, "The Night."
82. See note 19, page 261.
83. (German, roughly) Pity's greatest might. In addition to translating "Mitleid" as "compassion" rather than "pity," Dick is conflating two lines from the second act of Wagner's Parsifal,which run "Mitleids höchste Kraft/und reinsten Wissens Macht" (pity's mighty power/and purest wisdom's might).
84. During Dick's breakup with his wife Nancy, he perceived Peterson as a romantic rival.
85. This rather chaotic folder appears to have been assembled by Dick himself. It contains, among a scattering of handwritten pages, a number of typed-up extracts from earlier folders. It also includes three pages of the manuscript of VALIS. Since it includes material from 1975 through at least 1980, we have opted to insert it chronologically according to the last dateable piece it contains.