The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Page 125
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* Between 1947 and 1951, Dick worked for Herb Hollis at University Radio and later at Art Music in Berkeley, jobs that helped him make the difficult transition from awkward teenager to self-sufficient adult. A straitlaced father figure, Hollis served as a kind of mentor for Dick, while his coworkers served as models for Dick's future characters. Whether with the futuristic ad agency in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the family-run android business in We Can Build You, or the anti-telepathy Prudence Organizations in Ubik, Dick's fiction constantly recasts his formative years working for Hollis, often focusing on the plight of a small business operation struggling against a more powerful, but less upstanding, competition. In 1977 Dick told interviewer Uwe Anton that "the ultimate surrealism ... is to [take] somebody that you knew, whose life ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future utopia or dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia." Dick's thematic concern for the "little guy," as opposed to the galactic royalty featured in space opera, was one of the defining features of his work.—DG
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* Dick's higher and lower realms mirror the important distinction he draws in his fiction between man and machine. While machines are predictable, man is not; moreover, the machine is cold and unfeeling, cut off from the plight of those around it. Similarly, in the Exegesis the lower realm is incapable of empathy. Like an android programmed to react in a predetermined way, the spurious world is a deterministic "maze" of unthinking causation that cannot by its nature care about anyone stumbling blindly through its passages. Like the heroes in Dick's fiction, the true reality of the higher realm is based on its ability to love.—DG
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* Here again we meet Dick's mystical mutants. More importantly, we see the multiple influences that helped shape his zapped imagination of these figures. First, we see a book, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians (originally Les Matins des Magiciens, 1960), which employed the tropes of mutants, superhumans, even Superman, to advance a countercultural occultism inspired largely by the books of the American Charles Fort. Second, we see the importance of Dick's auditions, psychical experiences (the "tutelary telepathic link"), and dreams, and their profound influence on his writing life. Also significant here is the fact that the first American edition of The Morning of the Magicians was published by Avon, the same publisher that would later publish an edition of Dick's Radio Free Albemuth. In short, we see here within Dick's paperback world a mind-bending feedback mechanism or "loop" of pop culture and altered states of consciousness arcing back on itself through countless acts of reading, dreaming, and writing: a morphing superconsciousness published or "made public" in the only form of our culture that will have it—fantastic literature.—JJK
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* Here Dick nails two crucial features of the paranormal: (1) the "fantastic" or both-and paradoxical structure of its appearances, which leave the reader, and even the experiencer, in a state of profound hesitation or confusion over the event's reality; and (2) the manner in which these paradoxical events organize themselves around narrative, story, or, to be more traditional about it, myth. Hence Dick's "secret narrative" comes first to shape reality, even the physical universe, around its patterns and meanings. Seen in this light, it is a serious mistake to approach a paranormal experience with an up-down vote, as if it were a simple object "out there" that could be measured and controlled. This is to miss its wildly living function and fierce message, which are all about pulling us into its own drama and shattering our either-or thinking through story and symbol. In short, the paranormal is about paradox, not proof; about meaning, not mechanism; about myth, not math. Most of all, however, the paranormal is about the "coincidence" or fundamental unity of mind and matter. Two of Dick's favorite scholars captured this truth in two Latin sound bites: the mysterium conjunctionis, or "mystery of conjunction," of C. G. Jung and the coincidentia oppositorum, or "coincidence of opposites," of Mircea Eliade.—JJK
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* Dick's fiction establishes an unusually strong connection between the author and his characters, and specifically his protagonists: men who are down on their luck and forced to encounter, once again, the inscrutable apathy of the universe. These characters give voice to Dick's own existential concerns; his third wife, Anne, called his writing "surrealist autobiography." In a 1970 letter to SF Commentary, Dick wrote, "I know only one thing about my novels. In them, again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength ... against the universal rubble." Part of Dick's charm as a writer is precisely his similarity to his characters; barely eking out a living, languishing as an underappreciated artist, Dick is nonetheless determined to move forward against overwhelming odds. As Dick's public persona has grown following his death—a persona based in part on his life and in part on the plight of his characters—he has become increasingly mythological. Later reprint editions of his novels often picture Dick on their covers, staring out at potential readers, part author, part fiction, trapped in the half-life of his own stories.—DG
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* Dick is often read by literary scholars as a "postmodern" writer. Postmodernism is a complex of concepts that assert that all our constructs are just that, constructs; that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is necessarily a limited and local one. Here Dick realizes that such a way of thinking, which he himself has championed in dozens of novels, is a half-truth, in the sense that its claims rely on a non-duped subjectivity and a privileged claim, which, ironically, is itself a grand narrative or abiding truth. Dick, then, was finally no postmodern thinker, not at least in the sense in which that label is commonly understood. In his own mind at least, his body of work constituted both a demonstration that the sensory and social world is an illusory simulation and a revelation of another order of mind and being from outside this maze of cognitive and cultural tricks. As Dick puts it later on in the Exegesis: "Valis proves there is an outside."—JJK
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* The editors were tempted to cut out several of the numbered points on the preceding list, which, like much of the Exegesis, goes on a bit longer than we might wish. But in a year already full of lists, this one stands out for length and exuberance and deserves to be represented. Paradoxically, the impulse to circumscribe and define unleashes a manic flow of ideas culminating in a lyrical explosion. As is often the case, Dick also writes right through his most breathtaking moments, not even noticing the climax: in the original, the striking number 39 is followed by points 40 to 42, which were enough of a letdown that we could no longer resist the temptation to excise them—even as we opted to include the footnote that continues the flow. All of which is to say that the most difficult decisions we faced in editing Dick's Exegesis involved how and when to cut him off. It's tempting to give him the punch lines he doesn't have time to stop for, and often we have done so. On the other hand, we felt that sometimes we should let the ideas tumble on. We wanted readers to experience a bit of what it's like to read the original manuscript, page after page after page. It wouldn't be the Exegesis if there wasn't too much of it.—PJ
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* Anticipating the insights of artificial life, Dick posits a phase transition that he delightfully terms "thresholding." Just as liquid water must be heated past the threshold of 100 degrees centigrade if it is to become a gas or cooled below 0 centigrade if it is to solidify, so too must the "initial living info bit" undergo a quantitative change if it is to undergo a qualitative change. And this qualitative change entails a change in consciousness such that the self becomes aware of a Möbius strip-like continuity between itself and Christ. Dick deploys the concept of the hologram to make sense of this simultaneously individual a
nd cosmic aspect of human nature, possibly under the influence of psychologist Karl Pribram's holographic model of the brain. For both Pribram and Dick, one of the most salient and suggestive features of the hologram is that each "bit" or fragment taken from a hologram contains information about the whole. Dick's reference to the "Swarm of Bees" brain is also resonant with Timothy Leary's notion of the "hive mind," but the holographic model, along with numerous entries on free will and volition, suggests that for Dick this collective mind in fact requires free will to function.—RD
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* Readers skeptical about Dick's sanity after reading the Exegesis should pay careful attention to this passage, where he explores the possibility that the events of 2-3-74 were a schizophrenic hallucination. In interrogating the veracity of his visions, Dick examines his own psychological makeup and analyzes what was going on in his life at the time. Simply put, crazy people do not question their own sanity like this, at least as a general rule. I find this one of the most moving passages of the entire Exegesis because, in it, Dick places the cosmic scope of his vision in relation to the lack of love and excitement in his own life and goes so far as to suggest that this loneliness may have given rise to delusions of grandeur. Such honesty is refreshing and points to the sincerity that underlies Dick's belief in the authenticity of his experiences, as well as his desire to determine whether those experiences were generated internally, as a manifestation of his psyche, or externally, by an encounter with the divine.—DG
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* Dick's mystical vision or apparent psychosis seems to put him in touch with the eternal feminine. This is one of the many moments when the Exegesis resonates with Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), where the erstwhile high court judge became convinced that his body took on breasts and female genitalia in order to be properly penetrated by the rays of God and to redeem the universe. The fusion with the divine is here conceived (poor choice of word, I know) as a kind of transsexual bliss, a penetration (a repeated word in the Exegesis) by the divine. We should also note Dick's later affirmation of Christianity as the experience of being "the intended bride" of Christ. In 1910, Freud had a lot of fun writing up his interpretation of the Schreber case, although Freud's text finishes with the wonderfully honest confession that it will be for posterity to judge whether there was more delusion in Schreber's (or indeed Dick's) paranoid vision than in Freud's own theory of psychoanalysis.—SC
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* Dick was in many ways a genius and visionary, but this Rome business is just stone screwy. In VALIS, which has the good sense to pretend it might be fiction, an alternate-reality Rome can be accepted as an imaginative conceit. Here it raises the obvious question: Did Dick really believe this? Or is he half-consciously assuming a guise of madness, not so much for the sake of the reader as for his own sake, so as to get—à la the most romantic nineteenth-century notions of madness—at some truth?—SE
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* One of the great failures of futurism—whether science fiction or professional prognostication—is the fact that few saw anything like the Internet coming. Though Dick opens Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) with a couple of lonely cubicle workers wasting time on a translation game they play through an absurd information network, Dick's fiction was no more predictive on that score than anyone else's. But the Exegesis, here and in many other places, can be seen as an eerie and in some ways optimistic prophecy of our absorption into an all-consuming, endlessly arborizing, weirdly disincarnating information network. With the spread of smart phones, sensors, and GPS devices, the Internet is now reconfiguring physical reality very much the way Dick describes Valis using the world of objects to organize and extend itself as an intentional information system. We still have food, music, and friends (though books are beginning to dissolve), but an increasing chunk of our lives—love and play as much as work and thought—is given over to intensified, cybernetic information processing, what Dick earlier calls the "'Swarm of Bees' brain." Though Dick puts a liberating spin on it, his words here also anticipate the grim prophecy of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who wrote that the individual has now become "only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence."—ED
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* In this short list, Dick reaches his most succinct and quotable formulation of the gnosis of his fiction. So perhaps this is the time to stand up for Dick's fiction, in all its waywardness and contradiction and humor, and point out that as infectious as Dick's readings are, they don't do justice either to his fiction or to the astonishing intermingling of narrative and reality, fiction and experience, that Dick lived through in, and after, 3-74. As he writes elsewhere, 3-74 keeps changing—as if the experience itself were alive. In fact, it is alive, partly because he keeps feeding it through his fiction. It gets Ubikified. It gets Scannerified. It gets Mazeified. It gets more like the novels as the novels get more like it. How do we get outside this feedback loop of reality and fiction to what really happened? We can ask the novels about that. They say (contra PKD in the Exegesis) there is no outside. It's all inside—but if you're lucky, out of that inside a savior of sorts might be born.—PJ
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* In this and the subsequent folder, we can feel VALIS (1981) rising on the horizon as specific ideas and even characters in the novel begin to take shape. Messages from the AI Voice intensify in frequency and apparent significance, and a flurry of concepts emerge that Dick will pour into his manuscript, and especially into the "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura" that appends the novel.—PJ
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* Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian scholar of comparative religion who helped develop a school of thought known as the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. This quote draws from Eliade's early work on yoga, especially his doctoral dissertation turned into a major book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958). If Dick read this particular tome, he would have received a rich education in the history and philosophy of yoga and Tantra in their Indian sources and pan-Asian histories, as well as long literate passages (Eliade was also a fiction writer) on the yogi's deconditioning and quest for spiritual transcendence and the abolishment of time—a major theme, of course, in Dick's own Exegesis.—JJK
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* Dick's use of "occlusion" in this passage, directly correlated with the concept of rebellion against God, shows that he is using the term as a substitute for the more traditional terminology of sin. In this, he is largely in keeping with twentieth-century theologians like Paul Tillich, who emphasized that sin, rather than simply a bad or disobedient deed, is more like an ontological state. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich uses the word "estrangement" to illustrate this aspect of sin—a term that emphasizes the essential relationship between created and Creator. Dick's term "occlusion" makes the separation from God a matter of perception and knowledge, rather than of potential relationship.—GM
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* Dick was a passionate, intelligent, and deeply knowledgeable fan of classical, Romantic, and early music. With Bach, Beethoven, and Linda Ronstadt, Dick's most important musical touchstone in the Exegesis is Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Mostly Dick references Parsifal, Wagner's final and most religious opera, which pairs an aestheticized sense of Christian ritual redemption with a world-denying, Schopenhauerian view of Buddhism. In VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick quotes Gurnemanz, a wise Knight who enigmatically describes the environs of the Grail castle to the holy fool Parsifal: "Here my son, time turns into space." But Dick's imagination was also shaped by Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle, which, after all, features semi-divine (and incestuous) twins, the disastrous forgetting of true identity, and a profound meditation on freedom and fate. Perhaps the most important thing Dick readers can learn from Wagner, however, is the dynamics of the
leitmotiv: the recurrent musical phrases that Wagner used to invoke characters, objects, and ideas. The persistent archetypes of Dick's fiction, as well as the author's endlessly rehashed metaphysical concerns in the Exegesis, unfold through the repetition, transformation, and recombination of such familiar elements. Just as Wagner philosophized through music, Dick philosophized through fiction—and, in the Exegesis, made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return.—ED
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* This is the first explicit mention in the Exegesis of the "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura," the treatise of "hidden writing" published as an appendix to the novel VALIS. From the Exegesis it is clear that the raw material that Dick would shape into the "Tractates" was already in existence before the novel itself was written. Some entries of the published "Tractates" are direct quotations from the AI Voice (including 7 and 9), but beyond these, the published document does not quote the Exegesis so much as refine it, showing, as do subsequent entries, that Dick clearly thought of the "Tractates" as a distinct document designed for public consumption (and, he no doubt hoped, illumination). Dick struggled with how to integrate the text into his novel, as well as how to think about their relationship. Once the manuscript for VALIS was completed, a few portions of the "Tractates" were in turn cited in the Exegesis.—PJ
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* The first six pages of folder 9 consist of manuscript pages from VALIS. Coming thousands of pages into the Exegesis, they cut like a knife. Where did this voice come from? One almost expects the handwriting to be different, but it isn't; equally disconcerting is that in the midst of these passages that end up almost word for word in the published novel, Dick breaks into exegesis again to briefly explore one of his multiple time-track models of 3-74. Then it's back to that voice. In future Exegesis entries, Dick will sometimes treat the novel as little more than a vehicle for the Tractates, which he grants the authority of scripture. But the novel gives us much more than that, as this excerpt shows: a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic, heated imagination that is both ruthlessly realistic and sympathetic, even tender, toward the lost soul he understands himself to be. It reminds us that in the end what we have here, all gods aside, is a human being just trying to write himself into a better place.—PJ