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* The year 1964 was a bad one for Dick. Burned out after writing seven novels in twelve months, Dick suffered a serious bout of depression. Writer’s block and two bad acid trips took their toll. After separating from his wife and leaving bucolic Point Reyes, Dick got an apartment in East Oakland, a gritty neighborhood he referred to as “East Gak-ville.” In July, Dick flipped his car, dislocating his shoulder. After the accident, Dick languished in a body cast, and then wore a sling for two months. Unable to type, Dick was forced to dictate notes for a long-planned sequel to The Man in the High Castle (1962). Here Dick acknowledges that, basically a decade later, he found himself in exactly the same circumstance. After reinjuring his shoulder and undergoing surgery to repair it, Dick was once again dictating notes for a sequel to High Castle that would also integrate his 2-3-74 experiences into the novel. Eventually the notes he was dictating became Radio Free Albemuth, published posthumously in 1985. Dick never completed the sequel to The Man in the High Castle, arguably the most successful book of his career, and a high point he seemed determined to revisit, especially when he was down on his luck.—DG
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* In the Exegesis, one of the great themes of Dick’s work—memory—is being reconsidered, if not radically recast. The theme of memory runs from In Milton Lumky Territory to Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? to A Scanner Darkly; up until the Exegesis, Dick’s work has formed a multivolume epic that might be called “Remembrance of Time Irreal.” In this work, memory serves as the nexus between reality and humanity, but in the Exegesis Dick’s past and future seem to bleed into the present, creatively and psychologically, and one feels his effort to make memory not so much irrelevant as meaningless, maybe even nonsensical. It is no longer part of humanity’s cosmic DNA—the Lincoln robot in We Can Build You is as human as the real Lincoln not because he looks and acts like a real Lincoln, but because he remembers like one. Dick suspects that the person he remembers being for the previous ten years was a “secondary” incarnation that supplanted the real one that now has returned. If this is true, to what extent is the Exegesis not just an elaboration on Dick’s previous work, but a rebuttal? Has Dick ceased to be the parallel Proust and become the anti-Proust?—SE
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* It should be noted that everything Dick describes in this passage is only a slightly crazier version of something that every novelist experiences—the sense that he or she is not creating the work but someone or something else is. (Or as Dick has put it earlier, “My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them. . . .”) Many authors have had the experience of returning to earlier work with no recollection of having written it or of what the person who wrote it could possibly have been thinking. I’m not disputing Dick’s insightful assessment of the cleavage between an artist’s conscious and unconscious selves, nor am I even necessarily disputing the theories behind that assessment. I’m just saying that Dick’s sense of a freely, independently functioning unconscious that manifests itself in imagination and words is not unique, even as he has taken this meditation several steps further than most.—SE
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* Dick’s experience of 2-3-74 has sometimes been interpreted as auditory and visual hallucinations, perhaps induced by repeated transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), or temporary strokes. We know that he was experiencing dangerously high blood pressure during this period, so a stroke would not be unlikely. If a stroke did occur, some of the changes he recorded in his personality in 1974 suggest that the neural circuitry normally associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, possibly in ways that strengthened the connections between consciousness and what recent research in neuroscience has been calling “the new unconscious,” or “the adaptive unconscious.” Distinct from the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious catches the overflow of sensations and perceptions too abundant to be processed through the bottleneck of conscious attention. Far from surfacing only in dreams, it is constantly at work to help set priorities, direct attention, and change behaviors in ways adaptive to the environment. Dick’s observation that he had become more “shrewd” about business matters—more practical, so to speak—indicates that the adaptive unconscious may have been guiding his actions more directly than was usual with him. Much of his theorizing about the events of 2-3-74 could also derive from his previous experience, as he himself recognized; for example, his extensive reading about classical Rome may have surfaced in his conviction that he had somehow been transported backward in time to Rome in 100 C.E.—NKH
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* We all know the Christian fish, multiplied and mutated across millions of automobile bumpers in an endless ideological war. Sometimes the icon includes the word ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for fish and an acrostic—used by early Christians along with the symbol—of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Popular accounts of ΙΧΘΥΣ often suggest that the sign was once used by persecuted Christians to recognize one another—a believer would draw one arc of the fish, which a fellow acolyte would then complete. Though this account inspired Dick, there is no historical evidence for such secret winks. More relevant is the symbol’s modern revival by the countercultural Jesus Movement, for whose adherents the symbol replaced the stark rectilinear cross and invoked an alternative Christianity, radical and earthy. In Orange County, Dick was surrounded by the ambient vibes of Jesus Freakery, an originally Californian movement whose local avatar was the remarkably named Lonnie Frisbee. By 1974 Frisbee’s youth evangelism and “surf’s up” baptisms had helped groovify Calvary Chapel and other local mainline congregations. In one of Dick’s later visions, the Υ of an ΙΧΘΥΣ decal affixed to his window transformed into a palm tree—a fitting invocation of southern California as much as the ancient Levant.—ED
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* In the Phaedo, Plato recounts the death of Socrates, which is famously administered by drinking hemlock. Socrates’ enigmatic final words are, “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asklepios.” Asklepios was the god of healing, and people suffering from an ailment would offer sacrifice before sleep in the hope of waking up cured. Thus, Socrates’ final words seem to imply that death is a cure for life, a kind of restorative slumber. It is significant, then, that Dick identifies his tutor here as Asklepios—as the god of healing—for perhaps we can think of the Exegesis as a kind of attempted cure of the soul, an extended therapeutic extrapolation of a mystical experience. A temple to Asklepios, called Asklepieion, was constructed on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, right next to the Theater of Dionysos, the billy-goat god who also makes frequent appearances in the Exegesis.—SC
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* In his 2006 article “Entoptic Vision and Physicalist Emergentism,” the cognitive scientist Jean Petitot demonstrated that visual hallucinations reported by a number of subjects can be modeled mathematically through neural net feedback in the visual cortex. One of these subjects was blind, so in this case it was clear that there was no perceptual input but rather stimulation through other kinds of neural activity, perhaps a stroke. Images hand-drawn by subjects closely resembled mathematical models of neural net stimulation and feedback. Dick mentions that the graphics he saw were abstract and symmetric; they may have been like the ones Petitot studied or perhaps variations on them. (Changing the parameters yields a number of variations in the mathematical models.) For Petitot, the point is that it is possible in this instance to link a mathematical model of neural activity directly with reported experiences. In Dick’s case, the point is rather that his report of visual phenomena correspond with hallucinations reported by others in which the visions were internally caused by neural stimulation not related to external perceptions.—NKH
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* The single most lucid sentence in the entire book.—SE
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* Dick often writes as if he assumes that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do not normally communicate with one another. Perhaps this misperception grew out of Roger Sperry’s work on split-brain perceptions in the late 1960s, one of a number of studies that inspired the popular discussion of the lateralization of brain function in books like Robert Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), which Dick was familiar with. However, Sperry’s work was done with patients in whom the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres, had been surgically severed as a treatment for otherwise incurable epilepsy. In normal brains, there is continuous communication across the hemispheres. Dick’s belief that it may be possible to boost brain efficiency, although not technically correct with respect to the right and left hemispheres, is right on the mark with regard to reparative plasticity, in which neural circuits are repurposed to make up for deficiencies in normal brain function caused by an injury or trauma. Reparative plasticity may have been precisely at issue in his own brain function, if indeed he did suffer from TIAs and had his own neural circuitry rearranged as a result.—NKH
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* The reference here is to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, where the playwright explains the origin of love (eros) with the myth that the first human beings were akin to conjoined twins of opposite sex—bound face to face, hands to hands, feet to feet—who became separated; the fire of desire flows from the attempt to retrieve our lost unity. Here as elsewhere, the Exegesis can be seen as a long tug-of-war with Plato. There are constant references to Plato’s theory of anamnesis or recollection, which is the remembrance of the forms—the pure core of reality perceived within the soul through the activity of intellection or nous—that were allegedly forgotten due to the painful trauma of our birth. Dick also refers to Plato’s analogy of the cave from Republic, and to the true universe as idea or form (eidos), of which phenomenal reality is a mirror, or scanner, through which we see darkly. Later in the Exegesis, Dick also finds reason to harshly reject Plato, who, he will declare, is “180 degrees wrong.”—SC
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* Ursula Le Guin (1929-) is an SF and fantasy writer from Berkeley. Though she and Dick were nearly the same age and attended the same high school, the two never met, but they did correspond as friends and colleagues throughout the 1970s. In February 1981, Le Guin gave a lecture at Emory University attended by author and critic Michael Bishop. Le Guin made some disparaging comments about Dick’s later work, specifically the treatment of women in VALIS (1981). Le Guin wondered aloud if Dick was “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, California.” When Bishop passed Le Guin’s remarks on to Dick in a letter, Dick responded publicly, writing an angry letter to Science Fiction Review. Le Guin apologized but had clearly hit a nerve. Dick took Le Guin’s criticisms seriously, and in many ways Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), with its deep, intelligent, and charming female first-person narrator, Angel Archer, was written in response.—DG
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* “Since I last wrote you, the magnitude of the despotic gang of professional, organized criminals who came to power legally (as did Hitler in Germany) is increasingly revealed to the U.S. public. We Americans are now faced with precisely the situation the German people of the 1930s faced: we elected a criminal government to ‘save us from Communism,’ and are stuck. . . . This brings up the question of the proper moral response and attitude of the U.S. citizen who did not know this” (from Dick’s September 1973 public letter to an Australian fanzine). These musings continue in an unabatedly secular vein and reveal, just scant months before 2-3-74, how Dick already describes Watergate in terms of an epochal breach, yet interpreted here purely in twentieth-century political terms.—JL
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* The term “immanent mind” recurs throughout these pages. Immanence can be understood as experiential and manifest as opposed to transcendental. Dick here identifies immanent mind with the extraterrestrial intelligence we can intuit in an experience of gnosis; elsewhere immanence is linked to Spinoza’s idea of a God identified with and wholly internal to nature. There is a tension throughout the Exegesis between this monistic view of the cosmos (which also appears in Dick’s references to Hegel’s dialectic and Whitehead’s idea of reality as process) and a dualistic or gnostic view of the cosmos, with two cosmic forces in conflict. In his monist mood, Dick argues that the universe is a single living organism or God; at other times, Dick seems to tend toward a Platonic or Neoplatonic theory of emanation of the divine reality into the world. But again, this is in constant tension with a tendency toward dualism, which holds that the phenomenal world is a prison governed by corporations, archons, or malevolent political forces. The way I read Dick, this latter view wins out.—SC
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* In this and the following letters, Dick explores Christianity as an ancient mystery cult. The various mysteries of the Greco-Roman period were characterized by secret and mystical rituals in which initiates sacramentally relived their god’s experiences, which often involved death and rebirth. The central rites of the early Christian church bear much similarity to these rituals, particularly baptism, the agape or love feast, and the Eucharist. Indeed, in the Eastern Orthodox Church the sacraments are still referred to as “mysteries.” What separated the early church from the mysteries—and what led to its persecution—was its exclusivity: unlike followers of most other mysteries, the Christian faithful refused to participate in the imperial state religion.—GM
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* Cultural critic, rock-and-roll journalist, and founder of Crawdaddy magazine, Paul Williams (1948-) is a singularly important figure in the second half of Dick’s life. Besides giving a copy of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to both John Lennon and psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, Williams wrote the profile “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick,” which ran in the November 6, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone. The piece, which focuses on Dick’s various theories regarding the 1971 break-in and makes no mention of the 2-3-74 events, introduced Dick to his widest counterculture audience yet. The two became good friends, and Williams managed to get one of Dick’s earlier (and best) mainstream fiction books, Confessions of a Crap Artist, published in 1975, an accomplishment for which Dick was eternally grateful. Upon Dick’s death, Williams was made literary executor of Dick’s estate.—DG
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* This passage comes from book 2, chapter 2 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted here in John Allen’s translation. The idea that prelapsarian human beings had extraordinary abilities is not unique to Calvin—indeed, the text quoted here is preceded in the original by an attribution of the idea to Augustine. Dick latched onto Calvin as the idea’s primary proponent, both here and elsewhere in the Exegesis, and his name becomes shorthand for the concept of preternatural abilities.—GM
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* In many of Dick’s stories, collectors build encapsulated re-creations of places that once held special meaning for them. In Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Virgil Ackerman re-creates the city of his childhood, Wash-35 (Dick lived in Washington, D.C., in 1935). For Dick, these nostalgic places serve as staging grounds for a ceaseless replay of events, “lovingly composed,” in the words of critic Fredric Jameson, “for a human activity which has disappeared.” In his descriptions of ancient Rome superimposed on Orange County, Dick may also have created a past space of redemptive activity, running parallel to, but separate from, our fallen world. While the Empire and the Black Iron Prison are present in this space too, the underground Christian resistance is dedicated in their opposition. God seems closer in that world than he does in this one. Dick sometimes describes Rome, as he does here, as sinister, dangerous, and overrun with spies. But in Dick’s v
ision, ancient Rome transcends the petty concerns that addle the plastic-fantastic fakeness of Orange County in the 1970s, and in this way it can be read as a kind of sacred urban fantasy that replaces a vapid reality.—DG
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* Dick speaks often, as here, of his 2-3-74 experience as a kind of healing, specifically a healing of neural circuits. Contemporary neural science is providing the “scientific explanation” for what Dick sensed intuitively. Recent work in neuroscience has found that the brain is much more plastic than previously supposed, a fact that Oliver Sacks demonstrates throughout The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other accounts of patients who have suffered brain injury or trauma. In his recent work, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls the narrating voice of consciousness the “autobiographical self.” How the narrating self relates to the neuronal circuits of the brain is not well understood, but neural circuits can restructure and repurpose themselves when normal brain function is disrupted.—NKH
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* Interpreting his repurposed neural circuits as the emergence of a mind connected to all other minds, Dick here is quite right to note that the awakened mind (which I hypothesize is the adaptive unconscious) “has a job to do.” As he surmises, it is indeed not a separate entity, although in a different sense than he imagines.—NKH
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* Here Dick is quoting the voice he refers to variously as his tutor, his unconscious, the Spirit, or the Sybil; later he largely calls it the AI Voice (see Glossary). Throughout the Exegesis we find unsourced quotations like this one; often it is unclear whether Dick is quoting the Voice, the Bible, an imperfectly remembered line of poetry, the encyclopedia, or his own Exegesis. The Exegesis is a mishmash of external voices; the Voice itself is only one of them, though its gnomic utterances have a peculiar power to stop Dick in his tracks or springboard further exegesis.—PJ