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* 2-3-74 marks a turning point away from Dick questioning the nature of reality in his fiction, but without providing unambiguous answers, and toward generating an astonishing efflorescence of theories that do not merely question but instead make assertions about the nature of reality. The drive of his theorizing in the Exegesis seems always to be toward incorporating more and more ideas into a single synthetic scheme, without definitively eliminating or disqualifying any one of them. Not surprisingly, then, the synthesis grows wilder and more ideationally unstable as he proceeds.—NKH
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† In Dick’s stories, amid all the anxiety over disintegrating universes and unstable realities, there is always the sense of an ultimate reality underlying the fakery. The absolute shines through the cracks in the walls of the universe, and the hand of God—or Ubik, or the Walker-on-Earth, or Wilbur Mercer—reaches through to help us. This is Dick’s basic ontological faith: contrary to appearances, something is actually real. Whether that something is comprehensible to the human intellect is another question entirely, but even in this doubt Dick can be located in the tradition of apophatic mystics like Meister Eckhart or the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.—GM
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* Here Dick poignantly reflects on being a student in a philosophy class whose instructor dogmatically insisted that Plato’s world of forms was no longer intelligible or useful to us. In the face of this intolerance, Dick rightly quit the class (and, soon enough, the university). Dick is evidently not an academic or professional philosopher, but an amateur, or perhaps that most splendid of things, what Erik Davis calls a garage philosopher. As someone who gets paid to teach philosophy for a living, I find Dick compelling as a philosopher because, whatever he lacks in scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and in rich lateral and cumulative associations. Indeed, if one defines a philosopher along the lines offered by Deleuze and Guattari—namely, as someone who creates concepts—then Dick is a philosopher. The naïveté of Dick’s approach to philosophy, like his use of secondary sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Paul Edwards’s fantastically useful Encyclopedia of Philosophy, permits a rapidity of association and lends a certain systematic coherence to his concerns. If Dick had known more, it might have led to him producing less interesting chains of ideas.—SC
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* Here Dick ponders the notion of the “Kingdom” found in Luke 17 alongside a Sufi insight. In Luke 17:20, Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be found by inspecting empirical reality or by watching for signs of its imminent arrival. So too in the Vedic tradition one finds the practice of “neti, neti,” which looks at the world and recalls—over and over—that the divine is “not this, not this.” In Luke 17:21, Jesus follows his first negation with another: “Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘Lo there!’ ” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is neither “here” nor “there” precisely because it is not the spatial, external world. Being neither here nor there, the Kingdom is what Dick would describe as “ubiquitous.” Hence Jesus then asks us to “behold,” to look with awareness: “for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” We are directed to behold what St. Theresa called our “interior castle,” our consciousness, the virtual “space” of contemplation. If we follow William Penn and “look within, look within,” we find, in the contemplative tradition Dick is writing in and through, that “within” and “without” form a unity.—RD
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* The Acts of the Apostles from the New Testament tells the story of the early church, focusing largely on the ministry of the apostle Paul. Dick speaks frequently about the presence of “Acts material” in his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, though Dick claims not to have read Acts at the time the novel was written. Dick focuses on two incidents from the biblical narrative: Paul’s trial before the procurator Marcus Antonius Felix (24:1-27) and Philip the Evangelist’s conversion of an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch (8:26-40). The former connection largely hinges on the similarity of names: in Tears, Felix Buckman interrogates Jason Taverner, just as the procurator Felix interrogates Paul. The latter incident shows a more striking correlation: Philip, traveling south from Jerusalem, passes an Ethiopian who is studying a passage from the Book of Isaiah. Philip interprets the passage for the eunuch, who then asks to be baptized. Dick saw a remarkable similarity between this story and the conclusion of Tears, in which Buckman is overcome by compassion and love for a stranger—a black man at an all-night gas station. Dick was also struck by Philip the Evangelist’s name, no doubt particularly since the scene that closes Tears was based on an event in his own life.—GM
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* Here Dick provides a concrete analogy that helps illuminate his generally Platonic take on “orthogonal time.” The eternal forms sit on a circular drum and stamp themselves onto a moving strip of time, literally “informing” the linear flow and creating the “two-source” time that we misrecognize as a single fusion of novelty and repetition, change and return. Essentially, Dick is describing a Platonic typewriter—one thinks in particular of the IBM Selectric model popular in the 1970s, an electric typewriter whose type elements, rather than being attached to separate bars, rest on a single “golfball” that rotates and pivots before striking the ribbon and impressing ink on the page. Dick’s metaphysics of media tech here shows how much he saw writing of any kind as a dream machine that models cosmic processes.—ED
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* The concept of an underground revolutionary Christian church occurs frequently in the Exegesis and is essential to understanding Dick’s conception of Christian theology. His is not the institutional, conservative church, but the early, persecuted, apostolic community. Dick gravitates toward rebellious Christian thinkers like Joachim of Fiore, Martin Luther, and George Fox, and his conception of the Black Iron Prison—the Empire that symbolizes all injustice—owes more than a little to the apostolic-prophetic depiction of Rome as Babylon. Dick’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit draws on the Book of Acts, which depicts the Spirit’s protection of the early church from its persecutors. But this emphasis also puts him in the territory of anti-authoritarian religious and millenarian movements like the Joachimites, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the early Quakers. For Dick, true Christianity implies or even requires a subversive attitude: as long as persecution and oppression are possible, the true church exists within the resistance to that oppression.—GM
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* Empedocles is mentioned throughout the Exegesis, along with other pre-Socratic thinkers, notably Heraclitus and Parmenides. Empedocles wrote two works, both lost, one on nature and the other called Katharmoi or Purifications. In a fragment of the latter, addressing himself to the citizens of Acragas in Sicily, Empedocles declares himself “an immortal god, no longer a mortal, held in honor by all.” In the end, Empedocles both rejected and was rejected by the people and threw himself in despair into Mount Etna in the hope of being transformed into a god. Sadly, a sandal was thrown out of the volcano in confirmation of his mortality. One suspects some identification between Dick and Empedocles, where the latter declares himself divine and is persecuted for his hubris.—SC
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* The Hymn of the Soul, also known as the Hymn of the Pearl, is a numinous fable of spiritual homecoming that captures, more than any narrative of antiquity, Dick’s noetic vision of anamnesis. The Acts of Thomas was a third-century apocryphal Christian text, most likely of Syriac origin, but the hymn, sung by Thomas in prison, is clearly an interpolation. Though it shows the influence of the New Testament, some scholars think it is a Mesopotamian fairy tale, or possibly the remnant of a pre-Christian Gnostic tradition whose very existence r
emains controversial. Of particular importance for an understanding of Dick is the role of the letter; when the occluded hero breaks the seal, “the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read.” Making his way home, the hero finds the letter again, “lying in the road,” like a beer can or a piece of trash. (Later in the Exegesis, Dick discusses the “Xerox missive” in terms influenced by the Hymn, though the values are inverted.) Once home, the hero puts on holy robes that, in Barnstone’s translation, “quiver all over with the movements of gnosis” and that mirror him like a divine twin: “two entities but one form.”—ED
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* While Schrödinger discovered the informatic character of living systems, Dick predates the invention of the discipline of artificial life here by positing the possibly living and sentient character of information itself. Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky had already coined the term “noösphere” as a label for the effects of focused attention on the biosphere—the living film of the planet—which itself had emerged from the lithosphere, the mineral substrate of our planet. But Vernadsky did not yet have the modern concept of information with which to push his concept further, as Dick does. While others (Le Roy, Teilhard) took the idea in a more theological direction, all characterized the noösphere as an instance of evolutionary change driven by the dynamics of attention and information.—RD
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* Linear time has a rather immediate purchase on our perception. Our finite experience of time—no moment can be simultaneous with any other moment—persuades us that moments actually “follow” one another. But Dick’s experience of what he often describes as divine reality—eternal time in which moments overlap or superimpose themselves—was equally persuasive to him, forcing him to grapple with the possibility that what he had previously perceived as reality was in fact fiction or camouflage. In this passage, Dick floats the rather alarming and counterintuitive idea that the future could alter the present, and he does so by way of orthodox Christian theology, which in his view takes this rather science-fictional concept of time as doctrine. Crucially, Dick effects this movement to the eternal aspect of time through his perception of unity: “I think it’s all the same thing, one found inner, one found outer.” By making all of space and time—the Kingdom of Heaven—“one thing,” Dick resolves the paradox of whether his experience is coming from within or without—a Möbius strip that provides further demonstration of the integration of “inner” and “outer” into “one thing.”—RD
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* In his later years Dick limited his drug use to scotch, snuff, and the occasional joint. In his teens, Dick was given the stimulant Semoxydrine as an antidepressant. Between 1952 and 1972, Dick became notorious for his prodigious use of amphetamines, which he reportedly consumed by the handful to keep up his nearly inhuman writing pace. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dick’s house in Santa Venetia became a well-known hangout for teenagers and eventually for serious addicts and pushers; Dick’s experience with the drug scene is chronicled with humor and compassion in his novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Though Dick’s mescaline trip in May 1970 inspired Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, it is not true, as many believe, that Dick wrote while on LSD—a claim that Harlan Ellison made in his introduction to the Dick story “Faith of Our Fathers,” which appeared in his influential new wave SF collection Dangerous Visions (1967). Dick took LSD only two or three times, once suffering a terrible trip spent envisioning an angry god tormenting him “like a metaphysical IRS agent.”—DG
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* Victoria Principal (1950-) is a Hollywood actress (Earthquake, Dallas) and one of Dick’s many “dark-haired girls.” Dick was drawn to this particular subset of brunettes throughout his life, sometimes suffering intense crushes on women he had never met (cf. Linda Ronstadt). Dick was especially drawn to Principal, whom he believed could capture the cold sensuality of his android femme fatale character Rachel Rosen in the cinematic adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dick began taping up pictures of Principal around his apartment and sent letters and a copy of Ubik to her. He was heartbroken when she failed to respond. Dick also pushed for Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick to play Rosen. Dick’s penchant for these women inspired his collection of poems, essays, and letters The Dark Haired Girl, published by Mark V. Ziesing in 1989.—DG
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* This is the book, published in 1969 by the pioneering parapsychologist Charley Tart, that introduced the phrase “altered states of consciousness” into the already humming counterculture. Although the phrase had already been used by Arnold M. Ludwig a few years earlier, it was this book, and probably this book title, that made the phrase a common stock of the Zeitgeist. As with so much other mystical literature, however, what we really encounter in the Exegesis are altered states of consciousness that are also altered states of energy. That is, what we finally encounter is Conscious Energy.—JJK
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* An early reference to the Eucharist, which grows in importance throughout the Exegesis. Here Dick frames the Lord’s Supper as a memorial reenactment rather than a mystical rite; later he will focus on the issue of transubstantiation.—GM
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* A contemplation of God’s nature occupies virtually all of Dick’s late-period work, but as he grapples with theology, what is startling are not the more far-fetched notions—anyone who has read Dick’s earlier work expects these—but the more conventional ones. The God who reveals Himself in Dick’s thinking often is very much the familiar humanized Judeo-Christian God. This God acts personally and responds personally in the ways of both the Old and New Testaments; note a few paragraphs earlier, in a passage that is practically biblical, the “trust” that Dick’s God places in “special men” and “prophets.” The upcoming reference to God/Jesus as “Zebra” is first deeply curious, then forehead-smackingly obvious—and fabulous anyway; nothing is more indicative of just how unconventional Dick’s mind is than that his most conventional notions seem most unconventional of all. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, Dick tries to reconcile his own particular God teased out of the fabric of reality and time with the God of millennia worshipped by millions. Which is to say that consciously and unconsciously, herein Dick is finding his place in civilization.—SE
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* “The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to set it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if not, then not. . . . my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness—but not complexity, if you see what I mean. The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes—it only emerges by stages and degrees” (from a twelve-page letter to Eleanor Dimoff of the Meredith Agency, February 1, 1960). Here, Dick is just declaring himself, at a time when his major writing was barely evidenced. The glimpse of the future author of the Exegesis is evocative, to say the least.—JL
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* With few exceptions, the Exegesis was not a journal where Dick would summarize his daily affairs. As a result, many of the crucial events of 2-3-74 were not written about as they happened, and so it is difficult to know how significant these events were for Dick when they transpired. One day before writing this letter to Claudia, Dick wrote a frantic letter to the FBI, saying that two days earlier (March 18) he had received a registered letter from Estonia, a letter he knew “was a trap, frankly by the KGB.” He makes no mention of that here. Similarly, in a letter written to his daughter on March 17, 1974, the day after “vivid fire” released Dick from “every
thrall,” he makes no mention of his life-changing circumstances. March 20 also appears to be the day Dick received the “Xerox missive,” which was to play a crucial role in his later theorizing. This envelope, sent from New York, contained two book reviews with certain words highlighted in red and blue pen. Dick worried that they were coded death messages. The importance of these events waxed and waned significantly in Dick’s life, so much so that even a major event like the arrival of the Xerox missive might go unreported for weeks or months in the Exegesis.—DG
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* From this point forward, Dick only occasionally included letters, and hardly ever dated his Exegesis entries. The obsessive, recursive nature of the work and the dearth of references to events in the outside world sometimes make establishing precise chronology difficult, if not impossible. Even if a definitive chronology is someday established, the Exegesis cannot be fully reconstructed as written, since it is clear that at times Dick reorganized his own pages.—PJ
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* While this self-encounter occurs as an idea for a plot, it offers an uncanny description of Dick’s own journey. Under the influence of his own writing, and by putting as much of himself as possible into that writing, Dick seems to have seen himself as an abstraction—not in the sense of a deadened thing taken out of its context, but in the sense that software engineers discuss “layers of abstraction”: an act of metacognition or description that at once detaches from and observes other layers of the system. In the Exegesis, Dick observed himself being what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop.” Dick later recognizes that this operation of “meta-abstraction” identifies something about reality—that the world itself is looped with the language we use to describe it. In The Divine Invasion, the child god Emmanuel manifests something like this loop when he performs the “Hermetic transform.”—RD