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* Doris Sauter was a dark-haired girl Dick met in 1972 when she was dating his friend (and fellow SF writer) Norman Spinrad. The two later bonded over their growing interest in Christianity, Doris sharing her conversion story with Dick, and Dick relaying the events of 2-3-74 to her. Eventually the two paired up for charity work. In May 1975, Sauter was diagnosed with advanced lymphatic cancer, which she survived. In January 1976, Dick asked Sauter to marry him (although his fifth wife, Tessa, and young son Christopher would not move out of the apartment for several months). Sauter refused. Later that year, when Sauter’s cancer returned and Dick’s health issues—including high blood pressure and heart problems—became more serious, they decided to live together. Doris became the character model for Sherri Solvig in VALIS (1981). Later she moved next door to Dick and became the inspiration for the character in Rybus Romney in “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” (1979) and The Divine Invasion (1981). Sauter was forced to move out when the apartment building converted to condominiums, but the two remained friends until Dick’s death.—DG
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* It is not clear from the Exegesis to what extent Dick’s path crossed with that of Theodore Sturgeon, the author of the science-fiction novels Venus Plus X and More Than Human, who herein is mentioned a number of times (as are the SF authors Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Stanislaw Lem). Dick’s and Sturgeon’s outlaw kinship—their shared anarchic spirit, their common ambivalence about the technology that wowed most other science-fiction writers, their subversion of physical and temporal reality in pursuit of emotional or even metaphysical truths—makes sense considering that both aimed for the literary “mainstream” before they were vortexed into genre. Perhaps Sturgeon will become the next Dickian vogue among the literati, notwithstanding his introduction here amid odd ruminations on a reincarnated cat.—SE
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* In passages like these, it is impossible to ignore Dick’s obvious and sometimes self-confessed psychopathology—in other words, that the guy often appears, well, crazy. It is tempting to collapse Dick’s mystical realizations into this craziness, as if Valis were nothing more than a symptom of Dick’s alleged schizophrenia, temporal lobe seizures, or whatever. But we must be more careful, and more sophisticated, here. Dick himself thought poignantly and deeply about these and related issues and came to a conclusion that many other thoughtful people—from William James and Henri Bergson to Aldous Huxley—have come to, namely, that the brain may be a kind of “filter,” “transmitter,” or “reducer” of consciousness. When this filter-brain is temporarily shut down or suppressed by whatever means (mental illness, psychedelics, political torture, meditative discipline, a car wreck, a profound sexual experience, heart surgery), other forms of consciousness and reality, many of them cosmic in scope and nature, can and often do shine through. Trauma, we might say, can lead to transcendence, but—and this is the key point—the transcendent state cannot be reduced to or explained by the traumatic context. As with the material brain and its relationship to the irreducible nature of consciousness, the trauma does not produce transcendence. It lets it in.—JJK
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* Such lines announce a continuous meta-theme in Dick’s Exegesis—what I have elsewhere called the mytheme of Mutation. This is the notion that paranormal powers and mystical experiences are expressions of the emerging buds or limbs of an evolving human supernature. Although this idea was endlessly explored in the pulp fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, found some of its most sophisticated mystical expressions in the human potential movement, and later found a wide popular audience in the counterculture with its “mutant” hippies and pop-cultural “X-Men,” it is much older than all of these. Indeed, the idea’s deepest roots lie in elite academic British culture, and more especially in the London Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), with figures like the Cambridge classicist Frederic Myers, who saw psychical abilities like telepathy (a word that he coined) as “supernormal” expressions of our “extraterrene evolution.” Further back still, Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of evolutionary theory with Darwin, asserted that there was a second spiritual line of evolution organized and directed by a higher power working toward its own ends. In short, the mytheme of Mutation goes back a century and a half to the very origins of evolutionary biology itself.—JJK
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* Dick consistently seeks to uncover some trace of the so-called unwritten doctrine that Aristotle associates with Plato in the Physics, an association that some see as “outing” Plato as a secret Pythagorean for whom ultimate reality is revealed by number. Dick also seeks to identify Plato’s doctrine of the forms with Parmenides’s idea of being as a well-rounded sphere opposed to the nothingness of nonbeing. This notion seems linked in Dick’s mind with another borrowing from Parmenides to which he makes frequent allusion, the famous fragment 3: “For it is the same thing to think and to be.” Also important to Heidegger, whose radical interpretations of the pre-Socratics may have influenced Dick, this fragment identifies the activity of intellection, noesis or noös, with the essential being of things. We might also take one further step and cite Empedocles’s fragment 28, which appears to allude to Parmenides: “But he [God] is equal in all directions to himself and altogether eternal, a rounded sphere enjoying a circular solitude.” The kernel of Dick’s vision is the mystical identification of the soul’s capacity for intellectual intuition with the being of the divine.—SC
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* In his extraordinary German sermons, Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) described the kingdom in the soul as the divine spark (vünkelîn), a term that appears elsewhere in the Exegesis. He also called this kingdom the godhead (gôtheit). Such views were condemned by the Avignon Pope as heretical two years after Eckhart’s death. Eckhart’s “heresy” was considered close to the much-feared Heresy of the Free Spirit that, some historians claim, was like an invisible empire across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The core of this heresy consisted in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us, but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God, but of the malevolent demiurge. Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. We might link this to Dick’s view that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age—the time before the fall—to return. In the text of Eckhart’s papal condemnation, we find quasi-gnostic utterances such as: “All creatures are one pure nothing. I do not say they are a little something, but that they are pure nothing.” All this can be linked to Dick’s later Eckhartean allusion to humans as “corruptible sheaves around divine sparks.”—SC
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* Dick’s approach to the concept of being “born again” is quite different from the interpretation that developed among evangelical Protestants in the twentieth century. For evangelicals, being “born again” depends on a personal decision, an intellectual/emotional acceptance of a soteriological proposition. For Dick, it refers to a passive event, an invasion—possibly even a victimization—by an outside force. Dick’s “second birth” was not the result of his conversion experience, but its cause. He was personally transformed, but not as a result of his own volition.—GM
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* What else was going on in the world in March 1974? As reality’s fabric ripped apart in Fullerton, a jumbo jet fell out of the sky outside Paris, killing more than three hundred people; an Arab oil embargo produced the most pronounced gasoline shortage ever in America, with cars lined up at stations for miles; and the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to restore the death penalty that the Supreme Court recently had ruled unconstitutional. Overshadowing even these unsettling events was the kidnapping in northern California of the heiress of a millionaire publishing family by a band of domestic terrorists; though there is no evidence that
Dick shared the rest of the country’s fascination with this incident, which took place in his own backyard, the subsequent conversion of Patty Hearst to the radicals’ cause sounds like a novel that Dick might have written in the fifties or might yet write toward the end of his life. Most prominently, virtually all of Richard Nixon’s immediate political circle in the White House, including his attorney general and chief of staff, were indicted in the Watergate scandal, which had reached critical mass, and the president himself was named a co-conspirator by a grand jury. To Dick, and to the country at large, this was the moment when the Nixon presidency—five months before its end—was at its most toxic.—SE
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* The term “exegesis” is most commonly used to describe a thorough interpretation of a biblical text, often based either on its historical context and language or on the revelation of its hidden meanings. Dick’s use of the term implies that he considered his experiences themselves to be a form of scripture, a story to be revealed, explored, and understood. Moreover, his exploration of those experiences is itself a form of continuous revelation, with no clear line between experience and interpretation. But since the experience is ongoing, the Exegesis itself becomes a key part of the narrative. In the Exegesis, Dick is telling a story to himself, and exploring the meaning of that story, in ever-expanding circles of narrative and interpretation.—GM
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* The introduction of Zebra brings us close to the center of Dick’s mystical vision. With the “discovery” of Zebra as a mimicker of forms, Dick thinks that he has found his deus absconditus— his hidden God concealed in the phenomenal world. Elsewhere, Zebra is described as a “cosmic Christ” and as a giant brain that utilizes us as crossing stations in his vast relay network of living information. Chains of associated identifications structure the argument of the Exegesis: Zebra equals Christ, and Christ equals God; the mind’s union with Zebra is the union with God, where “you are God.” The kernel of Dick’s mystical “heresy” may be located here: union with the divine.—SC
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* The turning point here seems to include not only a positive vision of what reality is but a figure who can intervene to direct events so as to bring reality to fruition in a positive sense. There seems to be a continuing oscillation in Dick’s thought during this period about whether such a reality exists now (and has always existed and will continue to exist into the future), or whether it must be realized through arduous effort and the validation of his vision.—NKH
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* After searching in reference books and other sources for analogies to his experiences in 2-3-74, Dick now seems to accept that it may be unique, or nearly so. The discovery is no doubt bittersweet: if others have had similar experiences, his vision would be validated; but if not, his status as a lone visionary is enhanced even more. There is, of course, another way to interpret the realization that an explanation “will have to derive from what I saw”—namely, that it was internally generated as a cerebral event, accompanied by the rearrangement of his neural circuitry.—NKH
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* Much of the 1977 Exegesis is taken up with pages like these, in which whole encyclopedia entries are copied out by hand. Taken together they provide a fascinating map of autodidactic study; Dick is led from one thing to the next not to master a field of study or a philosophical system but to try to figure out his own experience. The hunger for legitimacy in these passages is striking—no less an authority than Hegel agrees with him!—but no more so than the insistence with which he returns again and again to ground the inquiry in his own experience and need to understand. Dick was well aware of the idiosyncratic and unauthorized nature of his intellectual quest, as VALIS in particular shows. The novel piles up sources and citations from Dick’s own researches while posing the question of whether the path of Horselover Fat leads to anywhere but the nuthouse. But what the novel does—what it both intends to do and actually does—is extend an invitation. As Fat’s shrink tells him at a low point, “you are the authority.” It is a wonderful gift of permission, and the novel offers it in turn to any reader who needs it. Go forth and pursue knowledge! Even if you’re totally wrong! You are the authority! And more important perhaps, you are not alone.—PJ
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* In November 1971, Dick’s San Rafael house was burglarized. The intruders used explosives to blow open Dick’s fireproof safe. Manuscripts and canceled checks were stolen along with a stereo and a gun. Dick speculated for years about the identity and motivation of the intruders; in many ways this endless theorizing prefigures 2-3-74 and his writing of the Exegesis. Dick would construct an elaborate theory about the burglary, complete with motivation and method, only to cast his carefully crafted theory aside when another entered his mind. From Paul Williams’s Rolling Stone profile, it appears that Dick’s obsession with the event grew over time and eventually began to take over his life. The most Dickian suggestion was made by the police: Dick had committed the burglary himself. When Dick could no longer get the police to return his phone calls, he fell into another depression, writing to Williams, probably only partially in jest, “Ever since the police lost interest in me, there’s been nothing to live for.”—DG
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* Among all of Dick’s books, including the “important” ones, some of the most haunting remain the early so-called failures: Confessions of a Crap Artist, with its savant regarding the world from the perspective of science journals, comic books, and bondage magazines; In Milton Lumky Territory, in which a man falls in love with an older woman only to realize that she was the second-grade teacher who terrorized and humiliated him as a child; and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, where an archaeological hoax transforms a fraudulent artifact into irresistible destiny (a theme Dick picked up a year later in writing The Man in the High Castle). All were rejected by American publishers and remained unknown for years. It is worthy of one of his own stories to wonder what parallel career would have awaited Dick—perhaps heading off his shift into genre—had these utterly original novels found the readership they deserved when they were written. For a while he was the West Coast’s answer to Cheever and Updike, except, of course, for that Borgesian streak no one yet identified as Borgesian because Ficciones had not yet appeared in English as Labyrinths. What is most striking about Dick’s fiction around the Exegesis is the return to this fifties hybrid: A Scanner Darkly, part confession and part postmortem of an identity crisis, in a near-future where identity is as commodified as anything else; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, beginning in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination and striving for an answer in the rubble of smashed suppositions.—SE
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* Virtually all of Dick’s references to computers are metaphorical or part of his new religious terminology. They are rarely technological in the strict sense. It is paradoxical, or at least ironic, that Dick found his natural audience in the digital age, given not only that he died at the era’s outset but also that home computers, I strongly suspect, would only have aggravated his paranoia. I picture him peering deeply into the screen, trying to see who on the other side is watching back; would there have been any doubt in his mind that someone was there? Even Arthur C. Clarke’s more theological meditations (as alluded to earlier herein by Dick himself) accept technology’s role in our growing collective insight as a species, albeit while acknowledging the tension that technology begets. But the digital age has engendered a more widespread consideration and acceptance of the possible alternative realities that earlier readers of Dick’s fiction relegated to the realm of drug-induced hallucination. The eighties cyberpunks who mapped the emerging computer culture, like Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, and Sterling, counted Dick as among their most prevalent influences, even as Dick might well have wondered what the hell Neuromancer wa
s all about.—SE
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* With this important concept, Dick presents the visible universe as a moral test. The challenge is to perceive the injustice of the system of the world and to refuse to cooperate with it. The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear indication that it deserves to be rejected. The impetus to “withdraw assent” must come from a transcendent point of view that impels immediate disobedience: the word “balk” implies gut instinct rather than intellectual decision. Moreover, one cannot be aware that the visible universe is a test, because this would lead to calculated action in light of an expected reward. Dick gives one concrete example of his own balking: his participation in the tax strike organized by Ramparts magazine in 1968. By “this-worldly” standards, this was an illogical decision that led to personal hardship, but by “other-worldly” standards, his refusal was simply the right thing to do.—GM
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* The flip side of these feelings of self-importance was, for Dick, debilitating paranoia. Many of Dick’s theories placed him at the center of vast, cosmic scenarios, and these preoccupations were often coupled with feelings of persecution. An exaggerated sense of self-importance is common among paranoiacs, who often reason that they must be important if people are out to get them. In a speech to a Vancouver science-fiction convention in 1972, Dick famously noted that any formulation “that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis about what the universe is about” is a “manifestation of paranoia.” Throughout the period of 2-3-74, Dick was also peppering the FBI with increasingly bizarre letters outlining the various plots he felt were at work against him. While in the long run the 2-3-74 experiences seem to have mellowed Dick out, his enlightenment did not come without many a dark night of the soul.—DG