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* Discreet Music is the album I’ve listened to most often in the past thirty-five years since buying it when it was released in 1975. Brian Eno (affectionately also called “Brain One”) conceived of Discreet Music as something that might accompany a dinner party, and it was followed up by other soundscape experiments like Music for Airports and Music for Films. Eno’s extraordinary title piece is truly a machine composition; employing an early digital sequencer, looped tape machines, and other oblique strategies, it generates the music algorithmically. Intended to push at the threshold of audibility, Discreet Music is arguably the genesis of ambient music; certainly it and its creator inspired Dick to create the character Brent Mini, the electronic composer who appears in VALIS.—SC
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* In this extraordinary passage, the recursive, self-referential quality of the Exegesis goes loopy. The Exegesis is an exegesis after all, which means that it is obsessed with commentary and Talmudic cross-referencing. In addition to Dick’s interminable analysis of his own corpus, there is his regular use of footnotes, which here go haywire. At the top of the page Dick places an asterisk that refers to a small chunk of related text, between which lies the brief description of a dream in which Dick opens one of his own books and discovers a footnote that reads: “this is a gloss in the text for ‘I love you.’ ” Dick then parenthetically defines the term “gloss” as a difficult term needing explanation, a definition that nonetheless requires another explanation, a footnote now using his usual bracketed numeral (1). This footnote offers a variant reading of the meaning of “gloss,” defining it not as the explanation of an obscure term—rather like the explanation that you, reader, are now reading—but instead the obscure term itself—in this case, the cypher-text Felix. A parenthetical amendment about the Greek variant glossa in turn spawns another reference mark, a circled ⊗ that leads to yet another repetitive definition. Finally, Dick reiterates that Felix is such a glossa: a glossy obscurity whose invisible message is, at least in its original context, “at odds with what is apparent.” And what is apparent here, and odd, is the Exegesis reading and writing itself, like a book in a dream.—ED
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* This passage reveals much about the logic of the Exegesis and rewards close scrutiny. Here Dick is in great joy: the masterful A Scanner Darkly is hot off the press, and Stevie Nicks is in the headphones. (It must be “Dreams” from Rumours: “I see the crystal visions.”) Yet only one page before, Dick is in full metaphysical despair. He scribbles a lamentation in German; the second half is drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake. At the bottom of that page, as an unnumbered footnote, he declares that this “prayer” had been answered when he subsequently stumbled across the Britannica entry on Jacob Boehme. Though it is hard to imagine how one reads an encyclopedia passage “by mistake,” this random access is important to Dick because it removes his will from the equation, implying cosmic intention. In other words, God answered his lament by guiding him to Boehme, in whom he discovered a secret sympathy across time. However, this whole episode is complicated by the appearance sixty-four pages earlier (entry 50:19 above) of the unusual phrase “divine ‘abyss.’ ” This is a fundamental term in Boehme’s mystical scheme, where it denotes the emptiness of the Urgrund, the God beyond God. Its appearance earlier in this folder, particularly in quotation marks, strongly suggests that Dick had begun reading about Boehme sometime before uttering, in writing, his German prayer. This is a common pattern in the Exegesis: a motif is casually introduced and later blooms into a matter of such great significance that it changes the visionary narrative in retrospect.—ED
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* Dick is likely referring to Colossians 1:18–20, which states that “God wanted . . . all things to be reconciled through [Christ] and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.” More specifically, Dick is probably referring to the footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation first published in 1966 and containing extensive theological annotations written by a committee of Jesuit scholars. Dick frequently quotes from this version’s footnotes, suggesting that it was his preferred study Bible (though he is also known to have owned an annotated copy of the New Testament in the New English Version). The notes for this passage of Colossians declare that Christ is “head not only of the entire human race, but of the entire created cosmos, so that everything that was involved in the fall is equally involved in the salvation.”—GM
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* While the Exegesis is largely concerned with Western philosophy, Western religion, and Western science, Dick was strongly influenced by his (rather typically Californian) encounter with the East. Hinduism gave him a powerful language in which to think about the absolute and the problem of illusion; his embrace of paradox, organic process, and “the lowly” was deeply marked by his reading of Zen and Taoism, and especially his obsessive use of the I Ching—the ancient Chinese book of changes. The I Ching uses a binary system—yin and yang, broken and solid lines, respectively—to express and model the myriad phases of growth and decay. Like many oracles in Dick’s fiction (including The Man in the High Castle, which was partly written using the I Ching), the book’s messages—a mixture of Taoist, Confucian, and shamanic lore—are accessed through the throw of coins or other randomizing techniques. Indeed, with its computer-like code, its relentless oscillation of opposites, and its reliance on synchronicity, the I Ching gave Dick an early experience of an organic and mystical information entity—Valis before the name. Here the two hexagrams depict the “trash dialectic” that so concerned Dick, graphically figured through the loss and return of a single yang line between the two figures. In the Wilhelm/Baynes edition that Dick regularly used, the movement between these two hexagrams is described thus: “When what is above is completely split apart, it returns below.”—ED
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* The Invisible Landscape (1975) was Terence and Dennis McKenna’s attempt to theorize the bizarre high-dose psilocybin experiences they underwent in the Colombian Amazon in 1971. As Dick notes, their text shares many concerns with the Exegesis, which should remind us that Dick was hardly alone in his heady speculations. Throughout the 1970s, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Jack Sarfatti, and many others explored a mode of associative and interdisciplinary theorizing that combined weird science, psychoactive inspiration, occult semiotics, and what can only be called garage philosophy. While sometimes resembling the isolated and obsessional literature of cranks and conspiracy theorists, these speculations also served an underground social function by bringing heads together through a shared language and style. A moment later here, Dick writes, with good reason, that he lived out the process the McKennas described, while Terence later proclaimed, in the afterword to Lawrence Sutin’s 1991 abridgement of the Exegesis: “I Understand Philip K. Dick.” Such mutual resonance also forms the perfect platform for stoned, late-night bull sessions—for friendship, in other words, like the friendships and conversations that fueled Dick’s writing throughout his time in Orange County.—ED
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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 and 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