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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
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* Dick is most likely referencing Rudolf Otto’s comparative study of Meister Eckhart and Sankara, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1932). Otto (1869–1937) was a major German scholar of comparative religion who helped introduce the term “the holy” or “the sacred” (das Heilige) into the field, by which he meant, in his Latin phrase, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, a mystical presence at once terrifying and alluring (an idea that Dick clearly draws on in other parts of the Exegesis). “Master” Eckhart (1260–1327) was a Dominican scholar and preacher whose most radical mystical teachings were condemned shortly before he died. Sankara (eighth–ninth century) was one of the most important expositors of Advaita Vedanta or idealist “nondualism” in medieval India. Stunned by his own paradoxical experience of the inside being outside and the outside being inside, Dick was picking up on the similarities between the two intellectual mystics here, which he could now see and understand precisely through his own experiences.—JJK
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* This compelling but cryptic passage represents Dick’s recovery of one of Schopenhauer’s key aims: salvation from the world of illusion, and the attainment of intuitive access to what Nietzsche, in his early Schopenhauerian phase, saw as the mysterious and Dionysian unity of being that is the unconscious will, whose blind urgings Dick here identifies with God. If the core of the Exegesis is a blissful recovery of intellectual intuition, of gnosis, then a corresponding Schopenhauerian theme that emerges is that our existence in the phenomenal world is an experience of suffering and pain. Human life is a kind of mistake, a detour on the way to life’s goal: death. Indeed, a recurrent feature of the lives of mystics is the experience of dejection and depression, understood as distance from God. Such despair occurs repeatedly in the Exegesis and with greater frequency in the later years, as in [90:69]: “When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.”—SC
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* We see not unity but an “exploded” chaos. Dick sees a world of suffering, including his own, yet Valis offers reintegration through “entelechy”—the actualization of divine potential akin to the development of an embryo. Shattered, we dwell in an explosion of false categories, divided from the eternal in space and time. Despite this rhetoric of “explosion”—resonant with the 1971 burglary of Dick’s Marin County house and the explosion of his fireproof file cabinet, something like the Big Bang of Valis—the divine reality remains to be integrated through a consciousness willing to “go there.” Fragments of trash become what Gabriel Mckee calls the “god in the gutter,” as the most abject or insignificant phenomenon becomes a “splinter” connected in reality to the One. Here even suffering and evil can be creatively understood as a finger pointing elsewhere—beyond the dispersed consciousness of our splintered selves and toward the collective eternal Noös, a communion of mind that can only be discovered by each of us in our own particularity. This is perhaps a calling in a triple sense: Dick calls—names—the perception of the integrated Noös “Valis,” and the articulation of this perception is also, clearly, his calling, his vocation—and perhaps ours.—RD
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* Faced with the problem of how to map time and space when they no longer obey the logics of linearity and extension, Dick turns to more virtual models of infodynamics. Note that in this instance information is viewed as an “aspect” of reality rather than its essence. One of Dick’s refrains in his contemplation of 2-3-74 is a line from Wagner’s Parsifal: “Here, my son, time turns into space.” Here Dick posits a continuity between all time and space through recourse to a higher order of abstraction: the informational aspect of reality. But Dick avoids the usual opposition between “information” and reality.—RD
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* Dick’s handwriting changes here, midpage, to a wild, overheated scrawl. Such moments are scattered throughout the Exegesis. Here and in many cases, Dick’s rush of ideas seems to reflect the labile intensity of his holograph, as if a distinct shift in consciousness has taken place.—PJ
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* The difference between “is” and “does” underlies a good deal of Dick’s theorizing as he navigates between traditional philosophical questions about the essence of things (ontology) and a process paradigm based on genetics, informatics, and cybernetic systems theory. Within this latter paradigm, with its heuristic emphasis on process, experiment, and rules of thumb, philosophical questions about the “true nature” of things just get in the way of exploring the possibilities and problems in any given situation. After all, the skepticism that Dick also favors can always undermine notions of God and Being, but has a tougher time denying the evident fact that, even if you cannot know what the world really is, you still have to deal with it. And dealing with it means that, on some level anyway, your options are open because you have choice. Process leads toward pragmatism—the philosophical equivalent of the handyman who recurs throughout Dick’s fiction. In the following folder [6:44], Dick will make this point more explicit. Acknowledging there that truth is plastic—even and especially in a “metaphysical” zone like the bardo—one still faces the most concrete of questions: “I ask, not, ‘What is true?’ but, ‘What modulations shall I imprint on the stuff around me?’ ”—ED
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† We can detect a new mood in the Exegesis that deepens as Dick’s thinking evolves: a dialectical mood. Whether this is conscious or not, Dick seems to be close to Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the historical process, through which new shapes of Spirit appear and dissolve, is a highway of misery. Crucially, however, the highway does not end in despair, but in the self-consciousness of freedom understood as self-determination. This insight might be linked to Dick’s later references to history as an engine of pain and suffering that culminates in the achievement of human freedom, or the closing entry of the Exegesis, on the dialectic of pain and hope.—SC
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* Here Dick identifies his thinking with the Marxist idea that history is a dialectic that will culminate in communist revolution. In part, Dick is attempting to engage the leftist literary critics whose interest in his work in the 1970s both pleased and unnerved him. At the same time, Dick’s thinking already employs dualistic motifs that cast history as a dialectical conflict between the forces of Empire and those who struggle for freedom—what is described elsewhere in the Exegesis as the struggle between God and Satan. We should also note Dick’s frequent identification of true Christianity as revolutionary and Christ as a revolutionary figure. In this way, Dick retrieves the historical link that has often bound together rebellious quasi-gnostic movements, like the Cathars or the Heresy of the Free Spirit, with forms of insurgent political populism and indeed communism. Giordano Bruno, one of the other “heretics” to whom Dick is attracted, also professed a charismatic yet hermetic pantheism that has long been linked to forms of radical anti-Church insurgency. That is why, in many small Italian towns, a statue of Bruno, often erected by the local Communist Party, stands facing the principal Catholic church.—SC
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* What an odd, and incredibly paranoid, idea. And a popular one. We see something similar with the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We see an even closer version of this extraterrestrial mind-control computer in John A. Keel’s The Eighth Tower (1975), a book that Dick easily could have read. The “eighth tower” is Keel’s mythical way of referring to the machinelike origin-beacon of something he calls the superspectrum, an electromagnetic spectrum of physical and metaphysical energies that produces all the occult and paranormal phenomena found in folklore and the history of religions—from the angels and demons
of medieval lore to the Big Foot and UFOs of today. For Keel, this same technology also produces the “devil theories” of history, that is, the religious revelations that claim to be final truths when in fact they are no such thing. The result is endless wars. Unless we can stop being fooled by the signals of this superspectrum, violence and absurdity will continue. Keel is obviously performing a kind of thought experiment here of the most radical sort. So was Dick.—JJK
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* Just as the Exegesis responds to Dick’s calling, so readers of the Exegesis may be called on to investigate Dick’s claims, to test them through what B. Alan Wallace dubs “contemplative science.” This means that, along with Dick, we must be wary of treating our investigations as anything more than models of reality. The “Son” discussed elsewhere by Dick is born out of the “immaculate conception” of thought—the removal or emptying of previous thought formations. This path of contemplative science can be hard going—Dick asks us to consider the idea that our sense of historical ground does not exist, where nothing important has changed since ancient Rome. Humans suffer, are exploited by large-scale institutions, grow old, become ever more confused, and die. Buddhism describes this as Samsara, the “wheel of dharma.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra describes the repetition driving history as the most terrifying thought—the thought of eternal return—but Dick suggests that it is through practices of contemplation and exegesis that the real horror—the false perception of linear time—is overcome. This is not the Rapture predicted by fundamentalist Christianity, but the corrected perception of our nature as both human and eternal.—RD