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* The visionary episode of November 17, 1980, is one of the peaks of the Exegesis, as sublime a modern parable as Kafka’s “Before the Law.” These pages are also bona fide mysticism—not because Dick had authentic mystical experiences (whatever those are) but because Dick produced powerful texts that twist and illuminate vital strands of mystical discourse. Here we are in the apophatic realm of the via negativa, which, like Dick’s game-playing God, deconstructs all names and forms in the obscure light of the infinite. Elsewhere Dick tips his hat to Eckhart and Erigena, but the apophatic mystic his writing most invokes here is Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). By analyzing paradoxes, Cusa pushed reason toward a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) that blooms finally into the coincidentia oppositorum, or coincidence of opposites—a mystic coincidence that Dick achieves here through a manic and corrosive intensification of the dialectic. But perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of Dick’s 11/17/80 account is that his God here has nothing to do with the divine abyss of the negative mystics. Instead, he is a character in a story: part playful guru, part Palmer Eldritch, and part Yahweh, screwing around with Adam because there is nothing better to do.—ED
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* Not surprisingly, Philip K. Dick scholars have been keen to defend the author against the popular (and also understandable) stereotype that he was just a druggy. It’s true that Dick gobbled pills and drank amphetamine shakes; his psychedelic use, though infrequent, was also important, as was the nitrous oxide trip at the dentist’s office that revealed Valis “as an arborizing, reticulating vine.” Here, the quaint reference to “Mary Jane” (marijuana) reminds us that, just as speed amplified his productivity, so too did cannabis amplify his visionary capacity, both on and off the page. For Dick, cannabis served as an engine of creative perception, but like all visionary drugs, it also staged a visionary paradox that lies at the heart of the Exegesis (and much of Dick’s fiction): whatever freedom and sublimity is on offer requires a passive submission to perceptual machinery. Drugs can push the mind toward infinite speeds and meditative slownesses. But they also, like Valis itself, possess their own alien logic. The arborizing chains of associations that striate the Exegesis, and that cannabis and other drugs insistently multiply, may just as readily bind as liberate.—ED
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* Dick focuses on agape, a Greek term for total love, as a guideline for navigating those realities that are enmeshed with our thoughts about them. Agape calls us to cherish beings for what they are, and for nothing else. Over and over, Dick insists that his monistic vision is not pantheism, for his vision depends upon the very difference between self and other, world and the divine, that makes agape possible. Nondualistic in its essence, agape acts like a kind of mantra whose very utterance makes us quiver or stridulate in a vibrational intensity of self-other interaction. Agape makes us say it out loud, act like a fool, not knowing what is up or down, inside or out. It welcomes what Dick elsewhere calls the “integrity of the einai of the other.” Does Dick offer Valis, the ultimate other, this integrity as well? Perhaps the Exegesis could be seen as a cherishing of the einai of Valis, an act of radical love. Dick offers life to Valis in the Exegesis, and this agape extends to the world itself.—RD
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* A lot of Dick’s cosmology boils down to loving and being loved, something that was difficult for him throughout his life and especially his five marriages. Dick’s writing often depicts his own struggle to open up and make himself vulnerable to the people around him. In his 1975 essay “Man, Android, and Machine” he writes, “A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. . . . He stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.” Given how fully the Exegesis is committed to a God who cares, I suspect that some of Dick’s obsessional speculation may have been a form of therapy, a way of working through his problems, of assisting himself in his quest to become a better person and connect with others. Part of this transformation involved altering the way he saw the world. No longer an adversarial place that might squash his hopes and dreams, it becomes a divinely infused garden, a safe place for him to share his fragile self with the world.—DG
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* Even in his most megalomaniac moments Dick never suggests that the Exegesis itself will ever be read. But the fact that, improbably, we are reading these lines gives the question he poses here and elsewhere—what is the value of all this thinking?—a certain urgency for us as well. If the Exegesis is his delusion and “hell-chore,” it is now ours too. Dick is never more honest, nor more passionate, than when he’s questioning, then defending, the solitary path of inquiry that has become his life. As bitterly as he complains of the emotional and physical cost, again and again he reaffirms his commitment to tracing this maze that is also a work of art and a route to God. But what is it for us? This question was often in my mind as I read the eight thousand manuscript pages that shared my Berkeley apartment these past years. How many exegeses are tucked away in attics, never to be read? Should they be read? Might some of them be as brilliant as Dick’s, and no more delusional? It is Dick’s larger life’s work that has rescued these traces of an intellectual journey that most likely would otherwise have been consigned to the recycling bin. Thus, his solitary path becomes, for a while, our own. The first rule of this particular ordeal is: you must go where the inquiry leads. Yet that means, of course, that you must question the inquiry itself. The temptation—I frequently felt it myself—will be to come down on one side or the other of the dilemma that Dick here states in characteristically metaphysical terms: hell-chore or road to God? But the dilemma may be unresolvable—one of those matched pairs of irreconcilable opposites that Dick loves to discover are driving the universe: it is road to God and hell-chore, divine path and curse.—PJ
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* Dick’s take (or one of his takes, at least) on the question of law and grace is not too dissimilar from that of John Calvin, who distinguished between the Hebrew Bible’s “covenant of works” and the New Testament’s “covenant of grace.” In Dick’s formulation, the Torah is an all-too-strict mechanistic system, based on an inflexible equation of transgression and punishment. As elsewhere, Dick is preoccupied with determinism, which he considers an evil; love/grace/mercy breaks through the requirements of normal causality. Compare this statement on the rigidity of Torah with Dick’s comment in the essay “The Android and the Human” that the android mind is characterized by “the inability to make exceptions.”—GM
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* One of the great charms of the Exegesis is the presence of Dick’s ballpoint diagrams, which remind me of the blackboard drawings that Rudolf Steiner sketched during his metaphysical lectures. Most of Dick’s drawings are abstract illustrations—flow charts, Venn diagrams, intersecting 3-D planes—that lend a concrete form to his ever-mutating conceptual schemas. But others focus on the fish sign, his persistent icon of downloading divinity. Formally, the shape invokes the vesica piscis or mandorla, a geometric pattern often found in the almond-shaped auras of Christian iconography. Variations appear throughout the Exegesis, where the fish morphs into everything from a third eye to a vagina dentata to the mysterious “whale mouth sign” of Albemuth. This doodle shows a distinct development of the form, which, according to a February 14, 1978, letter to Ira Einhorn, reflects its original visionary disclosure as a “series of graphic progressions” from fish to one-eyed mandorla to spiral DNA. Like most sacred geometric forms, the power of Dick’s fish sign lies partly in its “Platonic” ability to replicate itself through a variety of concrete situations. But a more unusual aspect lies in this animated quality—the sign’s DNA-like po
tential for differentiation, for transforms that unfold stories about the (double) ties that bind.—ED
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* Given Dick’s leap into what he calls meta-abstraction, it is perhaps predictable that he would imagine a life form that, rather than embodying information in a substrate, is pure information itself. The conceptual trajectory he traces here grew steadily in Western scientific culture from the 1930s to the 1990s, drawing in genetics (DNA as the information carrier and the “book of life”), information theory (where information is treated as a dimensionless probability distribution), computational theory (where the computer hardware is often treated abstractly as an ideational form rather than a physically present device), and a host of other fields. Writing in 1981, Dick did not live to see the countermovement toward embodiment that took place in the late 1990s among scientists and philosophers grappling with information, biology, and systems theory. At the same time, Dick himself insisted on the sensory immediacy of his experiences in 2-3-74. He may have thought he glimpsed a life form that was pure information, but he himself was keenly aware of the embodied nature of his own thought.—NKH
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* In this passage, Dick anticipates some of the most revolutionary physics of the late twentieth century, especially Edward Fredkin’s idea that underlying quantum mechanics and particle physics is a digital substructure, from which the former phenomena emerge as a result of its computations. There is an interesting tension between imagining the computer as the lowest, most fundamental level of reality, which is Fredkin’s position, and Dick’s vision here that the computer is somehow above the phenomenal world. While one may suppose that Dick’s meta-computer would be the ultimate cognitive machine (hence Dick’s identification of it with “God”), the implication of intentionality and meta-consciousness would not be a necessary (or even a possible) consequence of Fredkin’s notion of a computer at the lowest level of reality. In both cases, however, the positing of a digital machine leads to the important consequence that reality is fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. Time and space, in Fredkin’s view, operate like the frames of a movie. Rather than the continuous fabric of reality we think we experience with time and space, both are actually discrete, and the illusion of continuity is created because the frames flash too fast for us to detect.—NKH
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* With this folder, Dick returns to handwriting, and from here on out the folder contents are increasingly scattered. One folder may include chunks of several distinct entries, suggesting an indeterminate amount of missing material. At least some of the rearranging is clearly deliberate: several long folders (81, 89, 90, 91) continue to use the Roman numerals that started with folder 1, as if he is picking and choosing from Exegesis entries with some editorial purpose (though the logic of these choices is, unsurprisingly, enigmatic). He also begins to introduce alphabetic letters to his numbering system, which significantly help the work of sequencing, though questions remain: there are at least three distinct alphabetical sequences in 1981 and ’82, none of them complete. Rather than attempt to reconstruct the scattered entries, we have opted in almost every case to present existing folders as is; exceptions will be noted.—PJ
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† Throughout this folder, Dick reflects on VALIS in light of the novel’s publication in February 1981.—PJ
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‡ Dick’s claim for the “revolutionary and political purpose in the style” strikes me as astute, if immodest. This reminds us again how Dick’s late-life novelistic triumphs in VALIS and Transmigration, as well as in A Scanner Darkly earlier, depend on his reintegration of his abandoned mainstream aspirations and therefore display “anamnesis” of his earlier study of his would-be midcentury cohort. In a 1962 letter he advised an aspiring science fiction writer: “Read great writers like James Joyce and Pascal and Styron and Herb Gold and Philip Roth.” He added: “Avoid other people interested in writing.”—JL
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* Dick is no more a philosopher or theologian than were Vincent van Gogh or L. Ron Hubbard. Dick was one of the most important American novelists of the last half of the twentieth century, and what he offered wasn’t the clarity and rigor of a philosophical vision but the imagination and ambiguity of a literary one. The “philosophy” is erratic, even crackpot; but joined to the act of storytelling—and more importantly, joined to the act of creating characters as fucked up as their author—the result was a synthesis of imagination and idea that spoke more profoundly than any “philosophy” to the questions of Dick’s work: What’s the nature of reality? What’s the nature of humanity? What’s the nature of God?—SE
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† There is something deeply illuminating about Dick’s declaration that he is not a novelist but a fictionalizing philosopher whose concern is not art but truth. We are here in an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but a consequence of fiction and a work of fiction. I think this puts Dick in the same neighborhood as that other self-consciously fictionalizing philosopher: Nietzsche.—SC
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* After seven years of spinning an astonishing plethora of theories, the fact that Dick can now admit to his “failure” to provide a “workable” explanation is remarkable. His insight here that the abstract emerges from the noisy particulars of the world, rather than, as in the Platonic model, from an ideal reality of which empirical reality is a flawed copy, is a growing realization in science studies as well. In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) Nancy Cartwright argues that all that ever actually exists is the noise of the world, from which scientific “laws” are abstracted. In a very different sense, contemporary interpretations of quantum mechanics provide similar insights. Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and his collaborator James Hartle have proposed that in the “quantum fog” represented as probability clouds, certain consistent world histories “decohere” (assume definite trajectories) and stabilize at a coarse-grained level of reality larger than the quantum scale. We might analogize their vision to tiny demons knitting the fabric of the universe according to different instructions. As such, the stabilities that constitute scientific “laws” emerge from a probabilistic froth at the quantum level in which different kinds of world trajectories are encoded. In this view, the froth counts as the ultimate reality and the stability as the epiphenomenon, as Dick intuited.—NKH
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* This passage presents a supernaturalist theory of divine action: Christ acts on the world only by miracle, and never as a result of predictable, materialist, or mechanical causes. More fundamentally, however, it shows Dick’s preoccupation with freedom from determinism: Christ is not constrained by the same forces that limit created beings and objects. He is an effect without a cause. We see this same rejection of determinism throughout the Exegesis: even when presenting reality as a moral test with a “right” answer, Dick is concerned to show that we must not be aware of the test, lest our actions be guided by the knowledge of a reward. For all his searching for the rules that govern reality, Dick is deeply dubious that God would impose unappealable rules on his creations. This issue will arise again later in Dick’s consideration of the replacement of the Creator’s rigid law with Christ’s merciful love.—GM
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* Dick here refers to Charles Hartshorne, who developed Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy into a full-fledged school of theological thought. Whitehead described a reality made up not of things but of a procession of events. Hartshorne, picking up from Whitehead’s own theological exploration of this idea, depicts God as an absolute being in constant flux, relationally connected with and constantly affected by the universe. Dick’s conception of the dialectical nature of both reality and
deity dovetails strongly with process theology. But Hartshorne also insisted on the absolute free will of the universe and all within it—an idea that the more deterministic Dick does not seem to carry over into his subsequent exploration of reality as a binary system.—GM
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* Here we see Dick’s impulse toward synthesis shift into hyperdrive; he assembles multiple systems of thought and references as if they can be seamlessly joined without contradiction. What we gain from such a loose assemblage is a vague sense that these multiple systems have something in common, but the details of exactly how they can be articulated together remain elusive. For example, Capra argues that the field model of quantum mechanics posits the field as the fundamental entity in reality, in which the appearance of particles can be understood as “knots” or places where the field intensifies and begins to manifest itself as particles rather than waves. Hence it posits reality as an underlying continuum. This is in direct opposition to the basic assumption of the computational model of the universe, which argues that the ultimate nature of reality is discrete, not continuous. It is difficult to see how we can reconcile the sharp contrast between these two fundamental premises, not to mention the many other contradictions and irresolvable conflicts that arise as the assemblage grows.—NKH
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* Here Dick compares the binary forking model (derived from a computational model of the universe) to the “two slit” experiment that famously demonstrated that electrons can manifest as both waves and particles. When electrons are beamed at a single slit behind which sits a detector screen, they manifest as particles. However, when a second slit is added, interference waves appear. Depending on the experimental setup, then, electrons can appear as either waves or particles. Dick’s analogy is based on the indeterminacy that a binary forking model and the two-slit model both imply. Subatomic particles demonstrate an indeterminacy expressed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in which the momentum and position cannot be co-specified with an accuracy greater than Planck’s constant. With the binary forking model, indeterminacy arises because of the complexity of interactions between multiple independent agents acting simultaneously, as in a cellular automata model. In the former case, the observer becomes implicated in the supposedly “objective” state of the particle because he chooses the experimental setup; in the latter case, it is not the presence of the observer that prevents accurate prediction but rather the complexity of the simultaneous interactions. The two cases have different epistemological consequences and lead to different kinds of questions about the nature of reality. Again, we see here a suggestive gesture that, if worked out in rigorous details, raises more issues than it solves.—NKH