[back]
* * *
* For all its eccentricity, the Exegesis is ultimately a rational exercise: Dick develops a hypothesis, applies its framework to his experience, and examines how well the theory fits the facts of his experience (or at least his current shaping of those facts). Dick was never a writer of hard science fiction, and his stories don’t generally adhere to a strict standard of scientific plausibility. But here he applies a loose variation on the scientific method to explain and rationalize his experiences. In this respect, the Exegesis shows more “scientific” influence than Dick’s science fiction.—GM
[back]
* * *
* Here Dick offers what is perhaps the most striking rationale for his theorizing: the ability to formulate and conceptualize an experience so that the affect associated with the experience can be captured and re-evoked by meditating on the theory. Without doubt, a theory that does this would have utility for the person who evolved it; the question then is whether it would have the same or similar effect on people who did not have the original experience. I doubt that it would work this way for most people reading Dick’s theories. By contrast, his fiction, with its rich contexts, suggestive characterizations, and haunting themes, clearly has this kind of power. His theorizing is important, then, not so much on its own account as for the insight it gives into his creative processes and the deep unconscious motivations that drive his fiction.—NKH
[back]
* * *
* I feel Dick struggling to reassure himself that God is at once more and less rational than Dick himself—whichever prospect seems less threatening at the moment. Dick spent many years and books trying to figure out God, his clearest and most vivid take (and, perversely, maybe most hopeful) up until the Exegesis probably being the utilitarian divine spray-can of Ubik. But for all of Dick’s apparent attempts to reconcile a good god and a bad world, his creation of an altogether more malevolent alternate world—in which there persists not only the Roman Empire but its manifestation in the form of Richard Nixon, and in which God is doomed to be even more hapless and ineffectually benign—raises questions as to whether Dick really is looking for reconciliation or to expose a God who at least has failed us all, if not actually betrayed us. Or is He, as we’ve suspected all along, just not fully in charge?—SE
[back]
* * *
* The assertion that Dick’s last three novels, in many (important) ways so divergent, should be read as a “trilogy” is annoying, to me anyway. As novels, they simply don’t add up that way (nor is Divine Invasion at the level of the other two), yet the term sticks; here, Dick shows unmistakable investment in it himself. On the one hand, keep in mind that in the wake of Star Wars and Tolkien, what publishers called “Sci-Fi” briefly enjoyed a weird boom that made best-sellers out of some of the long-suffering writers Dick could view as peers—Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, and others—and that nearly all of their commercial hits were in the form of declared “trilogies” (even if some of those involved four or more books). Why not ride the unlikely gravy train? On the other hand, here was a mind more than a little prone to view things as interconnected. He’d begun to see his long shelf of earlier works forming a single tapestry of meaning. Shouldn’t these new ones braid together as well?—JL
[back]
* * *
* United Artists picked up an option for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in September 1973, netting Dick a check for $2,500. When it was announced that Ridley Scott would direct Harrison Ford in the $25 million movie, it was clear that Blade Runner, as it was to be titled, was designed to cash in on the success of Star Wars. Though Dick was skeptical of Hollywood, he was excited about the project, especially after seeing footage from the film. The movie’s backers wanted Dick to write a novelization of the film based on the screenplay, which differs markedly from his novel. Dick was promised a $50,000 advance as well as a large cut from all print tie-ins if he would rewrite the book to more closely resemble the movie. Though the deal might have earned Dick as much as $400,000, the contract also stipulated that the original version of his book be taken out of print. After much soul searching, Dick turned down the offer and instead accepted a $7,500 advance on the mainstream novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Sadly, both The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Blade Runner debuted after Dick’s death.—DG
[back]
* * *
* Here Dick confronts one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mysticism. On the one hand, some modern thinkers assert that mystical experience—here rendered in the language of the human potential movement as Maslow’s “peak experiences”—enables us to transcend conceptual thought and to directly glimpse reality as it is. In contrast, more skeptical voices insist that mystical experience is, like everything else, a construction; our groks are mediated by cultural expectations, conceptual filters (including linguistic signs), and the peculiarities imposed by the structures of human consciousness. Here Dick embraces this latter Kantian argument, but pushes it in the direction of more traditional claims of revelation. Peak experiences are not real in themselves, but neither are they simply projections or hiccups of the individual mind. Like everything else, experiences are signs. But through meta-abstraction, we can intuit them as a special kind of sign: an “ultra-real” (or hyper-real) sign that points, not back to our own language or neural hardwiring, but to an ineffable ground that eludes both words and “things.”—ED
[back]
* * *
* When Dick claims that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is his best novel, in and of itself the statement is meaningless because every writer wants to believe this about his most recent work. So it’s profoundly satisfying, in no small part because the book will prove to be his last novel as well, that one can make as compelling a case for Transmigration as for The Man in the High Castle or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Paradoxically, for all its theology and philosophical aspirations, and for all the visionary craziness of Dick’s work as a whole, Transmigration becomes a contender for his masterpiece even as it’s the most earthbound of his books. The reason is clear. Though Dick is fascinated at the outset with Bishop Timothy Archer, Angel Archer takes over. Over and over Dick argues that Angel is just a creation of style, which is why in a nutshell authors shouldn’t waste two seconds trying to understand their own books. Elsewhere he lets out the real secret and the Exegesis’s bombshell: that Angel is his twin sister Jane. Smart, sardonic, and unsentimental, strong and compassionate and unflaggingly honest, surrounded by death and suicide, she is Dick’s greatest character, pursuing salvation and reliving its revelations, and concluding, “You will remember the ground again.”—SE
[back]
* * *
* This is an impossibly rich passage in which the theme of eucharistic transubstantiation (the blood of Christ) is linked to Valis (the plasmate), a kind of human-divine hybridization (the interspecies symbiosis and cross-bonding), and the dual-brain Double God (Ditheon), all of which are in turn linked to the registers of sexual union (the hierogamy or “sacred marriage”) and, in true Phil Dickian style, the act of reading. Through these different registers Dick presents the hermeneutical acts of reading and interpreting the New Testament as an esoteric process of mystical union and erotic divinization.—JJK
[back]
* * *
* The radical interconnection Dick perceived between himself and the cosmos extended to the natural world—what I have elsewhere called the “ecodelic” insight that we are not separable from the biosphere in which we live. In this sense, 2-3-74 enabled Dick to look beyond the illusion of our separation from each other and the biosphere. This revelation was anything but comfortable. Ordinary consciousness is essentially predicated on this separation; when it becomes palpably false, ecstasy and panic can follow in equal measure. Even as Dick was beginning to experience a modicum of financial success, his insight into our interconnection had much greater impact on him than
his growing income, so much so that he feared for his health.—RD
[back]
* * *
* Here Dick extends his ecodelic insight to the population of the planet, whose spiritual and ecological destinies have now become one. This “leverage,” however, must be recognized and experienced if it is to have any effect. The years since Dick penned this line have been a mixture of recognition and denial. Is it still possible to tune in to Valis’s ecodelic frequency? Might we receive the Valis transmission today?—RD
[back]
* * *
* The mind-body split here allows the formulation of two seemingly distinct entities (mind on the one hand, body on the other) to be worked into an analogy of humans as mind, ecosphere as body. Thus the poisoning of the ecosphere becomes the mind poisoning the body, without which it too will perish. Dick realizes, on the contrary, that mind and body are an indivisible whole. It therefore follows that the poisoning of the ecosphere means that it is his body being wounded by the activity of other humans, a conclusion consistent with his view of himself as an avatar or surrogate of Christ. The connections here are implicit rather than explicit, but they help to explain why he sees the “investiture by Christ” as the crucial element in seeing the ecosystem as sacred.—NKH
[back]
* * *
* This notion of reversing signs and reading backward comes remarkably close to the position of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), a German philosopher who helped found the modern study of religion by pioneering its central theory of projection, that is, the notion that all statements about the deity or the transcendent are in fact statements about human nature and its needs, wishes, and fears. In his The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach performs reversals and backward readings very similar to those Dick calls on here, reading, for example, the biblical notions that “God created man in his own image” as “man created God in his own image,” or “God is love” as “love is God,” and so on. Whereas the later Feuerbach was certainly an atheist and a materialist, it is not so clear that the early Feuerbach was. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Feuerbach can be read as a modern Gnostic thinker who sought to reverse and reduce orthodox claims back to their original base in human nature, which he, paradoxically, considered to be infinite and divine. So the divine projection is “reduced” to its projector, who is secretly divine.—JJK
[back]
* * *
* There is no way to overestimate or repeat enough this exegetical fact: for Dick, writing and reading are the privileged modes of the mystical life. Writing and reading are his spiritual practices. His is a mysticism of language, of Logos, of the text-as-transmission, of the S-F novel as coded Gnostic scripture. The words on the page, on his late pages at least, are not just words. They are linguistic transforms of his own experience of Valis. They are mercurial, shimmering revelations. They are alive. And—weirdest of all—they can be “transplanted” into other human beings, that is, into you and me via the mystical event of reading. Here, in this most stunning of Dick’s notions, the cheap S-F novel becomes a Gnostic gospel, words become viral, reading a kind of mutation, and the reader a sort of symbiote.—JJK
[back]
* * *
* Another “defeat is victory” paradox. Though Dick does not seem to have made the connection himself, these statements are reflective of Martin Luther’s “theology of the cross”—the idea that God conceals his glory within the humiliation of the crucifixion. Compare Luther’s notion with, for example, Dick’s earlier statement in the Exegesis that the deity “will be where least expected and as least expected” ([16:14]). Here there is an added level of complication, with the evil in which good hides itself pretending to be good: a classic example of the Dickian “fake fake.”—GM
[back]
* * *
* Does the divine camouflage itself to allow us our freedom? Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit articulates the epic quest of self-knowledge through the lens of German Idealist philosophy, scolded readers and told them to go back to the Greek Mysteries if they fell prey to the world’s ultimate camouflage: “the truth and certainty of the reality of objects of sense.” For those who believe that everything simply is as it seems, Hegel recommends that they “be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learnt the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.” This scolding, too, just might be an act of agape, as Hegel points to the same sacred site as Dick: Eleusis, where the quarry, again, would seem to be prior thought formations that must be destroyed. The Exegesis asks us to look beyond the camouflage of everyday reality toward the One—“the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.”—RD
[back]
* * *
* This quotation is from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion (1958), an important overview of Gnosticism that shows the force and persistence of the idea of enlightenment by a ray of divine light. For Jonas, this direct contact with the divine divinizes the soul in turn and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely, the view that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally, but requires the divine illumination reserved for the few. In the epilogue, Jonas shows how postwar existential philosophy and particularly the work of Heidegger can be seen as the modern transposition of this Gnostic teaching. Here the world is no longer the creation of a malevolent God, but simply the series of phenomenal events that are causally explained by natural science. Of course, these explanations don’t solve the problem of nihilism; they shift and deepen it, leading the modern self to oppose itself to an indifferent or hostile nature and to try to secure for itself a space for authentic freedom. For Jonas, although Gnosticism embodies a powerful temptation for a soul thirsty for God in the desert of the world, it is a temptation that must be refused. For Dick, things are not so clear.—SC
[back]
* * *
* Novelists have always wrestled with the great Selling Out to Hollywood Moral Dilemma, but I’m not sure any have ever escalated (or plunged) it to such a metaphysical (or hysterical) paroxysm. These passages are also at odds with claims made by others that Dick told director Ridley Scott the movie was exactly the way he imagined the novel; clearly he had other feelings. For better or worse, however, there’s no underestimating the impact of Blade Runner, not merely on the public recognition of Dick but also on the perception of his writing. The movie gave a visual identity to work that never was especially imagistic (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said comes closer visually to Blade Runner than does Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Even for those readers who were familiar with Dick’s work before the film, recollection of his books now takes a visual form that is equal parts Dick’s imagination and Scott’s advertising background in London. In a way that, of all people, Dick might understand—that what’s perceived is a collaboration between who has created it and who has perceived it—Dick himself has become a collaborated invention. All that said, and his histrionics aside, props to Dick for the artistic integrity and courage to resist Hollywood’s efforts to usurp the original novel and re-“novelize” it.—SE
[back]
* * *
* Picking up again on the theme of tragedy, here Dick discusses Hamlet in terms of the duality between the usurper king (Claudius) and the true king (Hamlet himself, both the murdered father and the mourning son, who share the same name), who is “mad” and a fool. It is not difficult to imagine some identification between the character of Hamlet and Dick himself; after all, “mad” Hamlet declares that the world is a prison (act 2, scene 2). And the idea of a usurper on the throne is consistent with the Gnostic bent of Dick’s worldview, where the false king of Empire has marginalized the true king through an act of murder. Dick identifies a similar dualism in the opposition between Pentheus (the illegitimate king) and Dionysos (the true king) in Euri
pides’ The Bacchae.—SC
[back]
* * *
* The very fact of Dick’s obsession with forming this overview of his work is noteworthy: though I question whether it’s healthy—there’s a point beyond which a novelist is better off not thinking too much about what he’s doing or why—in retrospect it’s astonishingly prescient; we know that in a few months Dick will be dead. Did he sense it as well? Is the pell-mell urgency of the Exegesis driven not only by madness or revelation (whichever you believe) but by a ticking of the universe’s clock in his ears? The ego behind all this is off the charts and accounts for how Dick can formulate a cosmic view that places himself at the center; without it, however, we probably wouldn’t have Flow My Tears, Scanner Darkly, or Transmigration, never mind the Exegesis (which was more crucial to its author than to the reader). So the flip side of what must seem megalomania to a reasonable person is the audacity on which nothing less than artistic survival depends, the defiant assertion that, in the face of his own obscurity, in the course of a life during which the Library of America hadn’t yet found the foresight or cultural imagination to acclaim him (and wouldn’t for another quarter-century), he mattered.—SE