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* In early November 1981, Dick made a difficult personal decision, choosing to stay in Fullerton to be near Tessa and Christopher rather than moving to the Bay Area to continue a relationship with a married woman. This decision is framed here in terms of biblical morality. 2-3-74, he says, transformed him into someone who could not continue down the path the relationship was leading him. Though elsewhere Dick is deeply concerned with free will’s absolute victory over determinism, he presents this as a decision made by God on his behalf, asserting that he really had no choice. Compare this with his statements on the assistance he gave to Covenant House, which he described as a “new act” not governed by normal rules of incentive or even causation. In any case, it’s clear that Dick believed that a pre-1974 PKD would have made a very different decision in this situation.—GM
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* The moral vision that ties all of Dick’s work together is rooted in the redemptive power of empathy. This emotional connection—the ability to experience the feelings, particularly the suffering, of others—counteracts the temptation to withdraw from the risk of loving others and into the safety of ourselves. When Dick’s characters struggle to determine what’s real, they ultimately have to rely on the people who care about them; stable reality in Dick’s work is always predicated on the sincerity of the emotions that pass between people. In his fiction, Dick famously asks two questions: what is real, and what is human? It could be said that his work provides a single, connected answer to both: what is real is what we perceive when we are emotionally engaged in the world, and what is human is what allows us to make an empathetic connection to the world. Tagore’s connection to the biosphere, in which the young boy takes on the suffering of the planet in the form of wounds that riddle his body, is a profoundly empathetic relationship. Similarly, when Dick learned that Anwar Sadat had been assassinated, he crushed a soda can and dragged the edge against his inner arm until he drew blood. For Dick, the reality of that moment involved pain, and truly connecting with that moment involved sharing the suffering.—DG
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* In this abridgement of the Exegesis, we have included all references to The Owl in Daylight, Dick’s last, unfinished project. What follows is his most extensive account of the novel’s plot elements. Characteristically, this material differs considerably from the account of Owl that Dick gave Gwen Lee and Doris Sauter in January 1982; that account draws considerably from folder 53, especially the entries beginning with [53:E-1].—PJ
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* This entry commences with a short burst of wild handwriting.—PJ
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† Dick is voicing a common theme in paranormal literature, particularly as it found expression in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, which he collected and adored. This literature in turn was deeply influenced by the American writer Charles Fort (1874–1932), who popularized any number of paranormal themes, including the phenomena of fish, periwinkles, nebulous biological matter, and rocks falling from the sky. Reflecting on such things, Fort speculated that we are like fish in an ethereal sea upon which a more advanced civilization is dropping crap. Later, the pulp fiction editor Ray Palmer (1910–1977), whose Amazing Stories magazine was a staple in the 1940s S-F world, posited something he called the “atmospherea,” basically an ether-like extension or “ocean” of the earth in which various occult critters and objects swim and fly, including those that came to be known in 1947 as “flying saucers.” Numerous writers have since identified the latter manifesting mysteries as extradimensional as opposed to extraterrestrial, much as Dick does here.—JJK
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* This is the ever-popular “ancient astronaut” or paleo-contact thesis, which reads the history of religions as a coded story about humanity’s interaction with extraterrestrials, which were mistaken within our mythologies as gods from the sky. There are multiple forms of this theory, some of which have us as biological hybrids intentionally created through primate-alien interbreeding (a theory that returned in a darker form in the 1980s through hypnosis-related abduction narratives and subsequent fears of an alien hybridization program). The origin of this complex of ideas is often attributed to Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), though in fact it had already existed for decades among various English, American, and French intellectuals, not to mention a whole host of occult groups. The public intellectual and science advocate Carl Sagan even voiced a version of the thesis as a thought experiment in 1966, speculating, for example, about an alien base on the far or dark side of the moon. Dick would have been very familiar with these ideas, as they were very much “in the air” in the 1970s.—JJK
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* A strictly materialist or historical understanding of the human being is not part of the solution. It is part of the problem. It is part of the trap. To make any real sense of our place in the cosmos and, more importantly still, to change that place, we must be open to genuine transcendence and the abolition of time through its conversion into space. Does this make any sense to our sense-based understanding and its three-dimensional categories? No. If it did, it would not lie outside these three dimensions, would it? In the end, then, Dick’s gnosis as expressed here is not an argument or a thesis. It is a revelation. And this, of course, is exactly what he claimed.—JJK
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* According to Henri Bergson, the discourse of the mystic “is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable.” Deep readers of the Exegesis will be tempted at times to arrest the flow by succumbing to the same impulse that Dick himself gives in to over and over: the impulse to declare, “This is it! This is the key to the Exegesis!” Well, here is my key: that inquiry—skeptical and speculative and interminable as the Exegesis (or life) itself—is truly divine.—ED
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* By its very nature, the Exegesis has no conclusion. And yet here, so close to the final pages Dick wrote, he hits upon a definitive truth of his experiences and their interpretation. Whatever the reigning theory of the moment, Dick is always concerned with deliverance, liberation, rescue. Whatever bonds might restrict the individual being—karma, astral determinism, sin, demiurgic imprisonment—Dick wants to see them broken and the being released into an absolute, ontological freedom. The Exegesis is a record of a human soul in search of salvation.—GM
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* Given its placement toward the close of the Exegesis, we cannot help but read this poetic condensation of Dick’s visionary experiences as a green flash on the horizon as the sun sinks down. Shorn of theory, of the need for theory, his words are reduced to the frog-plop haikus of barest memory, to “fish sign and light.” These glints return with an admission: Dick was not blasted with sci-fi laser pinkness after all, but simply a sunbeam that left a phosphene glow. Jacob Boehme was also illuminated, according to some accounts, by light bouncing off a pewter dish, and he is the most Dickian of mystics: a melancholic peasant-class cobbler who rode the dialectic into the divine abyss. He is pared here with a fiction, Mr. Tagomi. If Angel Archer is the greatest of Dick’s characters, Tagomi is the most singular. Toward the end of The Man in the High Castle, he sits down on a park bench to examine a small silver triangle that eventually “disgorges its spirit: light.” The jewelry’s “shimmering surface” gives Tagomi a brief glimpse of the real world—or our world anyway, the one outside the alternative history that enfolds him. And now, near the end he cannot see, Dick glimpses that light again, the quiver of gnosis from another (fictional) time that also shines, for a moment, into your eye. The medium is the message, but don’t try to figure it out. As Tagomi tells the dumb cop who interrupts his vision, it is “not a puzzle.”—ED
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* Given the central role that Di
ck’s dead twin Jane Charlotte Dick played in the novels of the 1960s and early 1970s, it is significant that she surfaces here through a miswriting, a slip of the pen that inscribes “sister” instead of “savior.” Dick interprets this as the “ultimate abolition” of his karma, a final erasure of his guilt over her death. (“Somehow I got all the milk,” he said of her inadvertent death as an infant through malnutrition.) Given his intense identification with Christ during this period, the slip also aligns her with Christ and consequently with Dick’s feeling that Christ is in him and, in a certain sense, is him. Hence the slip also signifies the “ultimate restoration of what was lost.”—NKH
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* Ultimately the value of the Exegesis lies not in its ideas but rather in the glimpse it provides into a creativity at once visionary and fractured, at once coming apart and striving heroically, in the only way a novelist can strive for such a thing, to keep himself together as a life nears its end in shambles, haunted by a dead twin sister whose own life was a month long, and defined by bouts of psychosis, a diorama of drugs, five marriages, suicide attempts, and financial destitution, real or imagined stalking by the FBI and IRS, literary rejection at its most stupid (which is to say destructive), and a Linda Ronstadt obsession. One takes the Exegesis seriously because one takes Dick seriously, not the other way around—because it’s his fiction that constitutes as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last sixty years, and because it’s his fiction that persuades us that Dick may be someone we remember who has yet to exist, writing books published around the time of the printing press, which was invented before the wheel and after voice-mail.—SE
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Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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