The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  In which case I am more truly myself now than at any other time since the accident. Which may well be. I am myself—in this, the best of all possible worlds. It’s heredity, so to speak, over environment. The stars and my innate character triumphed.*

  Which explains why I still can’t spell. It is not in my nature.

  Whatever all this is, I brought it on. I had been doing months of re search on recent discoveries about brain function, especially the exciting news that we have two hemispheres and use only one, the left one. They say that’s where procedural thoughts such as doing math and thinking inductive and deductive logical processes take place; the other hemisphere, which people in Asia use instead, does simultaneous work, such as gestalting of a picture, intuitive and even ESP functioning. Whatever it comprehends it comprehends in a single pattern and then passes on to the next, without there being a sequential or causal relationship between the apprehended and evaluated matrices, which I guess fly by like the frame freeze pictures on TV in the Heinz 57 Variety ad. I had read that massive doses of certain water-soluble vitamins improve neural firing in schizophrenics: better synchronization and so forth. It occurred to me that maybe in a normal person with normal, which is to say, average synchronization, it might cause firing to take place so efficiently that both hemispheres of the brain might come on together. So I found a recipe in a Psychology Today article and I did it. I took what they prescribe schizophrenics.

  In terms of my own personal life what happened made history, and I’m sure—off and on, anyhow—that whatever happened then and from then on has to do with my getting what I set out to get: such improved neural firing that both hemispheres came on together, for the first time in my life. It is the contents that puzzle me, not what happened in the biochemical or physiological or even psychological sense. Even allowing for the obvious fact that since my personality must have formed in the left hemisphere alone when whatever happens in the right would be subjectively experienced as the Not-I, or lying outside of my self-system and therefore not me and not my thoughts, I still can’t for instance understand why when I begin to fall asleep my thoughts switch from English to Greek, a language I don’t know.

  All my thoughts and experiences, focusing mainly in dreams, seem to constellate around the Hellenistic Period, with accretions one would expect from previous cultures. The best way to describe it is to say at night my mind is full of the thoughts, ideas, words and concepts that you’d expect to find in a highly educated Greek-speaking scholar of the 3rd century A.D., at the latest, living somewhere in the Mediterranean Area of the Roman Empire. His daytime thoughts, I mean. Not what he’d dream while asleep.

  Perhaps this is another Bridey Murphy.7 I’ve brought back to being active a personality “from a former life.” Undoubtedly, from internal evidence it appears to be the past, the archaic past, breaking through. But it’s not chaotic. It’s highly systemized, sort of like the left hemisphere of the Greek-speaking Roman citizen. It seemed to me that the preoccupations of this individual were indeed those of Jim Pike, and thus if you allow all prior steps in this chain of inferential thought to stand, you arrive logically at the final step that Jim Pike broke through to me “from the other side.” But, if you apply Occam’s Razor, the Principle of Parsimony (the smallest theory to cover the facts), you can deal Jim out and run with the ancient material alone. Except that obviously it’s organized as if by a living, idiosyncratic personality, which I often sense behind it. This personality, glimpsed by me as being a woman, holds up the book to me or mails it to me, etc. She likes me. She wants to guide, educate and help me. Evidently she’s exposing me to all this enlightening and ennobling written material deliberately, to make me into a higher life form, or anyhow, a better person. Up until now my higher education has been sadly neglected; she is making up for that, using very effective show-and-tell audio-video teaching techniques. I have the feeling that for every word or photo I consciously catch and remember there are thousands of yards of it poured into me that I do not consciously remember. They take hold anyhow, as witness my busy intellectual research—homework, if you wish—the next day.

  After one dream, in which I saw a sibyl who was a cyclops, I decided after doing research that it was the Cumaean sibyl who had seized hold of me, and not anyone from present times or the “other side.” I got a lot of mileage out of that theory, but then I get a lot out of each theory I hold.

  Treating this as a detective mystery thing which I have to solve on the basis of the clues, I am struck most by the amount of medical information and advice given me in these dreams. Health, mine, both physical and psychological, seems to be a high priority in this ceaseless nightly didactic print-out. The first written item held up to me, in fact, a baby’s cereal box with writing on it, contained medical information, among other things, although that was not first.

  The first was my ex-wife Nancy’s handwriting. Then in printing, very small, this: “The bichlorides are a very poisonous poison for you,” and it went on, dribbling off though, to say I ought to flush down every metallic toxin in the house: Sleep-Eze and spray can sprays with traces of metal in them.

  This is very much like Ubik, in which Ubik the force, the deity, the underlying entity bringing on and stabilizing eidos, form, is seen as a spray can—in fact, the label of a spray can.

  This is too close to be coincidence. My first written material was a label on a cereal box about a spray can. A main difference, though, is that my info-dump told me the spray can was bad; whereas Ubik of course was good. The absolute good of the universe.

  Anyhow I rose up in the night and threw out my Sleep-Eze and many spray cans including in particular insect sprays, and after that I wouldn’t let my wife smoke. Now we learn that the carcinomic factor in cigarette smoke is radioactive lead—a metal poison. So this information, however bizarre, from whatever source, has a definite therapeutic quality and accuracy. When I withdrew all my psychological projections and became sophisticated I experienced the universe as being drawn through infinity and winding up backward. Maybe when I did that I not only wound up in my own book I even turned the book backward. Turned Ubik inside out too. This causes me to think up, sui generis, another theory.

  (1) I, consciously, don’t write my novels.

  (2) Therefore a part of my unconscious does.

  (3) Novels are composed of words.

  (4) Taking all the water-soluble vitamins causes my neural firing to so improve generally that what had been below the threshold of consciousness was raised up to consciousness, anyhow at night.

  (5) That portion, active and more highly potentiated than before, and unusually endowed with verbal skills, in particular written verbal skills, rattles away at me visibly as soon as I shut my eyes; it is, so to speak, writing a book while I’m asleep.

  What the water-soluble vitamins did, then, was to make it possible for me to get in touch with myself, which when most people do that they get in touch with repressed material in the unconscious, usually their real feelings, all of it inchoate as the unconscious has to be in order to stay unconscious. But my unconscious has a predilection toward esoteric, exotic and archaic words—exact and precise ones at that. Much of the printed material I see in my dreams has elaborate annotation in scrawly blue pen or pencil in the margins. Someone has been copyediting it, cutting out unnecessary words. My book-writing unconscious has a concise style. As one would expect from over 23 years of professional work, cutting and pruning, looking up words in the dictionary. I have so to speak a real pro for an unconscious. It’s a fine style but it isn’t mine. I’d never write “a very poisonous poison,” or, as it expressed a vital thought in my sleep once by saying, “She will see the sea.” It makes an exact point with no regard for literary style, a higher method of expression with the intent to convey its meaning above all. Therefore it resorts to such strikingly enigmatic words as “syntonic,” if that is what it means; no other will do and it doesn’t seem to care whether I know the meaning of the word or not; if I don?
??t then I can just look it up. That’s my—the audience’s—problem. One thing about it: my wordsmith unconscious doesn’t talk down to me. On the contrary; I have to hustle every day to catch up with it.*

  Partly this must come from the fact that it has available to it my complete and entire memory, every word, every thought, everything I ever saw, read, heard, knew. My conscious memory—my conscious vocabulary—is only the tip of the iceberg. And yet it seems highly structured; obsessed in fact by the theological disputations and dogmas and highly abstract and abstruse concepts and theories of Rome. As Robert Graves once said, “Theological dispute was the disease of that age,” meaning that everyone in the streets was obsessed by it and had to talk about it endlessly—as my unconscious does. My unconscious is fixated in the Roman period, and that strikes me as strange. How did it get there in the first place? And being there, why does it remain?

  Once I myself was consciously deliberately interested in that period; I was in my early twenties, and read about it a lot, at the expense of being a rounded person. But my unconscious for all its obsessions with the theoretical material of that period is hard-headed and shrewd, and wants everything it comes up with applied in the most practical way. If it shows me the Golden Rectangle it does so in order to calm me with that ultimate esthetically balanced sight; it has a firm therapeutic purpose. There is a utilization of all its abstract material for genuine purposes, for me, by and large. It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander, which makes me wonder why it is grooming and shaping me this way, tutoring me in the exact fashion employed by the Greeks. Philosophy for real ends, for final causes, as Aristotle would have put it: for something lying ahead and not as an idle pastime, an end in itself. The ennobling and elevating education is altering me and I would presume that when it is finished I, having become changed (to resort to the Ablative Absolute), will act upon the improved character which I’ve acquired—not on the knowledge direct, as if on enlarged memory banks, but upon the basis of my matured and elevated character. I know this whole process sees ahead because I have caught sight of its clear perception down the web of time, seen with it for a while; it knows what is ahead and acts accordingly. I’m sure it has a final purpose in mind, for which this is careful preparation. This recalls to me my notion that the Cumaean sibyl is behind it all; certainly she had or has a clear view of the future, of time; that is what a sibyl is.*

  Following basic Greek thought it is improving my mind and body together, as a unity. Health is equated—correctly so—with vigor and the capacity to act. All its concepts, its viewpoints, are Greek. Symmetry, balanced, harmony. I sense Apollo in this, which is consistent, since the Cumaean sibyl was his oracle. Moderation, reasonability and balance are Apollo’s virtues, the clear-headed, the rational. Syntonos, or whatever. Pythagorean harmoniousness. A reconciling of all impulses and tendencies within, then turning to the outer world once that is achieved and becoming syntonic with it as well. I’m getting a classical education. Greek, a little Latin, knowledge of Sanskrit, theology and philosophy and the Ionian Greeks’ various views of the cosmos. Very unusual to get this here in Southern California. All very sane and steady. The most worthy, the highest virtues and values in the history of our civilization.

  How did they happen to arise within me? For instance, it pointed out that my ananke—the compulsion or fate lying ahead of me—is a darkening, a gathering gloom, which is a good description of my underlying melancholia. Against which I pit my learned syntonos. Cultivation against innate predispositions: a basic struggle in life, and well elucidated by my unconscious. How did it know these two terms and was able to define them for me? I didn’t know. I never knew. This is material emanating from a wise viewpoint which I never possessed. This was not me, although it is becom ing me; or rather, to be more accurate, it is shaping me so that I am becoming it. Meeting its standards, its ideals. Which are Apollonian Greece’s from over two thousand years ago: from its Golden Age. Our Golden Age.

  Now, this really does not rule out Jim Pike as my Athenian or Hellenistic tutor. Jim had, I’m certain, that kind of classical education. Greek, Latin, Roman theology and so forth. The disputations of St. Paul, St. John, the Logos Doctrine, what Augustine knew. Also, Jim was—is—shrewd; he’d apply, did apply in his life, all this classical education. He is the only person I ever knew, in fact, with such a background. If Jim were to become my tutor this I really think, all this that I’m being taught, that my attention is being drawn to, would be precisely what he would get me involved with. The reading list I’m getting is one he would give. This is Jim’s mind I’m getting, not so much his personality. Its directed—expertly directed—contents. It has me drink beer instead of wine because beer is more healthy for me and I should drink a little something to relax me; there’s an example. That’s directed tutoring. This is not an inert computer, whose keyboard I myself punch according to my own whim and volition.

  The one odd dream that I had, in which I picked up most distant, the smallest, weakest signal—from a star, star-information, sidereal . . . what I heard seemed to resemble, as an analog, an AI System, not a computer, and female in tone. Reasonable and female. This was a small system, though; it knew almost nothing, not even where it was (the “Portuguese States of America,” it decided, when I suggested it look around for something written to read from, like the address on an envelope). This was a subsystem and not my tutor, but its response told me that nowhere in our world would I find the sending entity which had begun impinging on me in the form of a highly abstract and highly balanced (like the Golden Rectangle) graphics back in March. Not so much what it told me in a positive sense—where it was—but by ruling out where it is not: that helped. It isn’t here, which means here in time, space, dimension, any of the coordinates.

  The past, then. Or the future. Another star. An alternate world. “The other side.” They’re all “the other side” in some way. For instance, it made me aware of God from the very start, but never of Christ; I deduce from this that it is non-Christian and probably pre-Christian. Actually I can’t catch in it any influences since the Greek Logos Doctrine. Which could be Iranian. India to Iran to Greece and then possibly (but not necessarily) to Rome. One night I had a short bitter dream in which I cried out in despair, “Ich hab’ kein Retter,” I have no Savior. Then in fear at having said that I added, “Ja, Ja, es gibt ein Retter,”8 but it was too late; the whole Ground of Being, everything around me, dwindled away and was gone; I floundered in the void, suffering. I think this was an awareness that for all its value, this new worldview being dominant in me and taking over from the old one would deprive me, perhaps forever, of Jesus Christ. I guess this is true. It’s a dreadful loss, but I can’t stop it; what can the pupil do in the hands of such a tutor? Unfortunately, though, a tutor who—well, lived before Christ and hence could not have known of Him? But Jim knew of Christ. Perhaps then I have worked the logical steps, deducing and deducting to prove that my tutor existed before the time of Christ, or if a bit later did not know of, or if knowing did not accept. Time and knowledge have been rolled back, for better or worse. Mostly it is better . . . except in this one conspicuous way. I miss my savior.

  So my “unconscious,” which I’ve claimed this tutor to be, has available to it “my entire memory,” except everything pertaining to events and concepts that arose after 100 A.D. That is an extraordinarily great restriction. Obviously, that is not in any sense that we know the term “my unconscious,” laid down in my lifetime; it knows words, concepts, that I never knew—and doesn’t know the commonplace elements of the last 2,000 years. Its location is far back in time. And another climate; I keep sensing—and craving—a moist, cool, high-altitude environment, where I can watch the stars.

  I remember that when this first hit me, in the first couple of weeks, I was absolutely convinced that I was living in Rome, sometime after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal. Back in the furtive Fish Sign days.* Secret baptism and that stuff. I was sure of it. Ro
me, evil Rome and Caesar’s minions, were everywhere around me. So were the fast-moving hidden agents of God, always on the go, like the Logos as it creates things. I was a Christian but I had to hide it. Or they’d get me. It made me very uncomfortable to belong to a persecuted sect like that, a small minority of fanatics. I was afraid I’d blurt out my beliefs and be thrown to the lions. That is one reason my blood pressure got so high. I was waiting to be hit by Caesar’s spies, and also I anticipated the Second Coming or something good like that. Maybe the Day of Judgment. I was more excited than afraid, sure in my faith, certain of my Savior. The Last Supper was real, actual and close by me. Maybe this is a clue. I’m still in that time period, but I’ve fallen under the wise and prudent guidance of an educated Greek—high class in other words—tutor. Brought in from the provinces where the ignorant scurry about, to be educated in cultivated urban life. I think I read all this in the novel The Robe9 11 years ago. Jeez, I’ve fallen into someone else’s novel!