The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Read online

  The present editors have navigated this maze of perplexities in possession of a few useful axioms. One is that, putting aside any of the peculiarities earmarking his work or the circumstances of its creation, Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s great novelists. This makes the eventual public availability of his unpublished notes, journals, drafts, and other surviving papers not only desirable but inevitable. This is as true of Dick’s Exegesis as it is of the notebooks of Dostoyevsky or Henry James. If the fate of such material is to attract fewer readers than the writer’s novels—and who would wish otherwise?—it is nevertheless of clear importance that it emerge. Yet another axiom is this: the whole of the Exegesis is unpublishable, short of a multiple-volume scholarly edition issued at a prohibitive price or (more likely) in an online form.

  Another belief we held going in: the Exegesis is terrific reading, of a kind. We might say, “If you take it for what it is,” or, “If you care for this sort of thing,” but those terms beg the question of what “sort of thing” “it” exactly is, and we are at a loss to answer that question. To give yourself to it completely, as Kinney and Sutin and ourselves—most especially the tireless Pamela—have done, demands a degree of mania and stupefaction we would not wish on another human (though we will undoubtedly not be the last). But to give yourself to it in part, at leisure, and in a spirit of curiosity can be entrancing. And to become entranced by it is—contradicting ourselves now—to want more. One last axiom, then: in the compromises and sacrifices that this effort, by its nature, imposed, we will satisfy no one. We have set another foot on Everest, reached a slightly higher station than others before us. But not the summit. That admission leads to a declaration: this book spearheads an effort to transcribe, reorganize (or, more rightly, “organize”), and, eventually, provide scholarly access to the entirety of the writing left behind by Philip K. Dick after his death. Much of what we excluded was repetitive and boring. Some was tantalizing but opaque, or defied excerpt. But no one will need to take our word for this forever.

  3.

  Determinist forces are wrong,

  Though irresistibly strong.

  But of god there’s a dearth,

  For he visits the earth,

  But not for sufficiently long.

  or:

  Determinist forces are wrong,

  Though irresistibly strong.

  But of god there’s no dearth,

  For he visits the earth,

  But just for sufficiently long.

  Science fiction writer Tim Powers recited these two limericks from memory, then explained, “He’d call you up at eleven in the morning and say, ‘I just figured out some stuff—I just figured out the universe—why don’t you come over.’ Possibly he’d written until six A.M., then slept from six to eleven. I’d say, ‘I’ve gotta go to work. Write it down so you don’t forget it.’ One day I said, ‘Oh, yeah, and can you write it as a limerick?’ When I showed up he gave me two versions.”

  In the last decade of his life, Philip K. Dick’s friends and visitors became, one after the next, confidants of the iconoclastic human being who was both scribbling out the Exegesis and, in many senses, living it. These eyewitnesses offer evocative accounts that amplify the text’s human di mension; its tenderness, monologuing obsessiveness, irascibility, seductiveness, despair, irony, voraciousness, curiosity, anger, and wit, and above all its doubt and certainty, were Dick’s own.

  Tim Powers continued: “Every day was starting again from zero. It was never cumulative. And every now and then he’d say: ‘It’s all nonsense. It’s all acid flashbacks.’ He’d be down, terribly depressed. For one thing it would mean he’d wasted years. Then he’d be off again. He called me one day and said, ‘Powers, my researches have led me to believe I have the power to forgive sins.’ I said, ‘Well, who have you forgiven?’ He said, ‘Nobody . . . I forgave the cat’s sins and went to bed.’ ”

  Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, then a young fan who considered Dick “the only living writer I wanted to meet,” made his first visit to Dick’s apartment in February 1974: “It was one week before the vision. I planned a trip from S. F. to L.A., but he wasn’t answering his phone. We did our day at Disneyland, then I thought: I can’t not ring his doorbell. I stayed for three days. He was charming, eager for someone to talk to about his work. Only later did I find out he’d been in a deep funk. We’d talk, I’d fall asleep, he’d go in and begin typing, and then I’d wake up and we’d begin talking again.

  “I think I have one of the earliest manifestations of what became the Exegesis. I wish I could find it. We wanted a collaboration with Phil for Arcade magazine—he gave us something sort of essaylike, clearly religious. It concerned taking Christopher to the hospital. This was the first clue I had that he was off in that territory, but I can’t remember it being a very big deal in ’74–75. He didn’t seem obsessive, didn’t seem manic.

  “Later, visiting to recruit him for Raw magazine, I thought: This guy’s on the skids somehow. The apartment was the worst version of the Philip Marlowe housing complex. But he was studying Aramaic. I was struck, thinking, That’s intense! There’s not too many people doing that. Yet it didn’t seem like a good influence on him—he seemed burdened by all this stuff. Crushed. I do remember expressing excitement about one idea, and he lit up. He’d figured out why evil exists on earth: we were in a bubble, and God couldn’t get to us. I liked that image, and we talked about it for a while.”

  Painter and cartoonist Gary Panter offered a word-portrait: “Phil was pixieish and self-effacing, always ready to make himself the butt of the joke. He sat thinking with his head back and lips pursed a little. He smiled small before he smiled big. He had long fingers like a piano player’s. White hairy chest peeking over his top button. His skin was pale. His lips were red. His cheeks had a tiny blush. He was like a clever fox, but tired, like he didn’t sleep much. He told me more than once about the miracle of his intuiting his son’s potentially fatal internal hernia. He’d take a big breath before he spoke because he knew the sentences would be long. His hands were lithe and expressive, often mirroring each other palm to palm. He had soulful, heartful eyes. With other people he could’ve played other roles, because he was a theatrical and prankish person. He laughed a lot.”

  Tim Powers alludes to a notion found in other accounts as well: that in its latter stages the Exegesis journey seemed to converge with a foreshadowing of its author’s death. “I do remember that around Christmas of ’81 he was convinced that the world would end in a couple of months. And it did, for him. I thought: Not bad—you were close.”

  4.

  Anyone interested in suggesting a medical, psychiatric, neurological, or pharmacological context for the experiences and behavior surrounding Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis—and by “behavior” we mean, of course and above all, the writing of the thing itself—will be spoiled for choice. Dick offers a wealth of indicators suggestive of bipolar disorder, neurological damage due to amphetamine abuse, a sequence of tiny strokes (it would be a stroke that killed him in 1982), and more. Within these pages, Dick mordantly speculates on a few himself.

  The decades since Dick’s death have been fertile ones for popular neurological case histories, frequently of creative people (call it the Oliver Sacks era). It is likely that had Dick lived longer, he would have been drawn to project his own neurological metaphors for his visionary experiences; in particular, it is hard to imagine that his restless mind would not have been eager to explore what Eve Laplante, in her 1988 article in the Atlantic Monthly, called “The Riddle of TLE” (temporal lobe epilepsy). The cause of electrical seizures in the brain less dangerous, and more diagnostically furtive, than grand mal epilepsy, TLE is associated in certain cases with hypergraphia (superhuman bouts of writing) and hyperreligiosity (“an unusual degree of concern with morality, philosophy, and mysticism, sometimes leading to multiple religious conversions,” in Laplante’s words). Among the historical figures whose profiles are suggestive of a retroa
ctive TLE diagnosis are Dostoyevsky, St. Theresa of Avila, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Van Gogh.

  Temporal lobe epilepsy has, reasonably enough, drawn attention from Dick’s biographers, and we should not hesitate to mention it here. Yet, given just a brief paraphrase of Dick’s history, neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, cautioned that one of any number of medical causes might easily account for Dick’s hypergraphia—a TLE diagnosis is far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it is worth noting that Dick described hallucinatory experiences of one kind or another going back as far as grade school; that his earliest writings prefigure the ontological and moral concerns exhibited after 2-3-74; and that his boggling literary productivity during his aspirant years and first ascendancy, from 1952 to 1964, could easily be labeled “hypergraphic.” Dick’s Exegesis is a site, then, where we reencounter one of the defining mysteries of our scientific age: the persistent elusiveness of a satisfying description of the full activities of “mind”—that is, consciousness—even as the mechanism of the biological brain yields itself increasingly to our understanding.

  5.

  Dick’s pursuit of the truth of 2-3-74 was destined, like Zeno’s arrow, for no destination. Years before his death, it became apparent that these activities would not cease until the pen fell from his hands, no matter his periodic attempts at closure. “Here ends four years and six months of analysis and research,” Dick wrote. “Time is unmasked as irreal; 1,900 years are disclosed as aspect of one underlying matrix . . . my 27 years of writing the same themes over and over again fits into place; 2-74 and 3-74 is comprehensible, as is the overthrow of Nixon; the transtemporal constants have been explicated . . . perhaps I should destroy the Exegesis. It is a journey that reached its goal.” Dick wrote those words in 1978; they occur on the first page of an entry that would continue for sixty-two more.

  In the end the Exegesis can be viewed as a long experiment in mind-regarding-itself. The puzzle that Dick can never solve in this effort is that of his own exegetical efforts. This mind writes—why? More and more it may seem as if in describing the macrocosm Dick describes the Exegesis: the two are coextensive. Each falls victim to repetition and entropy; each grows by reticulating and arborizing; each, for its renewal, requires divine intervention in the form of language. The same questions apply to both: What saves the universe from running in useless circles until it drops? What separates the living spark of meaning from the “inferior bulk” of chaos and noise? Does the universe evolve or devolve? If the system is closed, then where does “the new” originate?

  We found ourselves struck by the notion that Philip K. Dick was, for all his garrulous explications, an aphoristic writer, in the vein of E. M. Cioran or Blaise Pascal. What disguises his aphoristic gift is, simply, the scaffolding he left in place. Every impulse, every photon of thinking collects on the page; it is left for the reader to isolate the spires.

  “What lies hiding within each object? A garden, so to speak.”

  “There are no gold prisons.”

  “The schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed.”

  “To remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.”

  “All that is colossal is fraud.”

  “The physical universe is plastic in the face of mind.”

  “Reality lacks discretionary power.”

  “What’s got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter.”

  “ ‘One day the masks will come off, and you will understand all’—it came to pass, and I was one of the masks.”

  Each of these fine provocations is embedded somewhere in the Exegesis’s pages, together with more extensive sequences of aphoristic invention and self-contained parables too lengthy to quote here. We invite readers to discover their own.

  Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson

  Editors’ Note

  Your humble scholars have wandered into a land that makes a mockery of scholarship. Dick’s own centrifugal and chaotic methodology was more than infectious; it rewrote our attempts to rewrite it. This volume, then, reflects an enthusiastic foray on the reader’s behalf. The larger purposes of archival scholarship could only have been answered with a completely transcribed and fully cross-referenced Exegesis—a thing not bindable into the pages of a book. In the name not of apology but of transparency, we offer an account of our compromises and the decisions that made them possible.

  We chose chronological ordering, yet this is a text that defies chronology. Dates were frequently determined only by internal clues or references and so should be regarded as approximate and open to revision by future scholarship. We kept folders intact, despite recognizing these as an artifact of Paul Williams’s archiving rather than Dick’s own ordering. In places where this led to conflict with chronology, we relocated parts of folders; these are noted. Excerpts are identified by bracketed numbers at the top [folder number: page number in folder]. In folders where Dick’s own page numbering suffices, we retained these; in folders with multiple discontinuous numbering sequences, we have renumbered the pages to create a single pagination for the whole. Note that folder numbers do not reflect chronological order; they represent the order in which Williams picked up the pages. Inventive inconsistency is our hallmark here: we were affixing numbers to chaos. Bracketed ellipses indicate some of our excisions and elisions, providing a glimpse of the scope and nature of our editorial choices. Other excisions go unmarked in favor of readability.

  The Exegesis began in 1974, with letters and short pieces, and grew steadily. The early pages form an epistolary detective novel, plunging the reader into the 2-3-74 revelation: Dick began his interpretations even as clues in the form of dreams, voices, and visions poured in. Soon, his letters grew longer and denser, some accompanied by enclosures of further typewritten “notes”; short pieces with recognizable beginnings and ends gave way to the extended theoretical speculations and open-ended meditations that characterize the Exegesis proper. By the end of this period, Dick was typing twenty-plus pages at a go—single-spaced, with minimal margins and paragraphing. We have largely offered the earliest entries in full; as longer, more meandering entries begin, in early 1975, we transition to the method of excerpting used for the remainder of the book: selecting discrete chunks of varying lengths, from a single paragraph to several pages (with or without some internal trimming).

  Dick’s text is given interpretive, personal, and unsystematic annotation by the editors and these others: Simon Critchley, Steve Erickson, David Gill, N. Katherine Hayles, Jeff Kripal, and Gabriel Mckee. These annotations are identified by their author’s initials. Following the text and an afterword by Richard Doyle, we offer two aids to a reader’s comprehension: a series of individual notes on nomenclature, translation, sources, and editorial interventions; and a glossary of some of the most frequently seen terms, including Dick’s neologisms. This glossary was prepared by the editors, annotators, and the Zebrapedia Group, under the guidance of Erik Davis, but it includes material developed by Lawrence Sutin for his 1991 volume. A modest index follows the afterword.

  Let us be the first to say that the notes, glossary, and index are incomplete: nothing short of a Vast Active Living Intelligence could sort all of Dick’s avenues of reference and citation. For one small example, among many, of the challenges in an annotator’s path: Dick often quoted English sources from memory or altered sources as he hurriedly copied them out; his use of German and Latin is willful and imaginative. In consideration of sanity (our own) and time and space (which are after all the same thing), we have offered the gist of his intentions, as we understood them, rather than unraveling his errors. A few names have been disguised in these pages to ensure the privacy of persons not wishing to be named.

  Acknowledgments

  Editors’ acknowledgments: The Zebrapedia Transcription and Research Group, spearheaded by Richard Doyle: Lisa Boren, Scott Boren, Alex Broudy, Gerry Canavan, Devin Daniels
, Rob Daubenspeck, Eric Furjanic, Carl Hayman, Jesse Hicks, Shane Leary, Jesse Rafalko, and Jennifer Rhee, as well as others who went in before us; the Paul Williams transcription team, some of their names now lost; Andy Watson, Jay Kinney, Gregg Rickman, and Lawrence Sutin. Also: Rebecca Alexander, Will Amato, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Steven Black, David Brazil, Tessa Dick, Frederick Dolan, Michael Domeracki, Bob Gamboa, Ted Hand, Owen Hill, Frank Hollander, Mark Hurst, Babette and Bruce Jackson, Shelley Jackson, Jeremy Menzies, and Rob Miotke. Thanks to all the annotators and to Gabriel Mckee for above-and-beyond attention to notes and glossary. And to the estate: Isa Hackett, Chris Dick, and, above all, Laura Leslie, for transcription, for biographical research, and for her ceaseless support.

  Laura Leslie’s acknowledgments: Isa, Chris, and I would like to recognize and express our appreciation for the following people who were instrumental in overcoming the daunting hurdles along the journey from eight thousand disorganized journal pages to the book you hold in your hands: Tim Powers for saving, protecting, and hiding these pages immediately after our father’s death; Paul Williams for his leadership in preserving the Exegesis, and all the volunteers who organized the material; Jonathan Lethem, who knew publishing the Exegesis was possible, who encouraged us, shared his vision, advocated for this project, enabling others to understand and embrace its potential, and connected us with Pamela Jackson; Pamela Jackson, who worked with us and who, in balancing responsibility to our father’s legacy with sensitivity to his living family members, was able to more than satisfy both; and Andrew Wylie, our father’s literary agent, without whose support this book would not have been published at this time.