Dick increasingly came to view his earlier writings—specifically his science fiction novels of the 1960s—as an intricate and unconscious precursor to his visionary insights. Thus, he began to use them, as much as any ancient text or the Encyclopedia Britannica, as a source for his investigations. Never, to our knowledge, has a novelist borne down with such eccentric concentration on his own oeuvre, seeking to crack its code as if his life depended on it. The writing in these pages represents, perhaps above all, a laboratory of interpretation in the most absolute and open-ended sense of the word. When Dick began to write and publish novels based on the visionary material unearthed in the Exegesis, he commenced interpreting those as well. So, as these writings accumulated, they also became self-referentiaclass="underline" the Exegesis is a study of, among other things, itself.
Fully situating this text’s genesis within the flamboyant and heartbreaking life story of Philip K. Dick is beyond our reach in this introduction. We commend you to Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, published in 1989 and thankfully still in print. Sutin’s biography finds its limitations only in the sense that neither he nor any other commentator in the years immediately following Dick’s death, however persuaded of the unique relevance and appeal of his writing, could have predicted the expansion in its reputation and influence in the subsequent decades.
What will be needed by a reader coming to the Exegesis, however, whether familiar or not with Dick’s great novels, is a brief encapsulation of what both Dick and Sutin call “2-3-74”—meaning, simply, February and March of 1974—for the simple reason that Dick’s endless sequence of interpretations derive from that initial period of visions and a handful of external experiences that surrounded them (some of which, frankly, challenge credulity).
Whether interpreting a happening, memory, vision, or dream, Dick in his haste rarely bothers to set down the source events as scrupulously as we might wish—testament to his eagerness to begin his fierce private excavation of their meaning. After all, he understood to what he referred. Except for those lucky instances when Dick retraces his steps to their source, or in the letters to others that (mercifully for the reader) represent this wild journey’s inception point, Dick explicates events, but rarely narrates them. Sutin observes:
The events of 2-3-74 and after are unusual, even bizarre. There are scenes of tender beauty, as when Phil administered the Eucharist to [his son] Christopher. There are instances of inexplicable foresight, as when he diagnosed his son’s hernia. And there are episodes, like the Xerox missive, that foster skepticism. For some, the visions and voices will constitute evidence of grace. Others, both atheists and religionists, will doubt 2-3-74 for these very reasons.
So, what happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974? Among the mysterious events he chews over in these pages, the first, dark precursor to his visions was a break-in at his home in San Rafael, California, in November 1971 when someone blew up the file cabinet in his office. Candidates range from drug dealers to Black Panthers to various clandestine authorities, a few of which undoubtedly had Dick on their watch lists. Dick never settled on a single explanation for the break-in, but his fascinated, terrified rehearsals of this event set the stage for the deductive explosion to follow. It was then that Philip K. Dick’s life began to resemble, as many have observed, a Philip K. Dick novel.
Then to 1974: Dick now lived in Orange County, with a wife and young child. After receiving a dose of sodium pentothal during a visit to the dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick went home and later opened his door to a pharmacy delivery-girl bearing a painkiller and wearing a gold necklace depicting a fish, which she identified as a sign used by early Christians. At that moment, by his testimony, Dick experienced “anamnesis”—that sudden, discorporating slippage into vast and total knowledge that he would spend the rest of his life explicating, or exegeting.
Yet that doorway meeting with the fish necklace was only the first vision. In March Dick enjoyed two separate, unsleeping, nightlong episodes of visual psychedelia, the second of which he describes memorably as “hundreds of thousands of absolutely terrific modern art pictures as good as any ever exhibited . . . more than all the modern art pictures that exist put together.” Next, he found himself compelled to perform a home baptism on his son, Christopher. Then he was visited by a “red and gold plasmatic entity,” which he came to call, variously, Ubik, the Logos, Zebra, or the plasmate. He also heard dire messages on his radio (which played whether or not it was plugged into the wall).
Readers will learn here of the “Xerox missive”—a mailed broadside of some sort, possibly from an ordinary basement Communist organization, which Dick understood as a dire test of his new and visionary self-protective instinct: it needed to be disposed of. Dick believed that he was inhabited by another personality with different habits and character, someone more forceful and decisive than himself—in the Exegesis he auditions various candidates for this role—who steps in to fire his agent and field the Xerox missive. Our hero sees “Rome, Rome, everywhere,” in a vision of iron bars and scurrying outlaw Christians; he came to call this vision of the world the Black Iron Prison, or BIP for short. A cat died, and the apartment was flooded with memorial light. Most stirring, a pink beam informed Dick of a medical crisis that threatened the life of his son, a diagnosis confirmed by doctors.
Beyond 1974, he endured voices, visions, and prophetic dreams too numerous to list here—all to be enfolded, by the writer, into the cascade of interpretation of those earlier events. A reader will learn how readily and fluently a new revelation transforms Dick’s sense of the “core facts” of 2-3-74, which never sit still but adapt to a flux of analysis, paraphrase, and doubt. Illuminating them fully was Dick’s subsequent lifework. Why should it be simple for us?
The journey of the Exegesis from a chaos of paperwork stored, after Dick’s death, in a garage in Sonoma, California, to this (noncomprehensive) publication is still, if not as unlikely as its creation in the first place—what could be?—a saga in itself. When Dick died in 1982, the Exegesis was still a pile of papers in his apartment. Dick’s friend Paul Williams, then executor of his literary estate, sorted the fragments into the ninety-one file folders that still house it. (Williams’s provisional organizational choices, in the absence of other guides, remain evident in the form in which we present the material here.) The Exegesis spent the next several years in Williams’s garage in Glen Ellen.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Dick’s reputation had gone underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it had never been very far overground to begin with, and his stature with publishers was nonexistent. Working with Dick’s agent, Russ Galen, Williams found remarkable success inventing Dick’s posthumous career as we now know it, guiding the out-of-print novels into republication and a place in literary culture more secure than Dick probably ever imagined for himself. A number of unpublished novels—coherent, finished manuscripts that in almost every case had already made the publishers’ rounds and been rejected—were also brought to light.
The Exegesis, an unruly and unlikely “manuscript” that threatened to defy editorial ambition, remained terra incognita. Its first scholar, Jay Kinney, published a “Summary of the Exegesis Based on Preliminary Forays” in 1984. Estimating the document at two million words, Kinney defined requirements for its publication: transcription from the handwritten pages; an attempt at chronological resequencing; and “selecting out the most coherent portions.” He rightly called this prospect “staggering.” With Williams and a few volunteers, Kinney’s venture at least accomplished the photocopying and inventory of the eight-thousand-plus pages. At one point a distributed transcription effort was begun by mail—“swarm scholarship” before the Web. Kinney, in his article, also suggested that the published Exegesis could be the basis for the founding of a “Dickian religion,” mentioning the name L. Ron Hubbard. His intent may have been flippant, but the notion seeped into the chatter and proved more hindrance than incentive to scrupulous investigation of the material.