† Neoplatonism is crossed with thermodynamics to provide a framework for Dick to think through his experiences here. The entire universe can be comprehended as subject to an imperative: more entropy! While entropy is usually associated with the negativity of disorder, here it functions as something like a revelation: the bare bones, so to speak, of our world are revealed. And while the revelation is a “regression,” it enables an insight into the nature of reality. The divine, “Atman,” is perceived within all things for Dick even as the vehicle of this revelation is entropy—in the guise of noise, he receives a clarifying signal.—RD
* Until the mid-1960s, Dick’s novels explored isolation, entropy, and psychological withdrawal. But with Ubik (1966), his work becomes progressively more concerned with redemption and rebirth. After a team of anti-telepaths is injured in an explosion, the novel develops a dreamlike quality inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As the reality around them devolves, the characters begin to succumb to entropy themselves. A magical cure-all product begins to show up in advertisements: Ubik, which comes in an aerosol spray can and promises to combat the forces of encroaching chaos. Ubik is clearly an allegory for the Christian concept of “grace”; author Michael Bishop has written that Ubik is “whatever gets you through the dark night of the soul.” In the Exegesis, Ubik becomes shorthand for redemption.—DG
* This word information has become so commonplace that it is important to mark out its history here. Dick is writing a quarter of a century after Claude Shannon published his Mathematical Theory of Communication with Warren Weaver, wherein he defined the quantity of “surprise value” contained in any message as its “entropy.” Shannon named this value entropy because he was using equations drawn from the thermodynamic measure of entropy in a system—Maxwell’s equations. The paradox here—one that Dick grappled with—is presented by the fact that information, whose etymology suggests the existence of a pattern or “form,” is found to be mathematically equivalent to the amount of disorder in a closed system. That is, entropy is both the measure of the content of a message and a measure of its disorder. Maximum entropy is maximum message. The Exegesis is a working-through of this paradox: was Valis signal or noise?—RD
† The paradox of “entropy” as a measure of disorder and order is, for Dick, temporarily overcome. It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”—language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality. John 1:1 is additionally instructive because of what information theory would describe as the sentence’s “redundancy.” The semantic content of “In the beginning” reiterates the line’s formal content, since “In the beginning” is indeed in the beginning of the gospel. “In the beginning was the word” is, of course, in words, so here too the signal repeats itself through its own self-reference. In this passage Dick is treating this threefold redundancy as the Logos itself, out of which any message at all might emerge. Thus, when Dick receives this “letter from the future,” it is felt as salvation. The question of whether Valis is signal or noise is abstracted another level, as information “from the future” pours into the present, revealing the unreal nature of linear time.—RD
* Here Dick acknowledges that, as he comes to terms with 2-3-74, he can choose different maps for his exploration, since “any such terms will do.” He regards the present as a “continual informational print-out” in which he nonetheless and simultaneously has “free will,” a perception that is in accord with the thinking of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the chief architects of the informatic paradigm Dick is experiencing. Schrödinger, whose idea of the “code-script” in DNA gave birth to the concept of the genetic code, grapples in What Is Life? with the simultaneously mechanistic and free characteristic of human experience: “(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.” Notice that to perceive this twofold nature of the human being requires an act of contemplation on Dick’s part: “I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.”—RD
* When he wrote this sentence, Dick sat less than ten miles away from Disneyland, a geographic synchronicity that reminds us how regional a writer Dick was. Unlike most California writers, however, he bridged the “two hemispheres” of the bipolar Golden State. Before moving to the tacky conservative sprawl of Orange County, Dick lived for decades in the Bay Area, absorbing the lefty bohemia of Berkeley and Marin County. In 1973 he wrote Stanislaw Lem: “There is no culture here in California, only trash.” But as Dick’s own work proves, trash can achieve a visionary intensity, even a kind of escape velocity. After all, California was also the petri dish of our digital age, spawning the Internet, biotechnology, the personal computer, and geosynchronous satellite communication. And California has long encouraged the restless, eclectic, and sometimes wacky search for spiritual authenticity that drives the Exegesis. There is no more Dickian a Mecca than Disneyland. Indeed, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride offers a model for the entangled plots of a Phil Dick noveclass="underline" a fantastic contraption that careens through a variety of trapdoors and false fronts and deposits you in a kind of surreal hell. But then the doors open once again, and you face the blank blue sky.—ED
* The year 1964 was a bad one for Dick. Burned out after writing seven novels in twelve months, Dick suffered a serious bout of depression. Writer’s block and two bad acid trips took their toll. After separating from his wife and leaving bucolic Point Reyes, Dick got an apartment in East Oakland, a gritty neighborhood he referred to as “East Gak-ville.” In July, Dick flipped his car, dislocating his shoulder. After the accident, Dick languished in a body cast, and then wore a sling for two months. Unable to type, Dick was forced to dictate notes for a long-planned sequel to The Man in the High Castle (1962). Here Dick acknowledges that, basically a decade later, he found himself in exactly the same circumstance. After reinjuring his shoulder and undergoing surgery to repair it, Dick was once again dictating notes for a sequel to High Castle that would also integrate his 2-3-74 experiences into the novel. Eventually the notes he was dictating became Radio Free Albemuth, published posthumously in 1985. Dick never completed the sequel to The Man in the High Castle, arguably the most successful book of his career, and a high point he seemed determined to revisit, especially when he was down on his luck.—DG