* In the Exegesis, one of the great themes of Dick’s work—memory—is being reconsidered, if not radically recast. The theme of memory runs from In Milton Lumky Territory to Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? to A Scanner Darkly; up until the Exegesis, Dick’s work has formed a multivolume epic that might be called “Remembrance of Time Irreal.” In this work, memory serves as the nexus between reality and humanity, but in the Exegesis Dick’s past and future seem to bleed into the present, creatively and psychologically, and one feels his effort to make memory not so much irrelevant as meaningless, maybe even nonsensical. It is no longer part of humanity’s cosmic DNA—the Lincoln robot in We Can Build You is as human as the real Lincoln not because he looks and acts like a real Lincoln, but because he remembers like one. Dick suspects that the person he remembers being for the previous ten years was a “secondary” incarnation that supplanted the real one that now has returned. If this is true, to what extent is the Exegesis not just an elaboration on Dick’s previous work, but a rebuttal? Has Dick ceased to be the parallel Proust and become the anti-Proust?—SE
* It should be noted that everything Dick describes in this passage is only a slightly crazier version of something that every novelist experiences—the sense that he or she is not creating the work but someone or something else is. (Or as Dick has put it earlier, “My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them. . . .”) Many authors have had the experience of returning to earlier work with no recollection of having written it or of what the person who wrote it could possibly have been thinking. I’m not disputing Dick’s insightful assessment of the cleavage between an artist’s conscious and unconscious selves, nor am I even necessarily disputing the theories behind that assessment. I’m just saying that Dick’s sense of a freely, independently functioning unconscious that manifests itself in imagination and words is not unique, even as he has taken this meditation several steps further than most.—SE
* Dick’s experience of 2-3-74 has sometimes been interpreted as auditory and visual hallucinations, perhaps induced by repeated transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), or temporary strokes. We know that he was experiencing dangerously high blood pressure during this period, so a stroke would not be unlikely. If a stroke did occur, some of the changes he recorded in his personality in 1974 suggest that the neural circuitry normally associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, possibly in ways that strengthened the connections between consciousness and what recent research in neuroscience has been calling “the new unconscious,” or “the adaptive unconscious.” Distinct from the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious catches the overflow of sensations and perceptions too abundant to be processed through the bottleneck of conscious attention. Far from surfacing only in dreams, it is constantly at work to help set priorities, direct attention, and change behaviors in ways adaptive to the environment. Dick’s observation that he had become more “shrewd” about business matters—more practical, so to speak—indicates that the adaptive unconscious may have been guiding his actions more directly than was usual with him. Much of his theorizing about the events of 2-3-74 could also derive from his previous experience, as he himself recognized; for example, his extensive reading about classical Rome may have surfaced in his conviction that he had somehow been transported backward in time to Rome in 100 C.E.—NKH
* We all know the Christian fish, multiplied and mutated across millions of automobile bumpers in an endless ideological war. Sometimes the icon includes the word ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for fish and an acrostic—used by early Christians along with the symbol—of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Popular accounts of ΙΧΘΥΣ often suggest that the sign was once used by persecuted Christians to recognize one another—a believer would draw one arc of the fish, which a fellow acolyte would then complete. Though this account inspired Dick, there is no historical evidence for such secret winks. More relevant is the symbol’s modern revival by the countercultural Jesus Movement, for whose adherents the symbol replaced the stark rectilinear cross and invoked an alternative Christianity, radical and earthy. In Orange County, Dick was surrounded by the ambient vibes of Jesus Freakery, an originally Californian movement whose local avatar was the remarkably named Lonnie Frisbee. By 1974 Frisbee’s youth evangelism and “surf’s up” baptisms had helped groovify Calvary Chapel and other local mainline congregations. In one of Dick’s later visions, the Υ of an ΙΧΘΥΣ decal affixed to his window transformed into a palm tree—a fitting invocation of southern California as much as the ancient Levant.—ED
* In the Phaedo, Plato recounts the death of Socrates, which is famously administered by drinking hemlock. Socrates’ enigmatic final words are, “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asklepios.” Asklepios was the god of healing, and people suffering from an ailment would offer sacrifice before sleep in the hope of waking up cured. Thus, Socrates’ final words seem to imply that death is a cure for life, a kind of restorative slumber. It is significant, then, that Dick identifies his tutor here as Asklepios—as the god of healing—for perhaps we can think of the Exegesis as a kind of attempted cure of the soul, an extended therapeutic extrapolation of a mystical experience. A temple to Asklepios, called Asklepieion, was constructed on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, right next to the Theater of Dionysos, the billy-goat god who also makes frequent appearances in the Exegesis.—SC
* In his 2006 article “Entoptic Vision and Physicalist Emergentism,” the cognitive scientist Jean Petitot demonstrated that visual hallucinations reported by a number of subjects can be modeled mathematically through neural net feedback in the visual cortex. One of these subjects was blind, so in this case it was clear that there was no perceptual input but rather stimulation through other kinds of neural activity, perhaps a stroke. Images hand-drawn by subjects closely resembled mathematical models of neural net stimulation and feedback. Dick mentions that the graphics he saw were abstract and symmetric; they may have been like the ones Petitot studied or perhaps variations on them. (Changing the parameters yields a number of variations in the mathematical models.) For Petitot, the point is that it is possible in this instance to link a mathematical model of neural activity directly with reported experiences. In Dick’s case, the point is rather that his report of visual phenomena correspond with hallucinations reported by others in which the visions were internally caused by neural stimulation not related to external perceptions.—NKH
* The single most lucid sentence in the entire book.—SE