* Dick often writes as if he assumes that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do not normally communicate with one another. Perhaps this misperception grew out of Roger Sperry’s work on split-brain perceptions in the late 1960s, one of a number of studies that inspired the popular discussion of the lateralization of brain function in books like Robert Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), which Dick was familiar with. However, Sperry’s work was done with patients in whom the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres, had been surgically severed as a treatment for otherwise incurable epilepsy. In normal brains, there is continuous communication across the hemispheres. Dick’s belief that it may be possible to boost brain efficiency, although not technically correct with respect to the right and left hemispheres, is right on the mark with regard to reparative plasticity, in which neural circuits are repurposed to make up for deficiencies in normal brain function caused by an injury or trauma. Reparative plasticity may have been precisely at issue in his own brain function, if indeed he did suffer from TIAs and had his own neural circuitry rearranged as a result.—NKH
* The reference here is to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, where the playwright explains the origin of love (eros) with the myth that the first human beings were akin to conjoined twins of opposite sex—bound face to face, hands to hands, feet to feet—who became separated; the fire of desire flows from the attempt to retrieve our lost unity. Here as elsewhere, the Exegesis can be seen as a long tug-of-war with Plato. There are constant references to Plato’s theory of anamnesis or recollection, which is the remembrance of the forms—the pure core of reality perceived within the soul through the activity of intellection or nous—that were allegedly forgotten due to the painful trauma of our birth. Dick also refers to Plato’s analogy of the cave from Republic, and to the true universe as idea or form (eidos), of which phenomenal reality is a mirror, or scanner, through which we see darkly. Later in the Exegesis, Dick also finds reason to harshly reject Plato, who, he will declare, is “180 degrees wrong.”—SC
* Ursula Le Guin (1929-) is an SF and fantasy writer from Berkeley. Though she and Dick were nearly the same age and attended the same high school, the two never met, but they did correspond as friends and colleagues throughout the 1970s. In February 1981, Le Guin gave a lecture at Emory University attended by author and critic Michael Bishop. Le Guin made some disparaging comments about Dick’s later work, specifically the treatment of women in VALIS (1981). Le Guin wondered aloud if Dick was “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, California.” When Bishop passed Le Guin’s remarks on to Dick in a letter, Dick responded publicly, writing an angry letter to Science Fiction Review. Le Guin apologized but had clearly hit a nerve. Dick took Le Guin’s criticisms seriously, and in many ways Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), with its deep, intelligent, and charming female first-person narrator, Angel Archer, was written in response.—DG
* “Since I last wrote you, the magnitude of the despotic gang of professional, organized criminals who came to power legally (as did Hitler in Germany) is increasingly revealed to the U.S. public. We Americans are now faced with precisely the situation the German people of the 1930s faced: we elected a criminal government to ‘save us from Communism,’ and are stuck. . . . This brings up the question of the proper moral response and attitude of the U.S. citizen who did not know this” (from Dick’s September 1973 public letter to an Australian fanzine). These musings continue in an unabatedly secular vein and reveal, just scant months before 2-3-74, how Dick already describes Watergate in terms of an epochal breach, yet interpreted here purely in twentieth-century political terms.—JL
* The term “immanent mind” recurs throughout these pages. Immanence can be understood as experiential and manifest as opposed to transcendental. Dick here identifies immanent mind with the extraterrestrial intelligence we can intuit in an experience of gnosis; elsewhere immanence is linked to Spinoza’s idea of a God identified with and wholly internal to nature. There is a tension throughout the Exegesis between this monistic view of the cosmos (which also appears in Dick’s references to Hegel’s dialectic and Whitehead’s idea of reality as process) and a dualistic or gnostic view of the cosmos, with two cosmic forces in conflict. In his monist mood, Dick argues that the universe is a single living organism or God; at other times, Dick seems to tend toward a Platonic or Neoplatonic theory of emanation of the divine reality into the world. But again, this is in constant tension with a tendency toward dualism, which holds that the phenomenal world is a prison governed by corporations, archons, or malevolent political forces. The way I read Dick, this latter view wins out.—SC
* In this and the following letters, Dick explores Christianity as an ancient mystery cult. The various mysteries of the Greco-Roman period were characterized by secret and mystical rituals in which initiates sacramentally relived their god’s experiences, which often involved death and rebirth. The central rites of the early Christian church bear much similarity to these rituals, particularly baptism, the agape or love feast, and the Eucharist. Indeed, in the Eastern Orthodox Church the sacraments are still referred to as “mysteries.” What separated the early church from the mysteries—and what led to its persecution—was its exclusivity: unlike followers of most other mysteries, the Christian faithful refused to participate in the imperial state religion.—GM
* Cultural critic, rock-and-roll journalist, and founder of Crawdaddy magazine, Paul Williams (1948-) is a singularly important figure in the second half of Dick’s life. Besides giving a copy of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to both John Lennon and psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, Williams wrote the profile “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick,” which ran in the November 6, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone. The piece, which focuses on Dick’s various theories regarding the 1971 break-in and makes no mention of the 2-3-74 events, introduced Dick to his widest counterculture audience yet. The two became good friends, and Williams managed to get one of Dick’s earlier (and best) mainstream fiction books, Confessions of a Crap Artist, published in 1975, an accomplishment for which Dick was eternally grateful. Upon Dick’s death, Williams was made literary executor of Dick’s estate.—DG
* This passage comes from book 2, chapter 2 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted here in John Allen’s translation. The idea that prelapsarian human beings had extraordinary abilities is not unique to Calvin—indeed, the text quoted here is preceded in the original by an attribution of the idea to Augustine. Dick latched onto Calvin as the idea’s primary proponent, both here and elsewhere in the Exegesis, and his name becomes shorthand for the concept of preternatural abilities.—GM