* In many of Dick’s stories, collectors build encapsulated re-creations of places that once held special meaning for them. In Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Virgil Ackerman re-creates the city of his childhood, Wash-35 (Dick lived in Washington, D.C., in 1935). For Dick, these nostalgic places serve as staging grounds for a ceaseless replay of events, “lovingly composed,” in the words of critic Fredric Jameson, “for a human activity which has disappeared.” In his descriptions of ancient Rome superimposed on Orange County, Dick may also have created a past space of redemptive activity, running parallel to, but separate from, our fallen world. While the Empire and the Black Iron Prison are present in this space too, the underground Christian resistance is dedicated in their opposition. God seems closer in that world than he does in this one. Dick sometimes describes Rome, as he does here, as sinister, dangerous, and overrun with spies. But in Dick’s vision, ancient Rome transcends the petty concerns that addle the plastic-fantastic fakeness of Orange County in the 1970s, and in this way it can be read as a kind of sacred urban fantasy that replaces a vapid reality.—DG
* Dick speaks often, as here, of his 2-3-74 experience as a kind of healing, specifically a healing of neural circuits. Contemporary neural science is providing the “scientific explanation” for what Dick sensed intuitively. Recent work in neuroscience has found that the brain is much more plastic than previously supposed, a fact that Oliver Sacks demonstrates throughout The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other accounts of patients who have suffered brain injury or trauma. In his recent work, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls the narrating voice of consciousness the “autobiographical self.” How the narrating self relates to the neuronal circuits of the brain is not well understood, but neural circuits can restructure and repurpose themselves when normal brain function is disrupted.—NKH
* Interpreting his repurposed neural circuits as the emergence of a mind connected to all other minds, Dick here is quite right to note that the awakened mind (which I hypothesize is the adaptive unconscious) “has a job to do.” As he surmises, it is indeed not a separate entity, although in a different sense than he imagines.—NKH
* Here Dick is quoting the voice he refers to variously as his tutor, his unconscious, the Spirit, or the Sybil; later he largely calls it the AI Voice (see Glossary). Throughout the Exegesis we find unsourced quotations like this one; often it is unclear whether Dick is quoting the Voice, the Bible, an imperfectly remembered line of poetry, the encyclopedia, or his own Exegesis. The Exegesis is a mishmash of external voices; the Voice itself is only one of them, though its gnomic utterances have a peculiar power to stop Dick in his tracks or springboard further exegesis.—PJ
* 2-3-74 marks a turning point away from Dick questioning the nature of reality in his fiction, but without providing unambiguous answers, and toward generating an astonishing efflorescence of theories that do not merely question but instead make assertions about the nature of reality. The drive of his theorizing in the Exegesis seems always to be toward incorporating more and more ideas into a single synthetic scheme, without definitively eliminating or disqualifying any one of them. Not surprisingly, then, the synthesis grows wilder and more ideationally unstable as he proceeds.—NKH
† In Dick’s stories, amid all the anxiety over disintegrating universes and unstable realities, there is always the sense of an ultimate reality underlying the fakery. The absolute shines through the cracks in the walls of the universe, and the hand of God—or Ubik, or the Walker-on-Earth, or Wilbur Mercer—reaches through to help us. This is Dick’s basic ontological faith: contrary to appearances, something is actually real. Whether that something is comprehensible to the human intellect is another question entirely, but even in this doubt Dick can be located in the tradition of apophatic mystics like Meister Eckhart or the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.—GM
* Here Dick poignantly reflects on being a student in a philosophy class whose instructor dogmatically insisted that Plato’s world of forms was no longer intelligible or useful to us. In the face of this intolerance, Dick rightly quit the class (and, soon enough, the university). Dick is evidently not an academic or professional philosopher, but an amateur, or perhaps that most splendid of things, what Erik Davis calls a garage philosopher. As someone who gets paid to teach philosophy for a living, I find Dick compelling as a philosopher because, whatever he lacks in scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and in rich lateral and cumulative associations. Indeed, if one defines a philosopher along the lines offered by Deleuze and Guattari—namely, as someone who creates concepts—then Dick is a philosopher. The naïveté of Dick’s approach to philosophy, like his use of secondary sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Paul Edwards’s fantastically useful Encyclopedia of Philosophy, permits a rapidity of association and lends a certain systematic coherence to his concerns. If Dick had known more, it might have led to him producing less interesting chains of ideas.—SC
* Here Dick ponders the notion of the “Kingdom” found in Luke 17 alongside a Sufi insight. In Luke 17:20, Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be found by inspecting empirical reality or by watching for signs of its imminent arrival. So too in the Vedic tradition one finds the practice of “neti, neti,” which looks at the world and recalls—over and over—that the divine is “not this, not this.” In Luke 17:21, Jesus follows his first negation with another: “Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘Lo there!’ ” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is neither “here” nor “there” precisely because it is not the spatial, external world. Being neither here nor there, the Kingdom is what Dick would describe as “ubiquitous.” Hence Jesus then asks us to “behold,” to look with awareness: “for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” We are directed to behold what St. Theresa called our “interior castle,” our consciousness, the virtual “space” of contemplation. If we follow William Penn and “look within, look within,” we find, in the contemplative tradition Dick is writing in and through, that “within” and “without” form a unity.—RD
* The Acts of the Apostles from the New Testament tells the story of the early church, focusing largely on the ministry of the apostle Paul. Dick speaks frequently about the presence of “Acts material” in his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, though Dick claims not to have read Acts at the time the novel was written. Dick focuses on two incidents from the biblical narrative: Paul’s trial before the procurator Marcus Antonius Felix (24:1-27) and Philip the Evangelist’s conversion of an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch (8:26-40). The former connection largely hinges on the similarity of names: in Tears, Felix Buckman interrogates Jason Taverner, just as the procurator Felix interrogates Paul. The latter incident shows a more striking correlation: Philip, traveling south from Jerusalem, passes an Ethiopian who is studying a passage from the Book of Isaiah. Philip interprets the passage for the eunuch, who then asks to be baptized. Dick saw a remarkable similarity between this story and the conclusion of Tears, in which Buckman is overcome by compassion and love for a stranger—a black man at an all-night gas station. Dick was also struck by Philip the Evangelist’s name, no doubt particularly since the scene that closes Tears was based on an event in his own life.—GM