* Here Dick provides a concrete analogy that helps illuminate his generally Platonic take on “orthogonal time.” The eternal forms sit on a circular drum and stamp themselves onto a moving strip of time, literally “informing” the linear flow and creating the “two-source” time that we misrecognize as a single fusion of novelty and repetition, change and return. Essentially, Dick is describing a Platonic typewriter—one thinks in particular of the IBM Selectric model popular in the 1970s, an electric typewriter whose type elements, rather than being attached to separate bars, rest on a single “golfball” that rotates and pivots before striking the ribbon and impressing ink on the page. Dick’s metaphysics of media tech here shows how much he saw writing of any kind as a dream machine that models cosmic processes.—ED
* The concept of an underground revolutionary Christian church occurs frequently in the Exegesis and is essential to understanding Dick’s conception of Christian theology. His is not the institutional, conservative church, but the early, persecuted, apostolic community. Dick gravitates toward rebellious Christian thinkers like Joachim of Fiore, Martin Luther, and George Fox, and his conception of the Black Iron Prison—the Empire that symbolizes all injustice—owes more than a little to the apostolic-prophetic depiction of Rome as Babylon. Dick’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit draws on the Book of Acts, which depicts the Spirit’s protection of the early church from its persecutors. But this emphasis also puts him in the territory of anti-authoritarian religious and millenarian movements like the Joachimites, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the early Quakers. For Dick, true Christianity implies or even requires a subversive attitude: as long as persecution and oppression are possible, the true church exists within the resistance to that oppression.—GM
* Empedocles is mentioned throughout the Exegesis, along with other pre-Socratic thinkers, notably Heraclitus and Parmenides. Empedocles wrote two works, both lost, one on nature and the other called Katharmoi or Purifications. In a fragment of the latter, addressing himself to the citizens of Acragas in Sicily, Empedocles declares himself “an immortal god, no longer a mortal, held in honor by all.” In the end, Empedocles both rejected and was rejected by the people and threw himself in despair into Mount Etna in the hope of being transformed into a god. Sadly, a sandal was thrown out of the volcano in confirmation of his mortality. One suspects some identification between Dick and Empedocles, where the latter declares himself divine and is persecuted for his hubris.—SC
* The Hymn of the Soul, also known as the Hymn of the Pearl, is a numinous fable of spiritual homecoming that captures, more than any narrative of antiquity, Dick’s noetic vision of anamnesis. The Acts of Thomas was a third-century apocryphal Christian text, most likely of Syriac origin, but the hymn, sung by Thomas in prison, is clearly an interpolation. Though it shows the influence of the New Testament, some scholars think it is a Mesopotamian fairy tale, or possibly the remnant of a pre-Christian Gnostic tradition whose very existence remains controversial. Of particular importance for an understanding of Dick is the role of the letter; when the occluded hero breaks the seal, “the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read.” Making his way home, the hero finds the letter again, “lying in the road,” like a beer can or a piece of trash. (Later in the Exegesis, Dick discusses the “Xerox missive” in terms influenced by the Hymn, though the values are inverted.) Once home, the hero puts on holy robes that, in Barnstone’s translation, “quiver all over with the movements of gnosis” and that mirror him like a divine twin: “two entities but one form.”—ED
* While Schrödinger discovered the informatic character of living systems, Dick predates the invention of the discipline of artificial life here by positing the possibly living and sentient character of information itself. Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky had already coined the term “noösphere” as a label for the effects of focused attention on the biosphere—the living film of the planet—which itself had emerged from the lithosphere, the mineral substrate of our planet. But Vernadsky did not yet have the modern concept of information with which to push his concept further, as Dick does. While others (Le Roy, Teilhard) took the idea in a more theological direction, all characterized the noösphere as an instance of evolutionary change driven by the dynamics of attention and information.—RD
* Linear time has a rather immediate purchase on our perception. Our finite experience of time—no moment can be simultaneous with any other moment—persuades us that moments actually “follow” one another. But Dick’s experience of what he often describes as divine reality—eternal time in which moments overlap or superimpose themselves—was equally persuasive to him, forcing him to grapple with the possibility that what he had previously perceived as reality was in fact fiction or camouflage. In this passage, Dick floats the rather alarming and counterintuitive idea that the future could alter the present, and he does so by way of orthodox Christian theology, which in his view takes this rather science-fictional concept of time as doctrine. Crucially, Dick effects this movement to the eternal aspect of time through his perception of unity: “I think it’s all the same thing, one found inner, one found outer.” By making all of space and time—the Kingdom of Heaven—“one thing,” Dick resolves the paradox of whether his experience is coming from within or without—a Möbius strip that provides further demonstration of the integration of “inner” and “outer” into “one thing.”—RD
* In his later years Dick limited his drug use to scotch, snuff, and the occasional joint. In his teens, Dick was given the stimulant Semoxydrine as an antidepressant. Between 1952 and 1972, Dick became notorious for his prodigious use of amphetamines, which he reportedly consumed by the handful to keep up his nearly inhuman writing pace. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dick’s house in Santa Venetia became a well-known hangout for teenagers and eventually for serious addicts and pushers; Dick’s experience with the drug scene is chronicled with humor and compassion in his novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Though Dick’s mescaline trip in May 1970 inspired Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, it is not true, as many believe, that Dick wrote while on LSD—a claim that Harlan Ellison made in his introduction to the Dick story “Faith of Our Fathers,” which appeared in his influential new wave SF collection Dangerous Visions (1967). Dick took LSD only two or three times, once suffering a terrible trip spent envisioning an angry god tormenting him “like a metaphysical IRS agent.”—DG