* Victoria Principal (1950-) is a Hollywood actress (Earthquake, Dallas) and one of Dick’s many “dark-haired girls.” Dick was drawn to this particular subset of brunettes throughout his life, sometimes suffering intense crushes on women he had never met (cf. Linda Ronstadt). Dick was especially drawn to Principal, whom he believed could capture the cold sensuality of his android femme fatale character Rachel Rosen in the cinematic adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dick began taping up pictures of Principal around his apartment and sent letters and a copy of Ubik to her. He was heartbroken when she failed to respond. Dick also pushed for Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick to play Rosen. Dick’s penchant for these women inspired his collection of poems, essays, and letters The Dark Haired Girl, published by Mark V. Ziesing in 1989.—DG
* This is the book, published in 1969 by the pioneering parapsychologist Charley Tart, that introduced the phrase “altered states of consciousness” into the already humming counterculture. Although the phrase had already been used by Arnold M. Ludwig a few years earlier, it was this book, and probably this book title, that made the phrase a common stock of the Zeitgeist. As with so much other mystical literature, however, what we really encounter in the Exegesis are altered states of consciousness that are also altered states of energy. That is, what we finally encounter is Conscious Energy.—JJK
* An early reference to the Eucharist, which grows in importance throughout the Exegesis. Here Dick frames the Lord’s Supper as a memorial reenactment rather than a mystical rite; later he will focus on the issue of transubstantiation.—GM
* A contemplation of God’s nature occupies virtually all of Dick’s late-period work, but as he grapples with theology, what is startling are not the more far-fetched notions—anyone who has read Dick’s earlier work expects these—but the more conventional ones. The God who reveals Himself in Dick’s thinking often is very much the familiar humanized Judeo-Christian God. This God acts personally and responds personally in the ways of both the Old and New Testaments; note a few paragraphs earlier, in a passage that is practically biblical, the “trust” that Dick’s God places in “special men” and “prophets.” The upcoming reference to God/Jesus as “Zebra” is first deeply curious, then forehead-smackingly obvious—and fabulous anyway; nothing is more indicative of just how unconventional Dick’s mind is than that his most conventional notions seem most unconventional of all. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, Dick tries to reconcile his own particular God teased out of the fabric of reality and time with the God of millennia worshipped by millions. Which is to say that consciously and unconsciously, herein Dick is finding his place in civilization.—SE
* “The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to set it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if not, then not. . . . my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness—but not complexity, if you see what I mean. The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes—it only emerges by stages and degrees” (from a twelve-page letter to Eleanor Dimoff of the Meredith Agency, February 1, 1960). Here, Dick is just declaring himself, at a time when his major writing was barely evidenced. The glimpse of the future author of the Exegesis is evocative, to say the least.—JL
* With few exceptions, the Exegesis was not a journal where Dick would summarize his daily affairs. As a result, many of the crucial events of 2-3-74 were not written about as they happened, and so it is difficult to know how significant these events were for Dick when they transpired. One day before writing this letter to Claudia, Dick wrote a frantic letter to the FBI, saying that two days earlier (March 18) he had received a registered letter from Estonia, a letter he knew “was a trap, frankly by the KGB.” He makes no mention of that here. Similarly, in a letter written to his daughter on March 17, 1974, the day after “vivid fire” released Dick from “every thrall,” he makes no mention of his life-changing circumstances. March 20 also appears to be the day Dick received the “Xerox missive,” which was to play a crucial role in his later theorizing. This envelope, sent from New York, contained two book reviews with certain words highlighted in red and blue pen. Dick worried that they were coded death messages. The importance of these events waxed and waned significantly in Dick’s life, so much so that even a major event like the arrival of the Xerox missive might go unreported for weeks or months in the Exegesis.—DG
* From this point forward, Dick only occasionally included letters, and hardly ever dated his Exegesis entries. The obsessive, recursive nature of the work and the dearth of references to events in the outside world sometimes make establishing precise chronology difficult, if not impossible. Even if a definitive chronology is someday established, the Exegesis cannot be fully reconstructed as written, since it is clear that at times Dick reorganized his own pages.—PJ
* While this self-encounter occurs as an idea for a plot, it offers an uncanny description of Dick’s own journey. Under the influence of his own writing, and by putting as much of himself as possible into that writing, Dick seems to have seen himself as an abstraction—not in the sense of a deadened thing taken out of its context, but in the sense that software engineers discuss “layers of abstraction”: an act of metacognition or description that at once detaches from and observes other layers of the system. In the Exegesis, Dick observed himself being what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop.” Dick later recognizes that this operation of “meta-abstraction” identifies something about reality—that the world itself is looped with the language we use to describe it. In The Divine Invasion, the child god Emmanuel manifests something like this loop when he performs the “Hermetic transform.”—RD