* Doris Sauter was a dark-haired girl Dick met in 1972 when she was dating his friend (and fellow SF writer) Norman Spinrad. The two later bonded over their growing interest in Christianity, Doris sharing her conversion story with Dick, and Dick relaying the events of 2-3-74 to her. Eventually the two paired up for charity work. In May 1975, Sauter was diagnosed with advanced lymphatic cancer, which she survived. In January 1976, Dick asked Sauter to marry him (although his fifth wife, Tessa, and young son Christopher would not move out of the apartment for several months). Sauter refused. Later that year, when Sauter’s cancer returned and Dick’s health issues—including high blood pressure and heart problems—became more serious, they decided to live together. Doris became the character model for Sherri Solvig in VALIS (1981). Later she moved next door to Dick and became the inspiration for the character in Rybus Romney in “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” (1979) and The Divine Invasion (1981). Sauter was forced to move out when the apartment building converted to condominiums, but the two remained friends until Dick’s death.—DG
* It is not clear from the Exegesis to what extent Dick’s path crossed with that of Theodore Sturgeon, the author of the science-fiction novels Venus Plus X and More Than Human, who herein is mentioned a number of times (as are the SF authors Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Stanislaw Lem). Dick’s and Sturgeon’s outlaw kinship—their shared anarchic spirit, their common ambivalence about the technology that wowed most other science-fiction writers, their subversion of physical and temporal reality in pursuit of emotional or even metaphysical truths—makes sense considering that both aimed for the literary “mainstream” before they were vortexed into genre. Perhaps Sturgeon will become the next Dickian vogue among the literati, notwithstanding his introduction here amid odd ruminations on a reincarnated cat.—SE
* In passages like these, it is impossible to ignore Dick’s obvious and sometimes self-confessed psychopathology—in other words, that the guy often appears, well, crazy. It is tempting to collapse Dick’s mystical realizations into this craziness, as if Valis were nothing more than a symptom of Dick’s alleged schizophrenia, temporal lobe seizures, or whatever. But we must be more careful, and more sophisticated, here. Dick himself thought poignantly and deeply about these and related issues and came to a conclusion that many other thoughtful people—from William James and Henri Bergson to Aldous Huxley—have come to, namely, that the brain may be a kind of “filter,” “transmitter,” or “reducer” of consciousness. When this filter-brain is temporarily shut down or suppressed by whatever means (mental illness, psychedelics, political torture, meditative discipline, a car wreck, a profound sexual experience, heart surgery), other forms of consciousness and reality, many of them cosmic in scope and nature, can and often do shine through. Trauma, we might say, can lead to transcendence, but—and this is the key point—the transcendent state cannot be reduced to or explained by the traumatic context. As with the material brain and its relationship to the irreducible nature of consciousness, the trauma does not produce transcendence. It lets it in.—JJK
* Such lines announce a continuous meta-theme in Dick’s Exegesis—what I have elsewhere called the mytheme of Mutation. This is the notion that paranormal powers and mystical experiences are expressions of the emerging buds or limbs of an evolving human supernature. Although this idea was endlessly explored in the pulp fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, found some of its most sophisticated mystical expressions in the human potential movement, and later found a wide popular audience in the counterculture with its “mutant” hippies and pop-cultural “X-Men,” it is much older than all of these. Indeed, the idea’s deepest roots lie in elite academic British culture, and more especially in the London Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), with figures like the Cambridge classicist Frederic Myers, who saw psychical abilities like telepathy (a word that he coined) as “supernormal” expressions of our “extraterrene evolution.” Further back still, Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of evolutionary theory with Darwin, asserted that there was a second spiritual line of evolution organized and directed by a higher power working toward its own ends. In short, the mytheme of Mutation goes back a century and a half to the very origins of evolutionary biology itself.—JJK
* Dick consistently seeks to uncover some trace of the so-called unwritten doctrine that Aristotle associates with Plato in the Physics, an association that some see as “outing” Plato as a secret Pythagorean for whom ultimate reality is revealed by number. Dick also seeks to identify Plato’s doctrine of the forms with Parmenides’s idea of being as a well-rounded sphere opposed to the nothingness of nonbeing. This notion seems linked in Dick’s mind with another borrowing from Parmenides to which he makes frequent allusion, the famous fragment 3: “For it is the same thing to think and to be.” Also important to Heidegger, whose radical interpretations of the pre-Socratics may have influenced Dick, this fragment identifies the activity of intellection, noesis or noös, with the essential being of things. We might also take one further step and cite Empedocles’s fragment 28, which appears to allude to Parmenides: “But he [God] is equal in all directions to himself and altogether eternal, a rounded sphere enjoying a circular solitude.” The kernel of Dick’s vision is the mystical identification of the soul’s capacity for intellectual intuition with the being of the divine.—SC
* In his extraordinary German sermons, Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) described the kingdom in the soul as the divine spark (vünkelîn), a term that appears elsewhere in the Exegesis. He also called this kingdom the godhead (gôtheit). Such views were condemned by the Avignon Pope as heretical two years after Eckhart’s death. Eckhart’s “heresy” was considered close to the much-feared Heresy of the Free Spirit that, some historians claim, was like an invisible empire across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The core of this heresy consisted in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us, but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God, but of the malevolent demiurge. Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. We might link this to Dick’s view that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age—the time before the fall—to return. In the text of Eckhart’s papal condemnation, we find quasi-gnostic utterances such as: “All creatures are one pure nothing. I do not say they are a little something, but that they are pure nothing.” All this can be linked to Dick’s later Eckhartean allusion to humans as “corruptible sheaves around divine sparks.”—SC
* Dick’s approach to the concept of being “born again” is quite different from the interpretation that developed among evangelical Protestants in the twentieth century. For evangelicals, being “born again” depends on a personal decision, an intellectual/emotional acceptance of a soteriological proposition. For Dick, it refers to a passive event, an invasion—possibly even a victimization—by an outside force. Dick’s “second birth” was not the result of his conversion experience, but its cause. He was personally transformed, but not as a result of his own volition.—GM