* What else was going on in the world in March 1974? As reality’s fabric ripped apart in Fullerton, a jumbo jet fell out of the sky outside Paris, killing more than three hundred people; an Arab oil embargo produced the most pronounced gasoline shortage ever in America, with cars lined up at stations for miles; and the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to restore the death penalty that the Supreme Court recently had ruled unconstitutional. Overshadowing even these unsettling events was the kidnapping in northern California of the heiress of a millionaire publishing family by a band of domestic terrorists; though there is no evidence that Dick shared the rest of the country’s fascination with this incident, which took place in his own backyard, the subsequent conversion of Patty Hearst to the radicals’ cause sounds like a novel that Dick might have written in the fifties or might yet write toward the end of his life. Most prominently, virtually all of Richard Nixon’s immediate political circle in the White House, including his attorney general and chief of staff, were indicted in the Watergate scandal, which had reached critical mass, and the president himself was named a co-conspirator by a grand jury. To Dick, and to the country at large, this was the moment when the Nixon presidency—five months before its end—was at its most toxic.—SE
* The term “exegesis” is most commonly used to describe a thorough interpretation of a biblical text, often based either on its historical context and language or on the revelation of its hidden meanings. Dick’s use of the term implies that he considered his experiences themselves to be a form of scripture, a story to be revealed, explored, and understood. Moreover, his exploration of those experiences is itself a form of continuous revelation, with no clear line between experience and interpretation. But since the experience is ongoing, the Exegesis itself becomes a key part of the narrative. In the Exegesis, Dick is telling a story to himself, and exploring the meaning of that story, in ever-expanding circles of narrative and interpretation.—GM
* The introduction of Zebra brings us close to the center of Dick’s mystical vision. With the “discovery” of Zebra as a mimicker of forms, Dick thinks that he has found his deus absconditus— his hidden God concealed in the phenomenal world. Elsewhere, Zebra is described as a “cosmic Christ” and as a giant brain that utilizes us as crossing stations in his vast relay network of living information. Chains of associated identifications structure the argument of the Exegesis: Zebra equals Christ, and Christ equals God; the mind’s union with Zebra is the union with God, where “you are God.” The kernel of Dick’s mystical “heresy” may be located here: union with the divine.—SC
* The turning point here seems to include not only a positive vision of what reality is but a figure who can intervene to direct events so as to bring reality to fruition in a positive sense. There seems to be a continuing oscillation in Dick’s thought during this period about whether such a reality exists now (and has always existed and will continue to exist into the future), or whether it must be realized through arduous effort and the validation of his vision.—NKH
* After searching in reference books and other sources for analogies to his experiences in 2-3-74, Dick now seems to accept that it may be unique, or nearly so. The discovery is no doubt bittersweet: if others have had similar experiences, his vision would be validated; but if not, his status as a lone visionary is enhanced even more. There is, of course, another way to interpret the realization that an explanation “will have to derive from what I saw”—namely, that it was internally generated as a cerebral event, accompanied by the rearrangement of his neural circuitry.—NKH
* Much of the 1977 Exegesis is taken up with pages like these, in which whole encyclopedia entries are copied out by hand. Taken together they provide a fascinating map of autodidactic study; Dick is led from one thing to the next not to master a field of study or a philosophical system but to try to figure out his own experience. The hunger for legitimacy in these passages is striking—no less an authority than Hegel agrees with him!—but no more so than the insistence with which he returns again and again to ground the inquiry in his own experience and need to understand. Dick was well aware of the idiosyncratic and unauthorized nature of his intellectual quest, as VALIS in particular shows. The novel piles up sources and citations from Dick’s own researches while posing the question of whether the path of Horselover Fat leads to anywhere but the nuthouse. But what the novel does—what it both intends to do and actually does—is extend an invitation. As Fat’s shrink tells him at a low point, “you are the authority.” It is a wonderful gift of permission, and the novel offers it in turn to any reader who needs it. Go forth and pursue knowledge! Even if you’re totally wrong! You are the authority! And more important perhaps, you are not alone.—PJ
* In November 1971, Dick’s San Rafael house was burglarized. The intruders used explosives to blow open Dick’s fireproof safe. Manuscripts and canceled checks were stolen along with a stereo and a gun. Dick speculated for years about the identity and motivation of the intruders; in many ways this endless theorizing prefigures 2-3-74 and his writing of the Exegesis. Dick would construct an elaborate theory about the burglary, complete with motivation and method, only to cast his carefully crafted theory aside when another entered his mind. From Paul Williams’s Rolling Stone profile, it appears that Dick’s obsession with the event grew over time and eventually began to take over his life. The most Dickian suggestion was made by the police: Dick had committed the burglary himself. When Dick could no longer get the police to return his phone calls, he fell into another depression, writing to Williams, probably only partially in jest, “Ever since the police lost interest in me, there’s been nothing to live for.”—DG
* Among all of Dick’s books, including the “important” ones, some of the most haunting remain the early so-called failures: Confessions of a Crap Artist, with its savant regarding the world from the perspective of science journals, comic books, and bondage magazines; In Milton Lumky Territory, in which a man falls in love with an older woman only to realize that she was the second-grade teacher who terrorized and humiliated him as a child; and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, where an archaeological hoax transforms a fraudulent artifact into irresistible destiny (a theme Dick picked up a year later in writing The Man in the High Castle). All were rejected by American publishers and remained unknown for years. It is worthy of one of his own stories to wonder what parallel career would have awaited Dick—perhaps heading off his shift into genre—had these utterly original novels found the readership they deserved when they were written. For a while he was the West Coast’s answer to Cheever and Updike, except, of course, for that Borgesian streak no one yet identified as Borgesian because Ficciones had not yet appeared in English as Labyrinths. What is most striking about Dick’s fiction around the Exegesis is the return to this fifties hybrid: A Scanner Darkly, part confession and part postmortem of an identity crisis, in a near-future where identity is as commodified as anything else; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, beginning in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination and striving for an answer in the rubble of smashed suppositions.—SE