* Virtually all of Dick’s references to computers are metaphorical or part of his new religious terminology. They are rarely technological in the strict sense. It is paradoxical, or at least ironic, that Dick found his natural audience in the digital age, given not only that he died at the era’s outset but also that home computers, I strongly suspect, would only have aggravated his paranoia. I picture him peering deeply into the screen, trying to see who on the other side is watching back; would there have been any doubt in his mind that someone was there? Even Arthur C. Clarke’s more theological meditations (as alluded to earlier herein by Dick himself) accept technology’s role in our growing collective insight as a species, albeit while acknowledging the tension that technology begets. But the digital age has engendered a more widespread consideration and acceptance of the possible alternative realities that earlier readers of Dick’s fiction relegated to the realm of drug-induced hallucination. The eighties cyberpunks who mapped the emerging computer culture, like Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, and Sterling, counted Dick as among their most prevalent influences, even as Dick might well have wondered what the hell Neuromancer was all about.—SE
* With this important concept, Dick presents the visible universe as a moral test. The challenge is to perceive the injustice of the system of the world and to refuse to cooperate with it. The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear indication that it deserves to be rejected. The impetus to “withdraw assent” must come from a transcendent point of view that impels immediate disobedience: the word “balk” implies gut instinct rather than intellectual decision. Moreover, one cannot be aware that the visible universe is a test, because this would lead to calculated action in light of an expected reward. Dick gives one concrete example of his own balking: his participation in the tax strike organized by Ramparts magazine in 1968. By “this-worldly” standards, this was an illogical decision that led to personal hardship, but by “other-worldly” standards, his refusal was simply the right thing to do.—GM
* The flip side of these feelings of self-importance was, for Dick, debilitating paranoia. Many of Dick’s theories placed him at the center of vast, cosmic scenarios, and these preoccupations were often coupled with feelings of persecution. An exaggerated sense of self-importance is common among paranoiacs, who often reason that they must be important if people are out to get them. In a speech to a Vancouver science-fiction convention in 1972, Dick famously noted that any formulation “that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis about what the universe is about” is a “manifestation of paranoia.” Throughout the period of 2-3-74, Dick was also peppering the FBI with increasingly bizarre letters outlining the various plots he felt were at work against him. While in the long run the 2-3-74 experiences seem to have mellowed Dick out, his enlightenment did not come without many a dark night of the soul.—DG
* Discreet Music is the album I’ve listened to most often in the past thirty-five years since buying it when it was released in 1975. Brian Eno (affectionately also called “Brain One”) conceived of Discreet Music as something that might accompany a dinner party, and it was followed up by other soundscape experiments like Music for Airports and Music for Films. Eno’s extraordinary title piece is truly a machine composition; employing an early digital sequencer, looped tape machines, and other oblique strategies, it generates the music algorithmically. Intended to push at the threshold of audibility, Discreet Music is arguably the genesis of ambient music; certainly it and its creator inspired Dick to create the character Brent Mini, the electronic composer who appears in VALIS.—SC
* In this extraordinary passage, the recursive, self-referential quality of the Exegesis goes loopy. The Exegesis is an exegesis after all, which means that it is obsessed with commentary and Talmudic cross-referencing. In addition to Dick’s interminable analysis of his own corpus, there is his regular use of footnotes, which here go haywire. At the top of the page Dick places an asterisk that refers to a small chunk of related text, between which lies the brief description of a dream in which Dick opens one of his own books and discovers a footnote that reads: “this is a gloss in the text for ‘I love you.’ ” Dick then parenthetically defines the term “gloss” as a difficult term needing explanation, a definition that nonetheless requires another explanation, a footnote now using his usual bracketed numeral (1). This footnote offers a variant reading of the meaning of “gloss,” defining it not as the explanation of an obscure term—rather like the explanation that you, reader, are now reading—but instead the obscure term itself—in this case, the cypher-text Felix. A parenthetical amendment about the Greek variant glossa in turn spawns another reference mark, a circled ⊗ that leads to yet another repetitive definition. Finally, Dick reiterates that Felix is such a glossa: a glossy obscurity whose invisible message is, at least in its original context, “at odds with what is apparent.” And what is apparent here, and odd, is the Exegesis reading and writing itself, like a book in a dream.—ED
* This passage reveals much about the logic of the Exegesis and rewards close scrutiny. Here Dick is in great joy: the masterful A Scanner Darkly is hot off the press, and Stevie Nicks is in the headphones. (It must be “Dreams” from Rumours: “I see the crystal visions.”) Yet only one page before, Dick is in full metaphysical despair. He scribbles a lamentation in German; the second half is drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake. At the bottom of that page, as an unnumbered footnote, he declares that this “prayer” had been answered when he subsequently stumbled across the Britannica entry on Jacob Boehme. Though it is hard to imagine how one reads an encyclopedia passage “by mistake,” this random access is important to Dick because it removes his will from the equation, implying cosmic intention. In other words, God answered his lament by guiding him to Boehme, in whom he discovered a secret sympathy across time. However, this whole episode is complicated by the appearance sixty-four pages earlier (entry 50:19 above) of the unusual phrase “divine ‘abyss.’ ” This is a fundamental term in Boehme’s mystical scheme, where it denotes the emptiness of the Urgrund, the God beyond God. Its appearance earlier in this folder, particularly in quotation marks, strongly suggests that Dick had begun reading about Boehme sometime before uttering, in writing, his German prayer. This is a common pattern in the Exegesis: a motif is casually introduced and later blooms into a matter of such great significance that it changes the visionary narrative in retrospect.—ED