* Dick was in many ways a genius and visionary, but this Rome business is just stone screwy. In VALIS, which has the good sense to pretend it might be fiction, an alternate-reality Rome can be accepted as an imaginative conceit. Here it raises the obvious question: Did Dick really believe this? Or is he half-consciously assuming a guise of madness, not so much for the sake of the reader as for his own sake, so as to get—à la the most romantic nineteenth-century notions of madness—at some truth?—SE
* One of the great failures of futurism—whether science fiction or professional prognostication—is the fact that few saw anything like the Internet coming. Though Dick opens Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) with a couple of lonely cubicle workers wasting time on a translation game they play through an absurd information network, Dick’s fiction was no more predictive on that score than anyone else’s. But the Exegesis, here and in many other places, can be seen as an eerie and in some ways optimistic prophecy of our absorption into an all-consuming, endlessly arborizing, weirdly disincarnating information network. With the spread of smart phones, sensors, and GPS devices, the Internet is now reconfiguring physical reality very much the way Dick describes Valis using the world of objects to organize and extend itself as an intentional information system. We still have food, music, and friends (though books are beginning to dissolve), but an increasing chunk of our lives—love and play as much as work and thought—is given over to intensified, cybernetic information processing, what Dick earlier calls the “ ‘Swarm of Bees’ brain.” Though Dick puts a liberating spin on it, his words here also anticipate the grim prophecy of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who wrote that the individual has now become “only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.”—ED
* In this short list, Dick reaches his most succinct and quotable formulation of the gnosis of his fiction. So perhaps this is the time to stand up for Dick’s fiction, in all its waywardness and contradiction and humor, and point out that as infectious as Dick’s readings are, they don’t do justice either to his fiction or to the astonishing intermingling of narrative and reality, fiction and experience, that Dick lived through in, and after, 3-74. As he writes elsewhere, 3-74 keeps changing—as if the experience itself were alive. In fact, it is alive, partly because he keeps feeding it through his fiction. It gets Ubikified. It gets Scannerified. It gets Mazeified. It gets more like the novels as the novels get more like it. How do we get outside this feedback loop of reality and fiction to what really happened? We can ask the novels about that. They say (contra PKD in the Exegesis) there is no outside. It’s all inside—but if you’re lucky, out of that inside a savior of sorts might be born.—PJ
* In this and the subsequent folder, we can feel VALIS (1981) rising on the horizon as specific ideas and even characters in the novel begin to take shape. Messages from the AI Voice intensify in frequency and apparent significance, and a flurry of concepts emerge that Dick will pour into his manuscript, and especially into the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” that appends the novel.—PJ
* Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian scholar of comparative religion who helped develop a school of thought known as the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. This quote draws from Eliade’s early work on yoga, especially his doctoral dissertation turned into a major book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958). If Dick read this particular tome, he would have received a rich education in the history and philosophy of yoga and Tantra in their Indian sources and pan-Asian histories, as well as long literate passages (Eliade was also a fiction writer) on the yogi’s deconditioning and quest for spiritual transcendence and the abolishment of time—a major theme, of course, in Dick’s own Exegesis.—JJK
* Dick’s use of “occlusion” in this passage, directly correlated with the concept of rebellion against God, shows that he is using the term as a substitute for the more traditional terminology of sin. In this, he is largely in keeping with twentieth-century theologians like Paul Tillich, who emphasized that sin, rather than simply a bad or disobedient deed, is more like an ontological state. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich uses the word “estrangement” to illustrate this aspect of sin—a term that emphasizes the essential relationship between created and Creator. Dick’s term “occlusion” makes the separation from God a matter of perception and knowledge, rather than of potential relationship.—GM
* Dick was a passionate, intelligent, and deeply knowledgeable fan of classical, Romantic, and early music. With Bach, Beethoven, and Linda Ronstadt, Dick’s most important musical touchstone in the Exegesis is Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Mostly Dick references Parsifal, Wagner’s final and most religious opera, which pairs an aestheticized sense of Christian ritual redemption with a world-denying, Schopenhauerian view of Buddhism. In VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick quotes Gurnemanz, a wise Knight who enigmatically describes the environs of the Grail castle to the holy fool Parsifaclass="underline" “Here my son, time turns into space.” But Dick’s imagination was also shaped by Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle, which, after all, features semi-divine (and incestuous) twins, the disastrous forgetting of true identity, and a profound meditation on freedom and fate. Perhaps the most important thing Dick readers can learn from Wagner, however, is the dynamics of the leitmotiv: the recurrent musical phrases that Wagner used to invoke characters, objects, and ideas. The persistent archetypes of Dick’s fiction, as well as the author’s endlessly rehashed metaphysical concerns in the Exegesis, unfold through the repetition, transformation, and recombination of such familiar elements. Just as Wagner philosophized through music, Dick philosophized through fiction—and, in the Exegesis, made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return.—ED
* This is the first explicit mention in the Exegesis of the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura,” the treatise of “hidden writing” published as an appendix to the novel VALIS. From the Exegesis it is clear that the raw material that Dick would shape into the “Tractates” was already in existence before the novel itself was written. Some entries of the published “Tractates” are direct quotations from the AI Voice (including 7 and 9), but beyond these, the published document does not quote the Exegesis so much as refine it, showing, as do subsequent entries, that Dick clearly thought of the “Tractates” as a distinct document designed for public consumption (and, he no doubt hoped, illumination). Dick struggled with how to integrate the text into his novel, as well as how to think about their relationship. Once the manuscript for VALIS was completed, a few portions of the “Tractates” were in turn cited in the Exegesis.—PJ