* The first six pages of folder 9 consist of manuscript pages from VALIS. Coming thousands of pages into the Exegesis, they cut like a knife. Where did this voice come from? One almost expects the handwriting to be different, but it isn’t; equally disconcerting is that in the midst of these passages that end up almost word for word in the published novel, Dick breaks into exegesis again to briefly explore one of his multiple time-track models of 3-74. Then it’s back to that voice. In future Exegesis entries, Dick will sometimes treat the novel as little more than a vehicle for the Tractates, which he grants the authority of scripture. But the novel gives us much more than that, as this excerpt shows: a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic, heated imagination that is both ruthlessly realistic and sympathetic, even tender, toward the lost soul he understands himself to be. It reminds us that in the end what we have here, all gods aside, is a human being just trying to write himself into a better place.—PJ
* Dick is most likely referencing Rudolf Otto’s comparative study of Meister Eckhart and Sankara, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1932). Otto (1869–1937) was a major German scholar of comparative religion who helped introduce the term “the holy” or “the sacred” (das Heilige) into the field, by which he meant, in his Latin phrase, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, a mystical presence at once terrifying and alluring (an idea that Dick clearly draws on in other parts of the Exegesis). “Master” Eckhart (1260–1327) was a Dominican scholar and preacher whose most radical mystical teachings were condemned shortly before he died. Sankara (eighth–ninth century) was one of the most important expositors of Advaita Vedanta or idealist “nondualism” in medieval India. Stunned by his own paradoxical experience of the inside being outside and the outside being inside, Dick was picking up on the similarities between the two intellectual mystics here, which he could now see and understand precisely through his own experiences.—JJK
* This compelling but cryptic passage represents Dick’s recovery of one of Schopenhauer’s key aims: salvation from the world of illusion, and the attainment of intuitive access to what Nietzsche, in his early Schopenhauerian phase, saw as the mysterious and Dionysian unity of being that is the unconscious will, whose blind urgings Dick here identifies with God. If the core of the Exegesis is a blissful recovery of intellectual intuition, of gnosis, then a corresponding Schopenhauerian theme that emerges is that our existence in the phenomenal world is an experience of suffering and pain. Human life is a kind of mistake, a detour on the way to life’s goaclass="underline" death. Indeed, a recurrent feature of the lives of mystics is the experience of dejection and depression, understood as distance from God. Such despair occurs repeatedly in the Exegesis and with greater frequency in the later years, as in [90:69]: “When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.”—SC
* We see not unity but an “exploded” chaos. Dick sees a world of suffering, including his own, yet Valis offers reintegration through “entelechy”—the actualization of divine potential akin to the development of an embryo. Shattered, we dwell in an explosion of false categories, divided from the eternal in space and time. Despite this rhetoric of “explosion”—resonant with the 1971 burglary of Dick’s Marin County house and the explosion of his fireproof file cabinet, something like the Big Bang of Valis—the divine reality remains to be integrated through a consciousness willing to “go there.” Fragments of trash become what Gabriel Mckee calls the “god in the gutter,” as the most abject or insignificant phenomenon becomes a “splinter” connected in reality to the One. Here even suffering and evil can be creatively understood as a finger pointing elsewhere—beyond the dispersed consciousness of our splintered selves and toward the collective eternal Noös, a communion of mind that can only be discovered by each of us in our own particularity. This is perhaps a calling in a triple sense: Dick calls—names—the perception of the integrated Noös “Valis,” and the articulation of this perception is also, clearly, his calling, his vocation—and perhaps ours.—RD
* Faced with the problem of how to map time and space when they no longer obey the logics of linearity and extension, Dick turns to more virtual models of infodynamics. Note that in this instance information is viewed as an “aspect” of reality rather than its essence. One of Dick’s refrains in his contemplation of 2-3-74 is a line from Wagner’s Parsifaclass="underline" “Here, my son, time turns into space.” Here Dick posits a continuity between all time and space through recourse to a higher order of abstraction: the informational aspect of reality. But Dick avoids the usual opposition between “information” and reality.—RD
* Dick’s handwriting changes here, midpage, to a wild, overheated scrawl. Such moments are scattered throughout the Exegesis. Here and in many cases, Dick’s rush of ideas seems to reflect the labile intensity of his holograph, as if a distinct shift in consciousness has taken place.—PJ
* The difference between “is” and “does” underlies a good deal of Dick’s theorizing as he navigates between traditional philosophical questions about the essence of things (ontology) and a process paradigm based on genetics, informatics, and cybernetic systems theory. Within this latter paradigm, with its heuristic emphasis on process, experiment, and rules of thumb, philosophical questions about the “true nature” of things just get in the way of exploring the possibilities and problems in any given situation. After all, the skepticism that Dick also favors can always undermine notions of God and Being, but has a tougher time denying the evident fact that, even if you cannot know what the world really is, you still have to deal with it. And dealing with it means that, on some level anyway, your options are open because you have choice. Process leads toward pragmatism—the philosophical equivalent of the handyman who recurs throughout Dick’s fiction. In the following folder [6:44], Dick will make this point more explicit. Acknowledging there that truth is plastic—even and especially in a “metaphysical” zone like the bardo—one still faces the most concrete of questions: “I ask, not, ‘What is true?’ but, ‘What modulations shall I imprint on the stuff around me?’ ”—ED