* In the following sections, Dick’s holograph grows larger and increasingly frenetic.—PJ
* These cosmic flip-flops are not sandals worn to an Orange County beach, but logic gates at the basis of computers, wherein the change of a single bit at a single gate can alter the entire meaning of a message. Dick’s encounter with the Tao, reality as it is, occurs in perhaps equal measure to the planet’s historical transformation into digital information and to his own horror of and fascination with simulation. By conceptualizing VALIS as both the Tao—an ancient model of two-state flux between yin and yang—and DNA—a double helical molecule organized in base pairs according to a triplet code—Dick again integrates the seemingly antithetical traditions of modern science and traditional mysticism even as he “harmonizes” the seeming opposition of life and death into a whole contained by each part.—RD
* “Suppose . . . time is round,” Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly, speculating that as explorers once sailed west in order to circle the world to India, we might sail into the future only to shipwreck on the shores of Jesus’s crucifixion two thousand years ago. Of course, the explorers didn’t reach India, they reached America, an altogether different version of the past that came to be called the future. By the same token, we might suppose Dick’s career was round as well; as he wrote his way into the future of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the mainland of science fiction receding behind him, he saw before him an altered version of his strange novels of the fifties, all the more singular for how they contextualized his cracked vision not in outer space but in the new American suburbia as saturated with madness as its front lawns were with water and fertilizer. Setting aside the cosmic and religious preoccupations of God and infinity, in a purely literary sense Dick’s contemplation of the “infinite” also integrates his literary output, not to mention the vicissitudes of his career, into something coherent; though this might seem banal compared to God and infinity, to Dick such a consideration of literary identity was tantamount to formulating a sense of who he was and why—because a writer doesn’t do, a writer is.—SE
* This and the next two folders are largely taken up with examinations of the following “G-2 dream,” and thus with various conspiracy theories concerning the Xerox missive, Soviet espionage, psychic weapons, and the like. In this they resemble a good deal of the nine-tenths of the Exegesis that is not represented in our abridged edition. While such paranoid speculations might delight fans of the cold war spy thriller or David Icke, they quickly become monotonous and, as Lawrence Sutin has written, produce “much heat but little light.” Of more interest to the editors have been passages in which Dick struggles with or transforms, rather than succumbs to, the intense paranoia that clearly was one (but only one) of 2-3-74’s effects.—PJ
* Dick and his twin sister Jane were born six weeks prematurely. Dick’s mother was unable to produce enough milk, and Jane died of malnutrition a little over a month after her birth. Culturally speaking, it may be the most significant instance of such trauma since Elvis Aron was haunted by Jesse Garon. The single strangest scene in all Dick’s work comes in Dr. Bloodmoney when a young girl who has ongoing conversations with an imaginary friend is finally taken by her mother to a doctor, who discovers that living in the girl’s side is a twin brother the size of a rabbit. Might they be considered conjoined, in that they share a body and brain? If they share a body and brain, do they share the memory that Dick now struggles for tens of thousands of words in the Exegesis to disown? If they share memory, do they share a soul—a possibility that potentially undermines Dick’s attempt in the Exegesis to divide soul from memory? In any case, they have shared everything except birth, which Phil shared with Jane and the resulting duality of which is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, expressed in Presley’s case by the division between heaven (gospel) and hell (rock-and-roll) and in Dick’s by his literal sense of living two lives at the same time or, more precisely, in two times that coincide.—SE
* Metaphysical paradoxes abound in these sections: first the comments on the reintegration of the divine and trash, and then this equation of defeat and victory. The latter image, illustrating multiple reversals, is the more complex: Christianity defeated the Empire with the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion, but the Empire won by reversing the early church’s anti-authoritarianism. Then the church covertly won by its preservation of a hidden minority of true, rebellious Christians. Furthermore, the image of the sliced-up fish echoes the early church father Tertullian’s statement that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” In both the “divine trash” comments and this eviscerated fish image, there is a sense of reality being the opposite of appearance: God is to be found, not in glory, but in abasement; the martyr’s subjection to death is actually a great victory for life.—GM
* This is exactly the kind of sophistication we need, desperately need, from our religious visionaries. No more stupid literalisms, which no one but the unthinking can believe anyway, but an unblinking recognition that whatever is coming through is, well, coming through. Put a bit less unclearly, what Dick is doing here is recognizing that (a) yes, something profound is indeed coming through, but (b) it is coming through the filters of his own socialized and encultured brain, personality, and upbringing. Dick is our teacher here. It is in this way that we can come to understand, finally, that extreme religious experiences are true and false at the same time, and that, sometimes at least, it is only in the symbolic modes of myth and metaphor that the deepest truths can appear at all. This, by the way, is precisely what Mircea Eliade intended with his language of hierophanies (a term that Dick used often)—that is, real appearances of the sacred through the contexts and conditions of the local culture and personality. We have two teachers here, then: Philip K. Dick and Mircea Eliade.—JJK