* This “involuntary chain of mental events” is crucial because it captures the way in which Valis is simultaneously something that Dick experienced in the freedom of his own consciousness and something that seemed to happen to him. And what happened to him, here at least, was One thing. Plotinus’s “One” is consonant with that other philosopher of the Perennial Philosophy, Sankara, who referred to reality as “one without a second.” In other words, despite appearances, everything we perceive in the world, including ourselves, has the attribute of unity. This is both a message—“Monistic Newsflash: Tomatoes, Tomahtoes, It’s All One!”—and a feeling: the self becomes an attribute of something immeasurably larger than itself. This insight is at once immensely obvious and notoriously ineffable: one either perceives the unity of all things or not, and Dick very much has. The experiences of “aha” that pepper the Exegesis are moments of immense creativity as well as insights into the inner realms.—RD
† The terms reticulation and arborizing explain the meshed and often baroque nature of reality, which is, pace the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, the “same as it ever was.” Apparently destroyed by its transformation into “bits” of information, the collective remains whole as “God’s memory,” another level of abstract topology that integrates the apparently chaotic multiplicity of the world through an infolding, outfolding, and branching of reality that resembles physicist David Bohm’s notion of the “implicate order” out of which all of reality emerges. Focusing our attention on this reticulation, as Dick does, affects reality itself via the noösphere: “As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order.”—RD
* Just as the manifestation of Valis is one of organizations, patterns of meaning, neural networks, and the collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries—that is, just as Valis is a revelation of hyperconnections—so too now works the radiated mind of Dick himself. Dick has in effect become a super-comparativist, and so he is able to draw connections and organize disparate patterns of information, like Valis, through huge stretches of space and time. And why not? Paradoxically, Valis works through history and yet exists, as a hyperdimensional presence, outside the box of history. This “abolishing of time” is especially evident in the history of religions and, more precisely, comparative mystical literature, to whose patterns and similarities Dick is powerfully drawn. In this particular passage, the double-edged sword of the comparative imagination is evident: bits of truth can indeed be found everywhere, but the full truth is nowhere to be found; religious systems are both true (as approximations or reflections) and false (as final and complete answers) at the same time. Today a much simpler form of this double-notion is crystallized in the oft-heard quip “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Such a position is often demeaned as fuzzy, as narcissistic, as “New Agey.” In fact, it constitutes a quiet, but radical, rejection of religion in all its dogmatic and dangerous forms.—JJK
* Among the many exotic and ominous diagnoses that may be proposed by those inclined to put Dick’s visions into a medical or neurological framework, one simple and relatively benign description hides everywhere in plain sight. “Micropsia” is the name for a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and of vast reorientations of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it’s a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. I suffered it myself, came to cherish it, and felt bereft when the episodes ended. I’ve subsequently been fascinated by how many different writers I care for—Julio Cortázar, J.G. Ballard, William Blake, Christina Stead, and certainly Dick (and Swift)—seem at some point to be attempting to gloss the micropsia sensation in imagery or metaphor.—JL
* The following description of Dick’s November 17, 1980, “theophany” is arguably the single most important entry in the entire Exegesis: it offers a fully developed interpretation of Dick’s mode of theoretical exploration, expressed in some of the most beautiful prose he ever wrote. In the face of despair at the interminability of his theological exploration, Dick meets a vision of a God at play: this entire theological exercise is presented as a game between omnipotent deity and created being. Moreover, the infinitude of Dick’s theories itself becomes proof that God is the beginning and end of his experiences. In light of the ideas presented in the theophany itself, Dick’s conclusions at the end of the entry—that 2-3-74 was caused by Satan and that the Exegesis is therefore a diabolical “hell-chore”—are surprising. Perhaps we can read these remarks not as Dick’s final conclusion, but rather the development of another theory about 2-3-74, and thus the beginning of another infinitely tall pile of computer punch cards.—GM
* The visionary episode of November 17, 1980, is one of the peaks of the Exegesis, as sublime a modern parable as Kafka’s “Before the Law.” These pages are also bona fide mysticism—not because Dick had authentic mystical experiences (whatever those are) but because Dick produced powerful texts that twist and illuminate vital strands of mystical discourse. Here we are in the apophatic realm of the via negativa, which, like Dick’s game-playing God, deconstructs all names and forms in the obscure light of the infinite. Elsewhere Dick tips his hat to Eckhart and Erigena, but the apophatic mystic his writing most invokes here is Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). By analyzing paradoxes, Cusa pushed reason toward a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) that blooms finally into the coincidentia oppositorum, or coincidence of opposites—a mystic coincidence that Dick achieves here through a manic and corrosive intensification of the dialectic. But perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of Dick’s 11/17/80 account is that his God here has nothing to do with the divine abyss of the negative mystics. Instead, he is a character in a story: part playful guru, part Palmer Eldritch, and part Yahweh, screwing around with Adam because there is nothing better to do.—ED
* Not surprisingly, Philip K. Dick scholars have been keen to defend the author against the popular (and also understandable) stereotype that he was just a druggy. It’s true that Dick gobbled pills and drank amphetamine shakes; his psychedelic use, though infrequent, was also important, as was the nitrous oxide trip at the dentist’s office that revealed Valis “as an arborizing, reticulating vine.” Here, the quaint reference to “Mary Jane” (marijuana) reminds us that, just as speed amplified his productivity, so too did cannabis amplify his visionary capacity, both on and off the page. For Dick, cannabis served as an engine of creative perception, but like all visionary drugs, it also staged a visionary paradox that lies at the heart of the Exegesis (and much of Dick’s fiction): whatever freedom and sublimity is on offer requires a passive submission to perceptual machinery. Drugs can push the mind toward infinite speeds and meditative slownesses. But they also, like Valis itself, possess their own alien logic. The arborizing chains of associations that striate the Exegesis, and that cannabis and other drugs insistently multiply, may just as readily bind as liberate.—ED