* Dick focuses on agape, a Greek term for total love, as a guideline for navigating those realities that are enmeshed with our thoughts about them. Agape calls us to cherish beings for what they are, and for nothing else. Over and over, Dick insists that his monistic vision is not pantheism, for his vision depends upon the very difference between self and other, world and the divine, that makes agape possible. Nondualistic in its essence, agape acts like a kind of mantra whose very utterance makes us quiver or stridulate in a vibrational intensity of self-other interaction. Agape makes us say it out loud, act like a fool, not knowing what is up or down, inside or out. It welcomes what Dick elsewhere calls the “integrity of the einai of the other.” Does Dick offer Valis, the ultimate other, this integrity as well? Perhaps the Exegesis could be seen as a cherishing of the einai of Valis, an act of radical love. Dick offers life to Valis in the Exegesis, and this agape extends to the world itself.—RD
* A lot of Dick’s cosmology boils down to loving and being loved, something that was difficult for him throughout his life and especially his five marriages. Dick’s writing often depicts his own struggle to open up and make himself vulnerable to the people around him. In his 1975 essay “Man, Android, and Machine” he writes, “A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. . . . He stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.” Given how fully the Exegesis is committed to a God who cares, I suspect that some of Dick’s obsessional speculation may have been a form of therapy, a way of working through his problems, of assisting himself in his quest to become a better person and connect with others. Part of this transformation involved altering the way he saw the world. No longer an adversarial place that might squash his hopes and dreams, it becomes a divinely infused garden, a safe place for him to share his fragile self with the world.—DG
* Even in his most megalomaniac moments Dick never suggests that the Exegesis itself will ever be read. But the fact that, improbably, we are reading these lines gives the question he poses here and elsewhere—what is the value of all this thinking?—a certain urgency for us as well. If the Exegesis is his delusion and “hell-chore,” it is now ours too. Dick is never more honest, nor more passionate, than when he’s questioning, then defending, the solitary path of inquiry that has become his life. As bitterly as he complains of the emotional and physical cost, again and again he reaffirms his commitment to tracing this maze that is also a work of art and a route to God. But what is it for us? This question was often in my mind as I read the eight thousand manuscript pages that shared my Berkeley apartment these past years. How many exegeses are tucked away in attics, never to be read? Should they be read? Might some of them be as brilliant as Dick’s, and no more delusional? It is Dick’s larger life’s work that has rescued these traces of an intellectual journey that most likely would otherwise have been consigned to the recycling bin. Thus, his solitary path becomes, for a while, our own. The first rule of this particular ordeal is: you must go where the inquiry leads. Yet that means, of course, that you must question the inquiry itself. The temptation—I frequently felt it myself—will be to come down on one side or the other of the dilemma that Dick here states in characteristically metaphysical terms: hell-chore or road to God? But the dilemma may be unresolvable—one of those matched pairs of irreconcilable opposites that Dick loves to discover are driving the universe: it is road to God and hell-chore, divine path and curse.—PJ
* Dick’s take (or one of his takes, at least) on the question of law and grace is not too dissimilar from that of John Calvin, who distinguished between the Hebrew Bible’s “covenant of works” and the New Testament’s “covenant of grace.” In Dick’s formulation, the Torah is an all-too-strict mechanistic system, based on an inflexible equation of transgression and punishment. As elsewhere, Dick is preoccupied with determinism, which he considers an evil; love/grace/mercy breaks through the requirements of normal causality. Compare this statement on the rigidity of Torah with Dick’s comment in the essay “The Android and the Human” that the android mind is characterized by “the inability to make exceptions.”—GM
* One of the great charms of the Exegesis is the presence of Dick’s ballpoint diagrams, which remind me of the blackboard drawings that Rudolf Steiner sketched during his metaphysical lectures. Most of Dick’s drawings are abstract illustrations—flow charts, Venn diagrams, intersecting 3-D planes—that lend a concrete form to his ever-mutating conceptual schemas. But others focus on the fish sign, his persistent icon of downloading divinity. Formally, the shape invokes the vesica piscis or mandorla, a geometric pattern often found in the almond-shaped auras of Christian iconography. Variations appear throughout the Exegesis, where the fish morphs into everything from a third eye to a vagina dentata to the mysterious “whale mouth sign” of Albemuth. This doodle shows a distinct development of the form, which, according to a February 14, 1978, letter to Ira Einhorn, reflects its original visionary disclosure as a “series of graphic progressions” from fish to one-eyed mandorla to spiral DNA. Like most sacred geometric forms, the power of Dick’s fish sign lies partly in its “Platonic” ability to replicate itself through a variety of concrete situations. But a more unusual aspect lies in this animated quality—the sign’s DNA-like potential for differentiation, for transforms that unfold stories about the (double) ties that bind.—ED
* Given Dick’s leap into what he calls meta-abstraction, it is perhaps predictable that he would imagine a life form that, rather than embodying information in a substrate, is pure information itself. The conceptual trajectory he traces here grew steadily in Western scientific culture from the 1930s to the 1990s, drawing in genetics (DNA as the information carrier and the “book of life”), information theory (where information is treated as a dimensionless probability distribution), computational theory (where the computer hardware is often treated abstractly as an ideational form rather than a physically present device), and a host of other fields. Writing in 1981, Dick did not live to see the countermovement toward embodiment that took place in the late 1990s among scientists and philosophers grappling with information, biology, and systems theory. At the same time, Dick himself insisted on the sensory immediacy of his experiences in 2-3-74. He may have thought he glimpsed a life form that was pure information, but he himself was keenly aware of the embodied nature of his own thought.—NKH