* Another “defeat is victory” paradox. Though Dick does not seem to have made the connection himself, these statements are reflective of Martin Luther’s “theology of the cross”—the idea that God conceals his glory within the humiliation of the crucifixion. Compare Luther’s notion with, for example, Dick’s earlier statement in the Exegesis that the deity “will be where least expected and as least expected” ([16:14]). Here there is an added level of complication, with the evil in which good hides itself pretending to be good: a classic example of the Dickian “fake fake.”—GM
* Does the divine camouflage itself to allow us our freedom? Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit articulates the epic quest of self-knowledge through the lens of German Idealist philosophy, scolded readers and told them to go back to the Greek Mysteries if they fell prey to the world’s ultimate camouflage: “the truth and certainty of the reality of objects of sense.” For those who believe that everything simply is as it seems, Hegel recommends that they “be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learnt the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.” This scolding, too, just might be an act of agape, as Hegel points to the same sacred site as Dick: Eleusis, where the quarry, again, would seem to be prior thought formations that must be destroyed. The Exegesis asks us to look beyond the camouflage of everyday reality toward the One—“the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.”—RD
* This quotation is from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion (1958), an important overview of Gnosticism that shows the force and persistence of the idea of enlightenment by a ray of divine light. For Jonas, this direct contact with the divine divinizes the soul in turn and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely, the view that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally, but requires the divine illumination reserved for the few. In the epilogue, Jonas shows how postwar existential philosophy and particularly the work of Heidegger can be seen as the modern transposition of this Gnostic teaching. Here the world is no longer the creation of a malevolent God, but simply the series of phenomenal events that are causally explained by natural science. Of course, these explanations don’t solve the problem of nihilism; they shift and deepen it, leading the modern self to oppose itself to an indifferent or hostile nature and to try to secure for itself a space for authentic freedom. For Jonas, although Gnosticism embodies a powerful temptation for a soul thirsty for God in the desert of the world, it is a temptation that must be refused. For Dick, things are not so clear.—SC
* Novelists have always wrestled with the great Selling Out to Hollywood Moral Dilemma, but I’m not sure any have ever escalated (or plunged) it to such a metaphysical (or hysterical) paroxysm. These passages are also at odds with claims made by others that Dick told director Ridley Scott the movie was exactly the way he imagined the novel; clearly he had other feelings. For better or worse, however, there’s no underestimating the impact of Blade Runner, not merely on the public recognition of Dick but also on the perception of his writing. The movie gave a visual identity to work that never was especially imagistic (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said comes closer visually to Blade Runner than does Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Even for those readers who were familiar with Dick’s work before the film, recollection of his books now takes a visual form that is equal parts Dick’s imagination and Scott’s advertising background in London. In a way that, of all people, Dick might understand—that what’s perceived is a collaboration between who has created it and who has perceived it—Dick himself has become a collaborated invention. All that said, and his histrionics aside, props to Dick for the artistic integrity and courage to resist Hollywood’s efforts to usurp the original novel and re-“novelize” it.—SE
* Picking up again on the theme of tragedy, here Dick discusses Hamlet in terms of the duality between the usurper king (Claudius) and the true king (Hamlet himself, both the murdered father and the mourning son, who share the same name), who is “mad” and a fool. It is not difficult to imagine some identification between the character of Hamlet and Dick himself; after all, “mad” Hamlet declares that the world is a prison (act 2, scene 2). And the idea of a usurper on the throne is consistent with the Gnostic bent of Dick’s worldview, where the false king of Empire has marginalized the true king through an act of murder. Dick identifies a similar dualism in the opposition between Pentheus (the illegitimate king) and Dionysos (the true king) in Euripides’ The Bacchae.—SC
* The very fact of Dick’s obsession with forming this overview of his work is noteworthy: though I question whether it’s healthy—there’s a point beyond which a novelist is better off not thinking too much about what he’s doing or why—in retrospect it’s astonishingly prescient; we know that in a few months Dick will be dead. Did he sense it as well? Is the pell-mell urgency of the Exegesis driven not only by madness or revelation (whichever you believe) but by a ticking of the universe’s clock in his ears? The ego behind all this is off the charts and accounts for how Dick can formulate a cosmic view that places himself at the center; without it, however, we probably wouldn’t have Flow My Tears, Scanner Darkly, or Transmigration, never mind the Exegesis (which was more crucial to its author than to the reader). So the flip side of what must seem megalomania to a reasonable person is the audacity on which nothing less than artistic survival depends, the defiant assertion that, in the face of his own obscurity, in the course of a life during which the Library of America hadn’t yet found the foresight or cultural imagination to acclaim him (and wouldn’t for another quarter-century), he mattered.—SE
* In early November 1981, Dick made a difficult personal decision, choosing to stay in Fullerton to be near Tessa and Christopher rather than moving to the Bay Area to continue a relationship with a married woman. This decision is framed here in terms of biblical morality. 2-3-74, he says, transformed him into someone who could not continue down the path the relationship was leading him. Though elsewhere Dick is deeply concerned with free will’s absolute victory over determinism, he presents this as a decision made by God on his behalf, asserting that he really had no choice. Compare this with his statements on the assistance he gave to Covenant House, which he described as a “new act” not governed by normal rules of incentive or even causation. In any case, it’s clear that Dick believed that a pre-1974 PKD would have made a very different decision in this situation.—GM