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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Kindle Edition
A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary writings.
Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick’s brilliant, and epic, final work.
In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called “2-3-74,” a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe “transformed into information.” In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy.
In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick’s life and work.
The e-book includes a sample chapter from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.
“A dyspeptic dystopian’s mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling.”—Kirkus Reviews- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateNovember 8, 2011
- File size24524 KB
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From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Exegesis of PHILIP K. DICK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Copyright © 2011 Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa HackettAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-547-54925-5
Contents
INTRODUCTION AND EDITORS' NOTE by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson...............................................................................................................................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................................................................................xxvTHE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK Annotated by Simon Critchley, Steve Erickson, David Gill, N. Katherine Hayles, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Gabriel Mckee, Richard Doyle, and the editors.....................1AFTERWORD: A Stairway to Eleusis: PKD, Perennial Philosopher by Richard Doyle.....................................................................................................................897ENDNOTES............................................................................................................................................................................................901GLOSSARY............................................................................................................................................................................................917ABOUT THE EDITORS AND ANNOTATORS....................................................................................................................................................................937INDEXES.............................................................................................................................................................................................939Introduction
1.The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact. Also, it is a fact that the suffering of the individual animal is so great that it arouses an ultimate and absolute abhorrence and pity in us when we are confronted by it. This is the essence of tragedy: the collision of two absolutes. Absolute suffering leads to — is the means to — absolute beauty. Neither absolute should be subordinated to the other. But this is not how it is: the suffering is subordinated to the value of the art produced. Thus the essence of horror underlies our realization of the bedrock nature of the universe.
This passage was written by the American novelist Philip K. Dick in 1980. Taken alone, the handful of lines might seem to be an extract from a lucid and elegant fugue on metaphysics and ontology — an inquiry, in other words, into matters of being and the purposes of consciousness, suffering, and existence itself. This particular passage would not strike anyone versed in philosophical or theological discourse as violently original, apart from an intriguing sequence of metaphorical slippages — printed, forged, extracted, converted — and the almost subliminal conflation of "the universe" with a work of art.
What makes the passage unusual is the context in which it arose and the other kinds of writing that surround it. Despite a tone of conclusiveness, the passage represents a single inkling, passing in the night, among many thousands in the vast compilation of accounts of his own visionary experiences and insights that Dick committed to paper between 1974 and 1982. The topics — apart from suffering, pity, the nature of the universe, and the essence of tragedy — include three-eyed aliens; robots made of DNA; ancient and suppressed Christian cults that in their essential beliefs forecasted the deep truths of Marxist theory; time-travel; radios that continue playing after being unplugged; and the true nature of the universe as revealed in the writings of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and in Robert Altman's film Three Women.
The majority of these writings, that is to say, are neither familiar nor wholly lucid nor, largely, elegant — nor were they intended, for the most part, for publication. Even when Dick, who was an autodidact if ever there was one, recapitulates some chestnut of philosophical or theological speculation, his own philosophical and theological writings remain unprecedented in their riotous urgency, their metaphorical verve, their self-satirizing charisma, and their lonely intimacy (as well as in their infuriating repetitiveness, stubbornness, insecurity, and elusiveness). They are unprecedented, in other words, because Philip K. Dick is Philip K. Dick, one of the more brilliant and unusual minds to make itself known to the twentieth century even before this (mostly) unpublished trove now comes to light.
Dick came to call this writing his "exegesis." The process of its production was frantic, obsessive, and, it may be fair to say, involuntary. The creation of the Exegesis was an act of human survival in the face of a life-altering crisis both intellectual and emotional: the crisis of revelation. No matter how resistant we may find ourselves to this ancient and unfashionable notion, to approach the exegesis from any angle at all a reader must first accept that the subject is revelation, a revelation that came to the person of Philip K. Dick in February and March of 1974 and subsequently demanded, for the remainder of Dick's days on earth, to be understood. Its pages represent Dick's passionate commitment to explicating the glimpse with which he had been awarded or cursed — not for the sake of his own psyche, nor for the cause of the salvation of humankind, but precisely because those two concerns seemed to him to be one and the same.
The attempt eventually came to cover over eight thousand sheets of paper, largely handwritten. Dick often wrote through the night, running an idea through its paces over as many as a hundred sheets during a sleepless night or in a series of nights. These feats of superhuman writing are astonishing to contemplate; they impressed even an established graphomaniacal writer like Dick, who had once written seven novels in a single year. The fundamental themes of the exegesis come as no surprise. The body of work that established Dick's reputation — his forty-odd realist and surrealist novels written between 1952 and his death in 1982 — concerns itself with questions like "What is it to be human?" and "What is the nature of the universe?" These metaphysical, ethical, and ontological themes enmesh his work, even from its very beginnings in domestic melodrama, science fiction adventure, and humor, in an atmosphere of philosophical inquiry.
Dick increasingly came to view his earlier writings — specifically his science fiction novels of the 1960s — as an intricate and unconscious precursor to his visionary insights. Thus, he began to use them, as much as any ancient text or the encyclopedia Britannica, as a source for his investigations. never, to our knowledge, has a novelist borne down with such eccentric concentration on his own oeuvre, seeking to crack its code as if his life depended on it. The writing in these pages represents, perhaps above all, a laboratory of interpretation in the most absolute and open-ended sense of the word. When Dick began to write and publish novels based on the visionary material unearthed in the exegesis, he commenced interpreting those as well. So, as these writings accumulated, they also became self-referential: the exegesis is a study of, among other things, itself.
Fully situating this text's genesis within the flamboyant and heartbreaking life story of Philip K. Dick is beyond our reach in this introduction. We commend you to Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, published in 1989 and thankfully still in print. Sutin's biography finds its limitations only in the sense that neither he nor any other commentator in the years immediately following Dick's death, however persuaded of the unique relevance and appeal of his writing, could have predicted the expansion in its reputation and influence in the subsequent decades.
What will be needed by a reader coming to the exegesis, however, whether familiar or not with Dick's great novels, is a brief encapsulation of what both Dick and Sutin call "2-3-74" — meaning, simply, February and March of 1974 — for the simple reason that Dick's endless sequence of interpretations derive from that initial period of visions and a handful of external experiences that surrounded them (some of which, frankly, challenge credulity).
Whether interpreting a happening, memory, vision, or dream, Dick in his haste rarely bothers to set down the source events as scrupulously as we might wish — testament to his eagerness to begin his fierce private excavation of their meaning. After all, he understood to what he referred. Except for those lucky instances when Dick retraces his steps to their source, or in the letters to others that (mercifully for the reader) represent this wild journey's inception point, Dick explicates events, but rarely narrates them. Sutin observes:
The events of 2-3-74 and after are unusual, even bizarre. There are scenes of tender beauty, as when Phil administered the Eucharist to [his son] Christopher. There are instances of inexplicable foresight, as when he diagnosed his son's hernia. And there are episodes, like the Xerox missive, that foster skepticism. For some, the visions and voices will constitute evidence of grace. Others, both atheists and religionists, will doubt 2-3-74 for these very reasons.
So, what happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974? Among the mysterious events he chews over in these pages, the first, dark precursor to his visions was a break-in at his home in San Rafael, California, in November 1971 when someone blew up the file cabinet in his office. Candidates range from drug dealers to Black Panthers to various clandestine authorities, a few of which undoubtedly had Dick on their watch lists. Dick never settled on a single explanation for the break-in, but his fascinated, terrified rehearsals of this event set the stage for the deductive explosion to follow. It was then that Philip K. Dick's life began to resemble, as many have observed, a Philip K. Dick novel.
Then to 1974: Dick now lived in orange county, with a wife and young child. After receiving a dose of sodium pentothal during a visit to the dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick went home and later opened his door to a pharmacy delivery-girl bearing a painkiller and wearing a gold necklace depicting a fish, which she identified as a sign used by early Christians. At that moment, by his testimony, Dick experienced "anamnesis" — that sudden, discorporating slippage into vast and total knowledge that he would spend the rest of his life explicating, or exegeting.
Yet that doorway meeting with the fish necklace was only the first vision. in March Dick enjoyed two separate, unsleeping, nightlong episodes of visual psychedelia, the second of which he describes memorably as "hundreds of thousands of absolutely terrific modern art pictures as good as any ever exhibited ... more than all the modern art pictures that exist put together." next, he found himself compelled to perform a home baptism on his son, Christopher. Then he was visited by a "red and gold plasmatic entity," which he came to call, variously, Ubik, the logos, Zebra, or the plasmate. He also heard dire messages on his radio (which played whether or not it was plugged into the wall).
Readers will learn here of the "Xerox missive" — a mailed broadside of some sort, possibly from an ordinary basement Communist organization, which Dick understood as a dire test of his new and visionary self-protective instinct: it needed to be disposed of. Dick believed that he was inhabited by another personality with different habits and character, someone more forceful and decisive than himself — in the exegesis he auditions various candidates for this role — who steps in to fire his agent and field the Xerox missive. Our hero sees "Rome, Rome, everywhere," in a vision of iron bars and scurrying outlaw Christians; he came to call this vision of the world the Black Iron Prison, or BIP for short. A cat died, and the apartment was flooded with memorial light. Most stirring, a pink beam informed Dick of a medical crisis that threatened the life of his son, a diagnosis confirmed by doctors.
Beyond 1974, he endured voices, visions, and prophetic dreams too numerous to list here — all to be enfolded, by the writer, into the cascade of interpretation of those earlier events. A reader will learn how readily and fluently a new revelation transforms Dick's sense of the "core facts" of 2-3-74, which never sit still but adapt to a flux of analysis, paraphrase, and doubt. Illuminating them fully was Dick's subsequent lifework. Why should it be simple for us?
2.
The journey of the exegesis from a chaos of paperwork stored, after Dick's death, in a garage in Sonoma, California, to this (noncomprehensive) publication is still, if not as unlikely as its creation in the first place — what could be? — a saga in itself. When Dick died in 1982, the exegesis was still a pile of papers in his apartment. Dick's friend Paul Williams, then executor of his literary estate, sorted the fragments into the ninety-one file folders that still house it. (Williams's provisional organizational choices, in the absence of other guides, remain evident in the form in which we present the material here.) The exegesis spent the next several years in Williams's garage in Glen Ellen.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Dick's reputation had gone underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it had never been very far overground to begin with, and his stature with publishers was nonexistent. Working with Dick's agent, Russ Galen, Williams found remarkable success inventing Dick's posthumous career as we now know it, guiding the out-of-print novels into republication and a place in literary culture more secure than Dick probably ever imagined for himself. A number of unpublished novels — coherent, finished manuscripts that in almost every case had already made the publishers' rounds and been rejected — were also brought to light.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Exegesis of PHILIP K. DICK Copyright © 2011 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett. Excerpted by permission of HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B005LVR7DQ
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (November 8, 2011)
- Publication date : November 8, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 24524 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 1475 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #512,482 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #399 in American Literature Anthologies
- #914 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #1,060 in Philosophy Metaphysics
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About the author
Over a writing career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film; notably: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
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Combining aspects of Neoplatonism, Taoism, Gnosticism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, Christianity, Judaism, as well as the writings of Schopenhauer, Jung, and Meister Eckart, among others, Dick analyzes and attempts to understand a life-altering hallucinogenic experience he had in 1974 that led him to question all of his previous conceptions about reality. In the process he seeks to find meaning amidst the suffering afflicting all mortal creatures.
According to Dick, this suffering is unjustifiable. It is a tragic, recurring, universal experience of pain and martyrdom. Each creature’s agony and death, Dick perceives as a re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion.
“I have seen the Savior wrapped in the crazed, crapping, dirty, wild body of an animal, then transformed and eternally . . . ,” he poignantly writes, describing a vision he had of his dying cat, Pinky. “Christ in deliberate disguise, and the passion fulfilled in victory: resurrection.” By becoming at that moment one with the tortured, debased creature, Christ acts as surrogate Dick believes, and this voluntary sacrifice, Dick believes, lies at “the heart of Christianity.”
Dick’s version of Christianity is a far cry from the restrictive, repressive, politically and socially conservative dogmas associated with most churches. It is, in his words, “revolutionary,” harkening back to Christianity’s beginnings as a subversive, underground religious cult persecuted by Rome. It is a Christianity incorporating aspects of other religious philosophies and inclusive of all species, from the lowliest insect to the most advanced forms of life. “There is nothing we know that the creatures don’t know; they are our equals,” he maintains. “The slain God proliferates down through the cosmos to each rat and cockroach.” Since each living being is, in a sense, a microcosm of the divine, Dick points out that by destroying the ecosphere, “we are killing not only the life-chain of our planet but our own God . . . God voluntarily sacrifices himself to save man: that man may live, but this time not just man but the entire life-chain, the ecosphere as an indivisible entity.”
Throughout his writings in this collection he continually challenges and revises his theories. At times he succumbs to abject despair, seeing the world as an entrapping illusion of perpetual pain whereby “each creature is born, suffers, dies, is again born, forever and ever, because the world soul . . . has fragmented into billions of bits--made the primordial and primary mistake of taking the spatiotemporal realm as real, thus plunging itself into enslavement and multiplicity. For a few,” he suggests, “there is a way out: discovery that the spatiotemporal world is not real, an ascent back up into unity and freedom,” but for most, he envisions perpetual entrapment, an endless wheel of suffering “unless some great savior comes and frees us en masse.” At other times, he even doubts his own sanity, the validity of his revelations and the possibility of ever attaining release from the “epistomological hell” of imprisoned consciousness, “a sort of normal madness” whereby the mind, in a “recirculating closed loop . . . simply monitors its own thoughts forever.”
Although the Exegesis is very dense, often rambling and sometimes incoherent, I find it immensely intriguing. In addition to the paradigm-shattering insights, vast eclectic knowledge and brilliant intellectual analysis, Dick’s concern for animals and oppressed humanity imbues the book with compassion as well as visionary wisdom. Radical and revelatory, Dick exposes the delusory, enslaving systems of control that prevent us from achieving our full creative potential. He, like David Lynch, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, Edvard Munch, and other fearlessly subjective artists, explores the horror, tragedy, and beauty of our fragile existence.
After reading many of the great books of history, from the East and West, I have come to the conclusion that Philip K.Dick's Exegesis is not only unique but it is one of the best--in the field of philosophy and theology. I stand by that astounding estimate with great confidence. The book's wisdom, searching questions, and convoluted thinking--based not on nonsense or "clever ideas" but Reality--is profoundly impressive. Mr. Dick thought and studied for many years, delved deeply into the Greeks, mysticism, early Christianity, German philosophy, Hindu thinking and much much more. The depth and brilliance of his thinking, also the compassion, is astouding--and very alive, not like some of the PHD philosophers. The book is not disciplined, it is not neat and tidy: it is rambling and challenging--but deeply rewarding. PKD, in my mind, was not loopy or deranged: he had tapped into essential truths about reality, himself and life. And, incredibly enough,he touched the source which Plotinus called the One, and this experience fueled the sincerity and depth of the great Exegesis. In his own inimitable way he explored the same truth of all the great thinkers and wise men: from Heraclitus to Lao Tzu, to St. Paul and Christ, to Boehme and Blake in the late Middle Ages, to the modern era with such stellar minds as Simone Weil and Franklin Merril. Strange, but really not so strange, that America, and California, would produce one of the lights of deep philosophy, and that this person would have a relatively humble background as a writer of pulp science fiction-- in his early days. One caveat: as said by others, read Valis, Ubik and others first. Exegesis is a product of Mr. Dick's whole life and career, the magnificent culmination of a remarkable career.
A brief addition: since writing this review I have gone back to Exegesis many times and have still not finished it. It does take time. But there are some real holes in the book that I now see better: Dick repeats himself extensively, he gets into ruts, and veers into pages of what I think is nonsense. He is extremely clever,he is a philosopher right on the edge of the abyss, and he had some powerful revelation, an enlightenment experience, but lacked an inner discipline, not something rigid or formal, but a sense of Self with a capital S. Other luminous genius' of great distinction like William Blake and Boehme still had their feet on the ground. I cannot quite explain my reservations, but they remain. The book is still, I said it before, unique in the annals of Western civilization and that is a remarkable accomplishment.
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Reviewed in Brazil on October 7, 2021
Alla fine ha avuto un'esperienza mistica, e ha capito tutto.