The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

FREDRIC JAMESON EULOGIZED HIM AS

THE SHAKESPEARE OF SCIENCE FICTION,

AND URSULA LE GUIN CHRISTENED HIM

OUR "HOMEGROWN BORGES." HE IS THE

AUTHOR OF MORE THAN 100 STORIES

AND 44 NOVELS. THE FILM ADAPTA-

TIONS OF HIS WORK, INCLUDING BLADE

RUNNER, MINORITY REPORT AND THE

ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, HAVE GENER-

ATED CLOSE TO A BILLION DOLLARS AT

THE BOX OFFICE. IN HIS LAST BOOK,

A COLLECTION OF LETTERS, JOURNAL

ENTRIES AND GRAPHS, HE PROVES HIM-

SELF TO BE ALL THE THINGS HE'S BEEN

CHARGED WITH —A SELF-DESCRIBED

'FICTIONALIZING PHILOSOPHER," A

MADMAN AND A MYSTIC

THE FOLLOWING LETTER BY AMERICAN novelist Philip K. Dick to literary critic Peter Fitting represents a single inkling, passing in the night, among many thousands. It is part of a vast compilation of accounts of his own visionary experiences and insights that Dick committed to paper between the years 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 forecast the deep truths of Marxist theory; time travet; radios that continue playing after you unplug them from the wall; and how the true nature of the universe may be discerned, variously, in the writings of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, in (continued on page 128)

PHILIP K. DICK

(continued from page 97) 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.

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.

The attempt eventually came to cover more than 8,000 sheets of paper, largely handwritten. Dick often wrote through the night, running an idea through its paces over as many as a hundred sheets in a sleepless night or series of nights. These episodes—feats—of superhuman writing are astonishing to contemplate; they impressed even an established graphomaniacal writer

like Dick, who'd once written seven novels in a single year. Their fundamental themes come as no surprise. The body of work that has established Dick's reputation—his 40-odd realist and surrealist novels, includ­ing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the film Blade Runner), A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and the Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle, 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?"

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 these, as much as any ancient text or the Encyclopaedia 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, and his letter to Fitting provides a fascinating sample of that exhaus­tive and otherworldly study.

—-Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson

Letter to Peter Fitting—June 28, 1974

Dear Peter,

In regards to some of the intellectual, theoretical subjects all of us discussed the day you and your friends were here to visit, I recall in particular my statement to you (which I believe you got on your tape, too) that "the universe is moving backward," a rather odd statement on the face of it I admit. What I meant by that is something which at the time I could not really express, having had an experience, several in fact, but not having the terms. Now, by having read further, I have some sort of terms, and would like to describe some of my personal experience using, in a pragmatic way, the concept of tachyons, which are supposed to be particles of cosmic origin (I am quot­ing Arthur Koestler) which fly faster than light and consequently in a reversed time direction. "They would thus," Koestler says, "carry information from the future into our present, as light and X-rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote past of the universe into our now and here. In the light of these devel­opments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena." And so forth (Harper's, July 1974).

I had been for several months experi­menting with something I read about while doing research on the brain, in particular in new discoveries on split-brain phenom­ena, for my novel A Scanner Darkly; I had come across the fact that the brain can transduce external fields of both high and low frequency providing that the ther­mal factor is quite low. Also, I had read about which vitamins in megadosages can improve neural firing and produce vastly increased brain efficiency. I began attempt­ing, on the basis of what I knew, to bring on both the hemispheres of my own brain using the recipe for megadoses of the water soluble vitamins; at the same time I tried again and again to exclude the ordinary external electrical fields that we customar­ily tune into: man-made fields, which we consider "signal," and at the same time I tried to directly transduce what we usually think of as "noise," in particular weak natu­ral electrical fields.

One night I found myself flooded with colored graphics which resembled the non-objective paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, thousands of them one after the other, so fast as to resemble "flash cut" used in movie work. This went on for eight hours. Each picture was balanced, had excellent har­mony and possessed idiomatic style—that of a well-known nonobjective artist. I could not account for what I was seeing (this took place in the dark, and was evidently phos-phene activity within my eyes, but the source of the stimulation of the phosphenes was

an enigma to me at the time), but I was cer­tain that those tens of thousands of lovely, balanced, quite professional and aesthetic harmonious graphics could not be originat­ing within my own mind or brain. I have no facility with graphics, and besides, there were too many of them; even Picasso, whose style predominated for over an hour, never actually painted so many, although he very likely saw that many in his own head.

In later studies about the brain I learned of an inhibiting brain fluid called GABA, which when its effect drops drastically, which is to say when an external stimulus causes disinhibition and firing of a programmed sequence up to then inhibited, such col­ored graphics are often experienced. So I concluded that massive—unique in my life, in fact—disinhibition had taken place, although I could not identify the external stimulus, nor comprehend the programmed or engrammed sequences. At the same time (in the days following) I found myself pos­sessed with enormous energy and did a lot of unusual things. This, in fact, is what prob­ably raised my blood pressure so much that my doctor had to hospitalize me. I was con­stantly active, and in new ways. This tends to confirm the theory of massive disinhibition and unusual neural firing along hitherto unusual neural pathways, perhaps an entire hemisphere of the brain held in readiness until then—I did not know for what.

All this may have been induced by the huge doses of water soluble vitamins I took, gram after gram of vitamin C, for instance. But I doubt it. At the same time as I expe­rienced the release of psychic energy (to use Esther Harding's phrase, picked up by Jung), I became conscious of pathic language directed at me from all creatures, and finally, as it spread—and this is the point I'm getting at—from the direction of the sky, especially at night. I had a keen intuition that information

of some kind was arriving at us all, in fact bombarding us, from sidereal space.

For a time I imagined that an ESP exper­iment had somehow by accident involved me: the long-range transmission of graphics. I wrote to a lab in Leningrad and told them about my experience, having at the time the feeling that the point of origin of these sig­nals was far distant, and hence in the USSR. Now I believe the point of origin was even farther: I think that I somehow for a short time transduced tachyon bombardment, which comes to us constantly, and which ani­mals utilize to engram them into performing what we call "instinctive actions." I had been consciously trying to transduce external weak fields, which I know to be possible, and I know that when this is done successfully that the brain's efficiency is increased; how­ever, I had no preconception of what fields I might transduce—except that I felt they would be natural and not man-made—and what information, if any, they might con­tain. I was hoping only for increased neural efficiency. I got more: actual information about the future, for during the next three months, almost each night, during sleep I was receiving information in the form of printouts: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers—sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes oddly, in the form of a baby's cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningful infor­mation was written and typed, and finally galley proofs held up for me to read which I was told in my dream "contained prophecies about the future," and during the last two weeks a huge book, again and again, with page after page of printed lines.

Without the tachyon theory I would lack any kind of scientific formulation, and would have to declare that "God has shown me the sacred tablets in which the future is written"

and so forth, as did our forefathers, back on the deserts of Israel under the sky as they tended their sleeping flocks. Koestler also points out that according to modern theory the universe is moving from chaos to form; therefore tachyon bombardment would con­tain information which expressed a greater degree of gestalt than similar information about the present; it would, to us at this time continuum, seem more living, more animated by a conscious spirit, to us giving rise to the concept of God. This would definitely give rise to the idea of purpose, in particular pur­pose lying in the future. Thus we now have a scientific method of considering the notion of teleology, I think, which is why I am writ­ing you now, to express this, my own sense of final causes, as we discussed that day.

Much of this printed-out information arriving in dreams has had a teaching, shaping and directing quality; it tends to inform and guide me, and make me aware of what I should do. It literally educates me, and I'm sure each small creature, each bug and plant and animal and fish, has the same sense of it. I've watched my cat, now, as he sits out on the sundeck at night; he is beyond doubt considering the sidereal world above him and not moving objects below— when he comes in the house an hour or two later he seems modified, as if he has been taught during that period and knows it. I think this happens to us all but I managed consciously to transduce above the thresh­old of awareness, which is unusual but not unique, and became aware of this constant natural and normal process which shapes all life from the future, as Koestler describes. It is often described as the "Divine Plan," or better yet "Continual Creation." Any such terms will do, but I regard it for my pur­pose as a continual informational printout from the future which directs us all, not in the coercive sense that the past does, but experienced—and rightly so—as volition. As, so to speak, free will. This term sounds right to me each morning when I wake up and reflect on the pages of print I've seen during the night; I am not forced to do what the information brings to my attention; I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.

For well over two months I was convinced that the Holy Spirit, which is to say God, was directing me, and in a sense this is true; it is a matter of semantics: at one time these would have been the only terms we had available to us; we would have talked about a divine vision and so forth. What I think now is that more modern terms can be bet­ter applied; the future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmit­ted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to, by a very informed Entity: that of all cre­ating as it lies ahead of us in time.

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick

From The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Jonathan Lelhem and Pamela Jackson, available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in November.