I’m participating in the Philip K. Dick-of-the-month-club and Exegesis support group along with some other book nerds in the blogosphere, having decided that it was a good idea to solider through Dick’s Exegesis en masse rather than in isolation—throwing bloggers over-the-top to wade through the trenches of Dick’s mind, dodging the paranoid shrapnel of Dick’s most surreal ideas, and his bizarre analysis of the most alien of authors… himself. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Previous posts in this series:
So far, I am around 156 pages or 16% into the Exegesis. It doesn’t look like anyone else has posted anything PKD-related this month, so I’ll get the group started.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m fighting off a head cold, so gathering the focus to read anything without pictures has been challenging at best, but the second set of 75 pages was an uphill slog. This isn’t to say that there are fascinating moments. But as Dick begins to move on from exploring the visions he’s had, he spends more and more time attempting to rationalize and understand them using Psychology Today, Christian Gnosticism, Greek mythology, and pure speculation. And there’s plenty of mind-bending answers he discovers, explaining them with all the certainty of a crazy person.
His base ideas revolve around the flow of consciousness and its relation to Time and God, the eternal factors; by now he thinks that a divine being—the Logos or Ubik—is sending out telepathic messages, and he sees himself as having accidentally unlocked the secret to receiving them… and is working on the interpretation. “Each of us is a vast storage drum of taped information which we purposefully modify, each of us differently,” he explains, part of his idea of the brain acting as a filter or transmitter for ideas—something postulated by William James, Henri Bergson, and Aldous Huxley, among others, though I don’t think theirs included “ideas are generated by the divine and sent backward in time.” And there’s some attempt to analyze elements of his past fiction’s exploration of what is real, what is consciousness, and what is merely a cardboard cutout imitation, tying that back to his current theories as examples of the thoughts sent to him by God.
Still, some of his notes make it too easy to simply label Dick as crazy; the certainty of which he talks about “spatial time” and a divine being sending its thoughts to us backward through time remind me of the Time Cube crank website. In one dream, he relieves a past life as a Christian hunted in Rome; in another, out of the word “Jesus” springs the word “Zagreus,” name of a god associated with Dionysus, and out of that comes “Zeus,” forming a new trinity of this divine being in Dick’s head. I’m particularly curious what Claudia Bush thought when she received these letters… some of them are hard to follow, and others simply look mad.
One of those “my-god-he-must-be-crazy” elements is his obituary for Anthony Boucher. The first editor of F&SF, long-standing mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, and a great writer in his own right, Boucher’s early death from lung cancer at the age of 57 was a heavy blow to the literary world. Dick expresses his condolences in a surreal piece he first submitted to a magazine of Sufi mysticism, included here from a version mailed to Boucher’s widow. It also deals with some elements of the Exegesis and Dick’s ongoing struggles; while it starts off well by quoting Ted Sturgeon, and goes on to compare real life to an early story of Dick’s that Boucher bought (“Roog”), but breaks down somewhere in the middle when Dick starts talking about a cat he adopted that also died of cancer, which he realizes was the reincarnation of Tony Boucher. To be honest, if someone sent me that obituary I’m not sure what I’d think; it’s not hard to see how Dick got his reputation as an addict even though he’s not supposed to have taken drugs more than two or three times.
Of interest to PKD fans, there’s references to his work-in-progress To Scare the Dead (the unwritten sequel to The Man in the High Castle) including a long note on plot elements, along with his plot notes for VALISystem A. These offer some aggregated notes and thoughts he had come up with before even putting pen to paper, less a plot “structure” and more a general outline with some ideas he wanted to include. I’ve always been interested in how writers plan their works, and so it’s fascinating to see the ideas Dick came up with before he really started writing them—he provides a general outline, various thoughts on the plot and how it should develop, an interesting contrast with what it turned out as: VALISystem A was published posthumously as Radio Free Albemuth. Both novels incorporate themes Dick was working through in his Exegesis; To Scare The Dead has a protagonist who discovers the hemispheres of his brain are going different directions in time, while Radio Free Albemuth… well, that’s for another post.
antyphayes said:
A journey into PKD indeed. I’m sorry I’m not there to take some of the random flak, sarge, but maybe one day I will be brave enough to wade in. That letter sounds like a cracker. I vaguely remember reading an address/lecture of his from the 70s once that sort of broke down into some of his mad obsessions half way through (or maybe I’m just imagining this?). Take care and watch out for the shape shifting aliens, they’re the worst.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
haha, thanks! It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read, but it is one of the most imposing books I’ve ever read… especially as it weighs in at over 900 pages. That alone should deter some people, before they even get to Ubik broadcasting thoughts backward in time into Dick’s mind…
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Richard Fahey said:
I haven’t read “The Exegesis”.Based on what I know of his 1970s experiences and “Valis”,perhaps they should be called “The Chronicles of Sadness”,which doesn’t make it very attractive to me,but because I haven’t read them,I probably shouldn’t pass judgement.I would hope however, that like his other non-fiction book,”The Dark Haired Girl”, it can be judged upon literary merit,not his proximity to chaos.Otherwise I feel it’s just going to be a lengthy journal of sad decline in a long and brilliant career.I would hope I’m wrong,but however fascinating it is,there doesn’t seem to be anything in your review to indicate anything different.
He had experienced visions in the previous decade,such as the one that inspired “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”,so this was hardly anything new really.The main difference was I know,that unlike the previous one,the encounter was with a divine force for the power of good.I suppose after so many years of thinking that the living universe was evil,he needed salvation.Perhaps that’s why it became so serious and personal for him.
It changed the course of his life and literary career.It does make me feel distant from it.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
I wouldn’t call it so much a “chronicle of sadness” or “journal of sad decline,” as mentioned below I think it was obviously quite important to him at the time and I can kind of empathize with his belief/wish to have unlocked some great secret of the universe which only he could understand. While it was frustrating for him, and while he certainly came up with things that aren’t quite rational, I think humans have believed in crazier things… religion is full of prophets and miracles that are not “normal” or rational, and the Exegesis was, if anything, PKD’s moment of religion/faith. Perhaps he did feel the need for salvation, as you say; it’s something I forgot to mention in these posts, but from some of his comments he seemed affected by Watergate and Nixon, like the concept of innocence had been snuffed out for him. Maybe this was replacing the rational bad with an irrational good. Far too much to interpret, as the Exegesis is a lens into a confused but frenetic mind…
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Richard Fahey said:
I don’t think what he experienced is any more irrational than orthodox religion.He had the courage and insight to interpret something that affected him personally.
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Palmer Eldritch said:
Recently, I’ve been slowly wading through this, as a break from my primary readings. Perhaps I’ll move it more to the front and join the club discussion.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
The more the merrier; we’re only just getting started and so are still wading into this relatively fresh — the link in the post goes back to the main page, where Nikki collects all the posts everyone has been making.
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Anton said:
I’m behind on this and just posted my thoughts on the first 50 pages last night. It is interesting how he is indeed completely certain about some of his mental phenomena. I am of the opinion that just because something is happening inside your head, doesn’t mean it’s not real, at least to yourself.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
I definitely agree—it was obviously very real, and very important, to PKD at the time. I don’t think he would have went through the trouble of doing all that research and theorizing if it wasn’t, and I can imagine how it must feel to have discovered this incredibly important secret. But his certainty kind of bugs me; he seems to instantly come to conclusions and stick with those as truth. Maybe it’ll become clearer when we’re seeing his notes rather than see him explain his current theories to others.
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Cavershamragu said:
Really enjoyed your post – and indeed, will admit that I am more likely to read what you have to say about the exegesis than actually try and make my way through it …
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Thanks Sergio, and I can’t say as I blame you 🙂 It’s sort of the reading equivalent of a marathon.
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Cavershamragu said:
More of a sprint man myself … 🙂
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transrealfiction said:
I just finished reading your post and the comments and looked at my twitter feed which had a link to this: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-unsettling-mystery-of-the-creepiest-channel-on-youtube I’ll blame synchronicity.
Apologies for linking to a page elsewhere about an unrelated topic but the content seems like something PKD might have written about, either in his fiction or in the Exegesis!
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nikki @bookpunks said:
I am finally catching up and about to start reading this 75 pages myself. Home sick from work today though, which means I will also be tackling these with a headcold, which sounds like it also just might be groggy enough to appreciate this. Sounds like a far more ridiuclous 75 pages than the others. *braces for impact*
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