Philip K. Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick

Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

by Philip K. Dick

Edited and with an Introduction by Lawrence Sutin

ISBN 0-679-42644-2

eVersion 4.0 / Important Formatting Notes at End - Please Read Before Converting

START Back Cover

Nonfiction/Science Fiction

"A wide-ranging selection of free-wheeling philosophical essays and journal

entries; humorous, thoughtful speeches; and plot scenarios. . . . For both casual and

serious Dick fans, The Shifting Realities unearths some gems." -- Boston Phoenix

Philip K. Dick was both our most brilliant science fiction writer and a visionary

philosopher who chose to couch his speculations in fiction. For, as he wrote about

androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also

posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human?

This unprecedented collection of Dick's literary and philosophical writings acquaints us

with the astonishing range and eloquence of his lifelong inquiry.

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick includes autobiography, critiques of

science fiction, and dizzyingly provocative essays such as "The Android and the Human"

and "It You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." Readers will

also find two chapters of a proposed sequel to Dick's award-winning novel The Man in

the High Castle and selections from the metaphysical Exegesis that inspired his classic

VALIS.

Witty, erudite, and exploding with intellectual shrapnel, this is the last testament of

an American original. This collection confirms Dick's reputation as one of the foremost

imaginative thinkers of the twentieth century.

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To Mab, for her ceaseless fascination and patience with Philip K. Dick, and to

Henry, always the most attentive reader of the Exegesis.

The editor would also like to thank Douglas A. Mackey for his kind assistance in

tracing prior publication data for certain of the writings inluded herein.

Contents

Introduction

Part One - Autobiographical Writings

Two Fragments from the Mainstream Novel Gather Yourselves Together (1949)

"Introducing the Author" (1953)

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1968)

"Self Portrait" (1968)

"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968, 1972)

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972)

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1973)

"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" (1976)

"The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976)

"Strange Memories of Death" (1979, 1984)

"Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview," Conducted by Frank C. Bertrand (1980,

1988)

Part Two - Writings on Science Fiction and Related Ideas

"Pessimism in Science Fiction" (1955)

"Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert

Heinlein?" (1966)

"The Double: Bill Symposium": Replies to "A Questionnaire for Professional SF Writers

and Editors" (1969)

"That Moon Plaque" (1969)

"Who Is an SF Writer?" (1974)

"Michelson-Morley Experiment Reappraised" (1979)

"Introduction" to Dr. Bloodmoney (1979, 1985)

"Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980)

"Book Review" of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980)

"My Definition of Science Fiction" (1981)

"Prediction" by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981)

"Universe Makers. . . and Breakers" (1981)

"Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1981)

Part Three - Works Related to The Man in the High Castle and Its Proposed Sequel

"Naziism and The High Castle" (1964)

"Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974)

The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle

(1964)

Part Four - Plot Proposals and Outlines

"Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth" (1967)

"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967)

"TV Series Idea" (1967)

"Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968)

Part Five - Essays and Speeches

"Drugs, Hallucination, and the Quest for Reality" (1964)

"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" (1965)

"The Android and the Human" (1972)

"Man, Android, and Machine" (1976)

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" (1977)

"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978, 1985)

"Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978)

"The Tagore Letter" (1981)

Part Six - Selections from the Exegesis

From the Exegesis (c. 1975-80)

Introduction

BY LAWRENCE SUTIN

This is a first-time collection, in book form, of significant nonfiction writings --

essays, journals, plot scenarios, speeches, and interviews -- by Philip K. Dick from

throughout his career. These writings establish, I believe, that Dick was not only a

visionary creator of speculative fiction but also an illuminating and original thinker on

issues ranging from the merging of quantum physics and metaphysics; to the potential

scope of virtual reality and its unforeseen personal and political consequences; to the

discomforting relation between schizophrenia (and other psychiatric diagnoses) and

societal "joint hallucinations"; to, not least, the challenge to primary human values posed

in an age of technological distance and spiritual despair.

The bulk of these writings have either never before been published, or have

appeared only in obscure and out-of-print publications. Dick saw himself first and

foremost as a fiction writer, and there can be no question that it is in his stories and his

novels -- both science fiction (SF) and mainstream -- that Dick's most permanent legacy

resides. As for his nonfiction writings, those few essays and speeches that he published

in his lifetime attracted scant attention. In certain cases, this was justified -- their style

and quality were markedly uneven; indeed, the same may be said with respect to the

contents of this volume, many of which -- the Exegesis entries -- Dick had no intention of

publishing in his lifetime and hence no reason to revise and polish. (He may -- there is

no direct evidence in his private writings to support the supposition -- have hoped that

they be discovered and published after his death.)

But the lack of attention paid to Dick's nonfictional works is due to factors that go

beyond unevenness of quality. To this day one finds, in SF critical circles, sharp

resistance to the notion that Dick's ideas -- divorced from the immediate entertainment

context of his fiction -- could possibly be worthy of serious consideration. It is as if, for

these critics, to declare that certain of Dick's ideas make serious sense is to diminish his

importance as the ultimate "mad" SF genius -- a patronizing role assigned him by these

selfsame critics. But it is nonsensical to maintain, in the face of the plain evidence of the

fictional texts themselves, not to mention his own writings on SF in this volume, that

Dick's ideas and his fictional realms are divisible dualities rather than the permeable

whole of a life's work. Thankfully, this kind of critical parochialism is diminishing even

within the SF world. And as for the world at large, Dick is, at long last, receiving his due

as a writer of both imaginative depth and intellectual power. Indeed, the story of his

emergence into sudden literary "respectability" is a revelatory parable as to the fierce

cultural strictures that, in America, dominate the type and degree of attention paid to an

author and his works.

Philip K. Dick (1928-82), author of more than fifty volumes of novels and stories,

has become, since his death, the focus of one of the most remarkable literary

reappraisals of modern times. From his longtime status as a patronized "pulp" writer of

"trashy" science fiction, Dick has now emerged -- in the minds of a broad range of critics

and fellow artists -- as one of the most unique and visionary talents in the history of

American literature.

This astonishing turnabout in recognition of Dick is evidenced both by the

intensity of the praise bestowed on him and the range of voices that concur in it. Art

Spiegelman, author/illustrator of Maus, has written: "What Franz Kafka was to the first

half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half." Ursula Le Guin, who

has acknowledged Dick's strong influence on her own acclaimed SF novels, points to

him as "our own homegrown Borges." Timothy Leary hails Dick as "a major twenty-first-

century writer, a 'fictional philosopher' of the quantum age." Jean Baudrillard, a leader of

the postmodernist critical movement in France, cites Dick as one of the greatest

experimental writers of our era. New Age thinker Terrence McKenna writes of Dick the

philosopher as "this incredible genius, this gentle, long-suffering, beauty-worshiping

man." Dick appears on the cover of The New Republic while the critical essay within

declares that "Dick's novels demand attention. . . . He is both lucid and strange, practical

and paranoid." An electronic-music opera with a libretto based on the Dick novel Valis

premieres to great acclaim in the Pompidou Center in Paris. The renowned Mabou

Mines theater group performs a dramatic adaptation of the Dick novel Flow My Tears,

the Policeman Said in Boston and New York. Punk and industrial rock bands take their

names from Dick titles and pay homage to his books in their lyrics. Hollywood adapts a

Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a story ("I Can Remember It for

You Wholesale") into the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, while an acclaimed

French film adaptation of yet another novel (Confessions of a Crap-Artist) was released

in America in the summer of 1993 under the title Barjo. In the past two years, Dick has

been the subject of laudatory front-page features in The New York Times Book Review

and the L.A. Weekly -- the opposite poles, one might say, of an overall mainstream

acceptance. The headline for the L.A. Weekly feature sums up the thrust of the critical

turnaround: "The Novelist of the '90s Has Been Dead Eight Years."

What makes this posthumous triumph all the more wrenching is the knowledge

that, during his lifetime, Dick could succeed in reaching a wide readership only within the

"ghetto" of the (SF) genre -- a critically derided "ghetto" that effectively prevented

serious consideration of his works from without. Dick wrote a number of mainstream

literary novels (including the above-mentioned Confessions of a Crap-Artist), most of

which have been published posthumously. But the greatest of his fictional works fall

within the SF genre, which allowed Dick a conceptual and imaginative freedom that was

severely crimped by the strictures of consensual reality favored by the mainstream.

Even within the SF genre, Dick was considered something of an odd figure, with his

penchant for plots that emphasized metaphysical speculations as opposed to "hard"

science predictions. Still, the sheer vividness, dark humor, and textured detail with which

Dick rendered his spiraling alternate universes and the oh so human characters who

inhabited them won over a sizable number of SF readers. In a writing career that

spanned three decades, Dick produced a number of stories and novels that are widely

regarded as SF classics; these include Time out of Joint (1959), Martian Time-Slip

(1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly

(1977), and Valis (1981).

In 1963, Dick was awarded the highest honor that SF has to bestow: the Hugo

Award for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that exemplifies Dick's trademark

blending of SF plot structure (as to which the number one rule is constantly to amaze the

reader) and philosophical mazemaking (with a no-holds-barred skepticism that allowed

for all possibilities). Dick was fervent in his view that SF was the genre par excellence for

the exploration of new and challenging concepts.

As Dick himself explained in an epistolatory interview (with critic Frank Bertrand)

included herein: "Central to SF is the idea as dynamism. Events evolve out of an idea

impacting on living creatures and their society. The idea must always be a novelty. . . .

There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before

everything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view

and the invented world."

High Castle contains a horde of stimulating ideas, beginning with the basic plot: a

post-World War II world in which the Axis powers apparently have prevailed and the

United States is a conquered land divided between Japan (the West) and Germany (the

East). While the Japanese are relatively compassionate conquerors, the Nazis have

extended their brutal methods throughout their dominions. Evil has become, under their

reign, a palpable daily horror. One of the characters, a Swiss diplomat who is secretly

working against the Nazis, sees them as the products of a collective psychic upheaval

(described in terms that evidence Dick's indebtedness to C. G. Jung) that has obliterated

the distinction between the human and the divine by reversing the sacrificial pattern of

the Christian eucharist:

They [the Nazis] want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power

and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their

egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It

is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and

that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

But beneath this apparent, horrific reality there exists -- for those who can

experience it -- an alternate world in which the Allies are victorious and life has retained

its capacity for goodness. To reach this alternate world is no easy matter; pain and

shock may be necessary to open one's eyes, or the enlightening aid of The

Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the novel-within-the-novel in High Castle that reveals the true

state of affairs for those who read with intelligence, heart, and an open mind.

In 1974, perhaps the most tumultuous year -- for reasons shortly to be discussed

-- in his signally tumultuous life, Dick contemplated writing a novelistic sequel to High

Castle, but his inward repugnance at returning to an extended reimagining of the Nazi

mentality prevented him from completing this project. The two chapters he did complete

are published for the first time in this volume, as is the "Biographical Material on

Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974).

Dick himself would come to hope, in the final decade of his writing life, that his

own novels and stories could fulfill a role analogous to that of Abendsen for his readers:

to alert them that the consensual reality that grimly governed their daily lives (the "Black

Iron Prison," as Dick would come to call it in his philosophical journal, the Exegesis)

might not be as impregnable as it seemed. This is not to say that Dick saw himself as a

prophet or as one possessing an undeniable Truth of life (though Dick could sound --

temporarily -- convinced while exploring the possibilities of an idea that intrigued him.)

On the contrary, Dick could be a relentless critic of his own theories and beliefs. He was

also quite willing to satirize himself broadly (as the would-be mystic Horselover Fat) and

his penchant for "wild" speculations in his autobiographical novel Valis (1981): "Fat must

have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he

developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked." In his

philosophical writings, Dick would don, dwell within, and then discard one theory after

another -- as so many imaginative masks or personae -- in his quest to unravel the

mysteries of his two great themes: What is human? What is real? What makes Dick

such a unique voice, both in his fiction and -- equally -- in the nonfiction writings

collected in this book, was not the answers he reached (for he held to none), but rather

the imaginative range and depth of his questioning, and the joy and brilliance and wild

nerve with which he pursued it.

Philosophical issues were always at the heart of Dick's subject matter as a writer.

He sold his first SF story back in 1951, at age twenty-two. Even by then, his course was

set: He would explore the basic mysteries of existence and of human character. In

Michael in the 'Fifties, an unpublished novel by Kleo Mini (Dick's second wife, to whom

he was married for most of the fifties decade), the psychological makeup of the title

character is based loosely on Dick and displays the same intense scrutiny of existence

that Mini remembers in her husband at the very start of his SF writing career. Here is a

dialogue between Michael and wife Kate, based to some extent on Mini herself. Kate

speaks first:

"I think you [Michael] -- sometimes -- want to pull away from the world. Away from me, away from

everything I think of as real. Away from your house and your car and your cat. Sometimes you're very far

away from all of us. And sometimes I think I'm like a string that brings you back to earth, holds you down

to the earth."

She was right, he thought. She was real, as real as the crab grass and the kitchen table.

"Where is it you go, Michael?"

"I don't want to go anywhere, Kate. But I think there are different kinds of reality. And the car and

the house and the cat are not all there is. Living like we do -- on the edge, in a way -- we're always so

busy scraping along, trying to get by, that it keeps us, it keeps me from dealing with the other reality, the

meaning of everything."*

* I would like to thank Kleo Mini for permission to quote from Michael in the

'Fifties, which offers a valuable portrait not only of Dick but also of the

Berkeley milieu in which he came of age.

In his interview with Bertrand, Dick offered a summary of his early philosophical

influences:

I first became interested in philosophy in high school when I realized one day that all space is the

same size; it is only the material boundaries encompassing it that differ. After that there came to me the

realization (which I found later in Hume) that causality is a perception in the observer and not a datum of

external reality. In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible

existence of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to understand that the

human mind could conceive of a realm of which the empirical world was epiphenomenal. Finally I came to

believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal

realm beyond it. At this point I despaired of the veracity of sense-data. Hence in novel after novel that I

write I question the reality of the world that the characters' percept-systems report.

This condensed history of philosophical influences tells only part of the story of Dick's

development as a writer. There are, to be sure, a good number of philosophical and

spiritual perspectives that mattered greatly to Dick but are not listed above. But a more

basic factor was the difficult childhood Dick endured, which included the early divorce of

his parents, frequent Depression era cross-country moves with his financially strapped

and emotionally distant mother, and bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia that interfered

with Dick's schooling and friendships and caused his mother to have him examined by at

least two psychiatrists. One of these psychiatrists speculated that Dick might be

suffering from schizophrenia -- a diagnostic possibility that severely frightened the boy

and would haunt the grown man all his life.

Throughout Dick's speculations, there is the underlying sense of a dark pain and

of shattering experiences that had left him grappling for his place in the shared world

(koinos kosmos, in the Greek of Heraclitus, a thinker whom Dick greatly admired) and

struggling to evade the madness of solitary delusion (idios kosmos, private world; from

idios comes the English "idiot" -- one who is cut off from that which is happening around

him). Though fear lurked strongly within him, Dick insisted on staring madness in the

face and asking if it, too, could lay claim to a kind of knowledge. Thus, in "Drugs,

Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," a 1964 essay included herein, Dick argued

that what is called schizophrenic or psychotic "hallucination" may be, in many cases, the

result of extremely broad and sensitive perceptions that most "sane" persons learn to

screen out of their consciousness. The Kantian a priori categories of space and time are

examples of such screens; Kant claimed that these were necessary for the mental

ordering of phenomenal reality, which would otherwise remain a hopeless perceptual

chaos to human minds. In his essay, Dick theorized that, to the extent that our mental

and sensory awareness happens to extend beyond these socially ratified screens, any

one of us may become subject to "hallucinations" -- which are, in essence, unshared

realities. While it is possible that "mystical" insights may ensue, there is a greater

likelihood -- and a fearfully tragic one it is -- that we may find ourselves in a hell realm of

utter mental isolation:

In the light of this, the idea of hallucinating takes on a very different character; hallucinations, whether

induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we

see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the

organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity. . . . No-name entities or aspects begin to

appear, and since the person does not know what they are -- that is, what they're called or what they

mean -- he cannot communicate with other persons about them. This breakdown of verbal communication

is the fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit

into his own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons.

There is an interesting parallel between Dick's emphasis here on a societally based

definition of hallucinations -- as perceptions unshared by others -- and the insight offered

by the eminent anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his Beyond Culture: "Perceptual

aberrations are not restricted to psychoses but can also be situational in character,

particularly in instances of great stress, excitation, or drug influences."* Instances, that

is, in which, in Dick's words, "too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of

the organism."

* Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1981), p. 229.

In his 1965 essay "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes" (also included), Dick

sought to give the fearful and isolated perceptions of the schizophrenic an analytical

coherence that might extend beyond the purely personal to a new viewpoint on human

experience:

What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy

is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of

film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not

exist. Instead, the a-causal connective principle which [quantum physicist] Wolfgang Pauli called

Syncronicity is operating in all situations -- not merely as one factor at work, as with us. Like a person

under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun.

Dick described himself, in this essay, as "schizoid effective" -- a "pre-schizophrenic

personality." This fearful dancing on the high wire of self-diagnostics is a recurrent

element in Dick's essays and journals. Two opposite possibilities set the boundaries: the

fear that he might be insane ("psychotic" and "schizophrenic" were his most common

terms), and the possibility that he might, through an encompassing intellectual

understanding (anamnesis, the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato),

win spiritual redemption -- freedom from his crippling fears, and a haven from the

deluded and sorrowful world.

There was, for Dick, a certain sense in which his own writings might alleviate

some of the sorrow -- for his readers and for himself -- by at least openly acknowledging

the doubts and questions that existence posed for those who had eyes to see. As he

wrote in one Exegesis entry:

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to

formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can

do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of

sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom

my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature

of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an

integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.*

* Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed.

Lawrence Sutin (Novato, Calif./Lancaster, Pa.: Underwood-Miller, 1991), p.

161.

One aspect of that "personal history" that has continued to intrigue his readers is the

bizarre and powerful series of dreams, visions, and voices that flooded Dick's

consciousness in February and March 1974 (or "2-3-74," Dick's shorthand for that

period) and stood for him as the central -- and, ultimately, inexplicable -- event of his life.

These inspired what has become known as the "Valis Trilogy" -- the final three novels of

Dick's life that have earned both critical praise and a broad readership (through their

recent simultaneous reissuance as Vintage trade editions): Valis (1981), The Divine

Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). In all three novels,

Dick explores the anguish and entropic emptiness of an earthly realm in which God (or

whatever alternative name we give to the divine) remains unknown and perhaps

unknowable. But also, in all of these works, Dick offers the hope that divine knowledge

and redemption may yet be granted -- even to modern, scuffling souls who have trouble

paying their rent and keeping their marriages together. There is a striking thematic

resemblance between these novels and the speculations of the Gnostic thinkers of the

early centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, in the definitive modern edition of Gnostic

scriptures, The Nag Hammadi Library (1988), an "Afterword" singles out Dick (along with

Jung, Hermann Hesse, and Harold Bloom) as a preeminent modern interpreter of

Gnostic beliefs.

As we have seen, even prior to the "Valis Trilogy," philosophical and spiritual

questions had formed the underpinnings of Dick's SF "alternate" worlds and "alien"

intelligences. But Dick had harbored a carefully limited view of himself, through the first

two decades of his writing career, as one who fervently posed ultimate questions but

lacked -- as a matter of personal experience -- any real encounter with a higher source

of being. After 2-3-74, this changed to an extent. By his very nature, Dick was not a man

to arrive at -- or even to wish to arrive at -- a simple conclusion about any life event,

much less as complex and unsettling a series of events as 2-3-74. But through all of his

wrangling, one fundamental fact emerges plainly: 2-3-74 served as a soul-shaking

inspiration for Dick as a writer and thinker. The pratfalls and paradoxes of his SF plots

had begun to seem to him -- after two decades of prolific exploration -- mere

entertainments. Not that Dick did not wish to entertain. On the contrary, it was one of his

paramount concerns as a writer: He loved the excitement of a good SF plot, as is amply

testified to in his essays on SF included in this volume. But one of the strongest facets of

his character -- and one that sets Dick aside from the abundance of writers who dabble

in metaphysical puzzles out of sheer amusement -- was his conviction that answers

could be attained by those who persisted in asking questions. Imagination, intelligence,

and yearning insistence could prevail. Now, in his final years, there was a new passion:

the driving necessity of getting to the truth of what had happened to him in those

months.

Was "2-3-74" a case of genuine mystical experiences, or a contact with "higher"

(or simply "other") forms of intelligence, or a conscious manipulation of his mind by

unknown persons, or a purely private outbreak of psychotic symptoms? Dick considered

each of these possibilities, as well as others too numerous to summarize here, in his

eight-thousand-page Exegesis (subtitled by Dick Apologia pro Mea Vita, to emphasize

its central importance). The Exegesis was a journal -- handwritten, for the most part -- at

which Dick labored night after night for eight years, until his death in 1982, in an attempt

to explain 2-3-74 to his own satisfaction. He never succeeded. The Exegesis is, at times,

a wild and wayward human record: Eight years' worth of impassioned journaling through

the dead of the night (Dick's preferred time for creative effort), with no expressed

intention of publication in his own lifetime, could not but result in highly uneven streaks

of writing. But the Exegesis is also replete with passages that confirm Dick's standing as

a subtle thinker and an astonishing guide to hidden possibilities of existence. A previous

collection, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (Underwood/Miller, 1991),

edited by the present writer, has won critical praise for Dick as a philosophical and

spiritual thinker. Robert Anton Wilson (coauthor of the popular Illuminatus trilogy) wrote:

"Dick explains 'mystic' states better than any visionary writer of the past." In Gnosis,

reviewer John Shirley declared: "Deluded or spiritually liberated, Dick was a genius, and

that genius shines through every page of this book." Further unpublished selections of

the Exegesis appear in this volume -- including a full-length essay, titled (in the parodic

pulp style that Dick employed with masterly effect in his fictional works) "The Ultra

Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The Secret Meaning of the Great Systems of Theosophy of

the World, Openly Revealed for the First Time."

As is exemplified by this flamboyant title, there is something in the nature of

Dick's raptly pell-mell style that may well put off those readers who think they know what

"serious" writing must look and sound like. Of course, it was just such fixed canons of

"serious" discourse that Dick devoted himself to dismantling -- or, in the more

fashionable postmodern jargon that has come into prominence since his death,

"deconstructing" -- in many of the essays included in this book.

Dick is, as a matter both of style and of content, an uncategorizable thinker. One

can dub him a "philosopher," and indeed he warrants the title in its original Greek

meaning as one who loved wisdom and truly believed in the value of uninhibited

questioning -- a rarity in this day and age, in which the word "metaphysical" has become

a synonym for "pointless." But Dick has none of the systematic rigor and impersonality of

tone that mark modern-day philosophical analysis for most readers. He adheres to no

single philosophical school, though he feels free enough to wander through the

hallways, so to speak, of each and every school of West and East down through the

ages. He defends no propositions; rather, he samples them, explores them to their

heights and the depths, then moves on. He proposes ultimate answers -- a goodly

number of them, in fact -- and then confesses that he himself cannot choose among

them. Especially in the Exegesis, Dick is sometimes moved to exclamations of

unphilosophical joy; at other times the despair expressed on the page is a fearful thing.

Dick clearly does not fit the modern mold of the "philosopher"; his true affinity is with the

pre-Socratic thinkers, whose gnomic and evocative writings -- adamant, fragmented

personal visions of the universe, its nature and purpose -- have resisted definitive textual

analysis for more than two millennia.

If one attempts to label Dick as a "mystic," similar difficulties arise. First, the term

"mystic" seems to imply, by its standard usage in theological literature, that Dick

definitely made contact with a divine reality or "saw God," as modern parlance goes.

This conclusion is, of course, unwarranted. Dick himself never made up his mind as to

whether it was God or "psychosis" or "something other" that he contacted in 2-3-74.

Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of the Exegesis. The sheer strangeness of

Dick's visions, coupled with his self-confessed "nervous breakdowns," have led some

readers and critics to conclude that 2-3-74 can be seen only as the product of mental

illness; the diagnoses offered are legion. To be sure, attempts at posthumous diagnosis

of Dick are doomed to be highly speculative, particularly when psychiatrists and

psychologists who treated him at various times of his life themselves disagreed widely

over his mental state (most placed him as neurotic in some form, and at least one found

him quite normal). Quite aside from the difficulties of such diagnosis, there is the further

concern that diagnostics per se are useful when applied to a living patient under

treatment but are singularly reductive when employed as a simplistic categorizing label

Philip K. Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

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