The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

The Deep End #23

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

Has anyone ever read this thing? I haven’t, but the purpose of this post is to hopefully push me to one day read it AND be able to discuss it with all you lovely people.

In March of 2023 I gave Melissa a ring to signify our engagement to be wed. A few days later she gifted me The Exegesis of Philip K Dick as a token of her gratitude for said ring. I considered it a fair trade at the time and have kept the book on proud display on my bookshelf ever since—while also never cracking it open even once. Hopefully I live to read it, but that won’t be until I deem myself worthy to.

My admiration of Philip K. Dick all started back when I read Valis in late 2022. Since then, I have heralded him as one of the greatest geniuses of our time. This is a statement which could be argued as true (depending on who you ask). Once I finished the book I proceeded to try to convince everyone in existence to read it (to no avail). Then I went out and bought his entire bibliography—of which I’ve read only a few books. So far, Ubik is my favorite of his novels—I’ll explain why it isn’t Valis.

Here’s my collection in all its glory.

To me, Valis is ineffable. It isn’t so much a novel as it is an amalgamation of Dick’s intense search for the meaning of life, which he then tried to turn into somewhat of a story in order to get it published. The first ¾ of the book is Horselover Fat’s (PKD’s third-person schizophrenic self) attempt to try making sense of several experiences he had between February and March of 1974. This included the real-life instance of him being told his infant son had a life-threatening hernia which required emergency surgery. Dick and his wife rushed the baby to the hospital where he was examined and thought to be fine. Dick pushed them to inspect further, and they ended up finding the hernia and saving his son’s life. Crazy.

Here's a great comic strip by R. Crumb which illustrates the experiences Dick had called The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.

 As someone searching for the truth of what the hell we’re doing here, this novel cut deep. Like I said, Valis is more of PKD’s borderline psychotic quest to understand his own religious/supernatural experiences than it is a book with a coherent story. As someone who’s also had experiences with “the other side,” I was floored by Dick’s book putting into word some of my own psychotic beliefs. I’ve had experiences which have made me believe there’s way more to life than we understand. So did Dick, except his experiences were like mine if they were on a rocket ship blasting straight to Jesus’s house in the next galaxy.

What I’m saying is, as batshit crazy as Valis may read to some people, it made some sense to me. As I read the book, I experienced a strange sense of relief, although I’m not sure if that was Dick’s point. For me, I think I was just happy to see that there was someone else who shared this same “understanding” of the universe as me—even if this meant sharing in the understanding that it is absolutely insane.

Through his search, Dick really goes off the deep end (going too far in some areas), which could have caused a negative impact. I believe it’s why he died so young. He passed at 53, just a few months before Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was released as Blade Runner and before he got to reap the benefits of the financial kingdom his work has become as so many of his novels and short stories have turned into blockbuster hit after hit. (In my opinion, God had other plans for him. Perhaps the money would have tainted his mission.)

All throughout the reading of Valis, I felt a bizarrely deep connection to Dick. Every time I picked it up, the book made me feel like I was toeing the line between our physical reality and the one we can’t see. For whatever reason, I really felt like I was meant to read the book. Like it had a purpose in my life.

VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It was Dick’s best way of explaining what he had discovered the universe to be. This reminded me of a quote from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, “You have functioned as a part of something; you will vanish into what produced you. Or be restored, rather. To the logos from which all things spring. By being changed.”

Is the logos that Aurelius describes the same as Dick’s VALIS? It’s a concept I’ve only scratched the surface of attempting to understand, but I think they were talking about the same thing.

After I finished reading Valis, it stuck with me for a while. This led to a fateful conversation between Melissa, her mom, her uncle Matt, and me one Sunday afternoon in her grandfather’s kitchen in Brooklyn. I was doing my typical sales pitch of pitching the latest thing I was into, i.e. Valis, and was initially falling on deaf ears—until Uncle Matt overheard the conversation and the concept I was trying to get across. As you can see, I’m really bad at trying to explain this stuff.

Before this conversation, Matt and I rarely spoke outside of hellos and goodbyes. It made sense. I was the douchebag boyfriend of his niece and usually sat in silence during my visits. There was never really a need for either of us to speak to each other. That day changed everything. Something made me decide to speak up about Valis and how it hit on some things I believed to be true. This led Matt and I to discover that we had much more in common than either of us had previously thought.

While I was poorly explaining my idea of what happens after we die, he came through and finished my thought process in a much more coherent way than I ever could. It turned out we both believed in the same thing. In essence it’s the belief that all of us are connected to each other whether we know it or not. We existed together before we were born into this physical world. We are all from that place, let’s call it the logos. Once we die, we’ll return to the logos from which we came. We’ll still be here, there, and everywhere after we’re gone. Just like we were before we were born. It’s actually quite peaceful and a beautiful thing.

It isn’t every day you meet people who have the same understanding of reality as you do. It takes certain life experiences and hardships to get you to search for it, and a willingness to let go of your preconceived notions in order to hold such a conversation.

 It’s why reading Valis was such an intense experience for me. By reading the book, it brought me to the conversation with Matt, which has since left an indelible mark on me. For that alone I am grateful.

Matt had been diagnosed with cancer a few months prior, and would be gone a few months after our discussion, but his certainty on what lies ahead was truly admirable. It takes a superhuman to hold strong in their belief with the end in sight. In this world experiences and relationships can set you on completely different courses. If it wasn’t for Valis I never would have had the desire to speak up that day and Matt would have never decided to divulge such personal beliefs in front of me. Instead, I read it, and it led me to having a conversation that will stay with me for the rest of my life. If that isn’t proof of something else being out there, I don’t know what is.

Anyway. That’s why I want to read The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. If Valis brought me this, I can’t imagine the shit I can unlock from that behemoth. It was written from 1974 until Dick’s death in 1982. Almost all of it was written by hand in the wee hours of the night. In total there were 8,000 pages (the final printed copy has almost 1,000). As Jonathan Lethem, one of the editors of it said, "absolutely stultifying, brilliant, repetitive, and contradictory. It just might contain the secret of the universe."

Well, that’s exactly what I’m trying to find out. I know Matt already did.

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