I’m not sure how this is going to go tackling the 900+ page publication of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. I’m planning to post notes after reading bite-sized chunks of twenty-five pages or so. Perhaps I will come to appreciate Dick’s VALIS experience in a different way. As it stands I always found it somewhat tedious and not as revelatory as Dick did. Can this doorstop of a book change my mind…? Stay tuned.
In the introduction editors Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem give us some backstory. Dick claims to have had the following experiences in February and March of 1974 (known collectively as “2-3-74” for Feb and March of that year).
- He trips out after seeing the Jesus-fish necklace of a delivery girl who brought him a painkiller after a visit to the dentist for his wisdom teeth. He had been given sodium pentothal earlier in the day.
- He hallucinated on two separate nights.
- A plasmatic entity visited him and he heard messages through his radio.
Prior to all this in 1971 someone broke into his house in San Rafael, California and blew up his file cabinet. Whoever was responsible remained a mystery.
Some people speculated later that Dick had temporal lobe epilepsy, but at the time Dick tried to make sense of all these events through copious notes which he referred to as the ‘Exegesis.’ After he died Paul Williams, his friend and executor of his estate, attempted to organize the 8000+ mostly hand-written pages. The ‘Exegesis’ took on a mythical status among Dickheads until this version, which is the editors’ best attempt to whittle everything down to something readable, was published in 2011.