‘The Exegesis’: Philip K Dick’s bizarre belief he had travelled through time
Separating the art from the artist is always a controversial argument, but in many ways, it simply cannot be achieved when it comes to Philip K Dick.
The author’s psychedelic life – naturally, of course, enhanced by the climate of the 1970s and his penchant for amphetamines – translated onto the page as some of the most dizzying works of science fiction that the literary canon has ever seen. Through his stories’ explorations of alternate realities, the very essence of human nature, and the exact notion of perception, it’s easy to state that PKD had one hell of an imagination. The trouble is, he had no mental illusion – this was real life.
The pinnacle of racing thoughts in the Blade Runner author’s bullet train brain came to a head very specifically on February 20th, 1974, when a pink beam of light filled his mind and departed knowledge from above. It’s as weird as it sounds. The resulting product from this event was an 8,000-page private lamentation on what it meant and the questions it raised from his life, titled The Exegesis.
Now, it’s important to state that The Exegesis was never intended for publication by Dick, but nonetheless, around 900 pages of it were released for public consumption back in 2011. It extolls his feeling that the pink beam of light had granted him the ability to time travel, given that it correctly diagnosed his son with an acute illness and spoke to him in languages beyond his consciousness.
It is perhaps easy to treat this superficially and laugh it off as just plain absurdity – but there are some decidedly serious aspects at play. Was this the manifestation of addiction and mental illness? Some kind of catastrophic neurological event? These were possibilities considered by Dick himself, but there will never be a definitive answer given that he died in 1982 and was continuing to write The Exegesis up to that point. The question thus remains – could he discern the difference between fiction and reality?
In the Venn diagram crossover of literary critics and PKD nerds, these open scenarios will forever be a source of enthral and intrigue. There are simply too many bizarre aspects of this legend that can fit into one succinct summation. No matter how insightful and profound you think your take could be, there’s just no way you can reckon with the psyche of a man who claims within the mere first 40 pages of his tome that bishops, Greek gods, and prophets are invading his mind one at a time.
What is striking, from one perspective, is the timing of which the pink beam incident happened and when Dick embarked on writing this body of work – it doesn’t take an expert to tell you that the 1970s were a time of generational uprising, exploration, and reality-warping through the medium of drugs. In many ways, The Exegesis speaks to that rewiring of mindset, expressed by the youth in punk music and fashion and here by Dick in mind-bending sci-fi literature. The relationship between the two is for you to decide.
However, it comes down to the million-dollar question – is The Exegesis really worth reading? Well, much like the man and his work, there is no straightforward logic to it. If you’re a PKD superfan, confident you know his work inside out and want to get your teeth into something like nothing else you’ve ever read, then sure, go for it. But for anyone else… if you fancy losing a significant amount of your precious time and sacrificing your sanity in the process, then do so at your own peril.
