Dick’s experiences in 1974 (which he later referred to as “2-3-74,” referring to their commencement in February and March 1974) formed the basis for his final novels, most notably VALIS. This novel offers a fictionally-skewed account of those experiences, with Dick himself split into two characters: the relatively logical and skeptical Phil Dick and the eccentric mystic Horselover Fat. But the lion’s share of Dick’s post-1974 writing was not fiction at all: for the final eight years of his life, Dick wrote over 8,000 pages of notes on his experiences, mostly by hand, in what he came to call The Exegesis. In this philosophical journal, Dick proposed, explored, and tested one theory after another to explain what had happened to him, from the grand (the return of the Holy Spirit) to the paranoid (Soviet scientists experimenting with telepathy and time manipulation) to the soberly mundane (maybe it was just psychosis, after all). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to categorize these theories—this one metaphysical, this mystical, that political—because these categories overlap and coexist. The theories feed one another, growing and expanding exponentially.
Though no theory proved permanent, the Exegesis’ recurring themes show Dick to be deeply concerned with oppression and liberation, both spiritual and literal. Throughout the journal he proposes the notion of an ancient, secret, revolutionary Christian underground, pitted against the Roman Empire, symbolized as the Black Iron Prison—a metaphysical category encompassing every form of repression, imprisonment, and tyranny. This concept of a radical, secret church puts Dick within arm’s reach of Christian anarchist ideas, akin to the early Quakers and their fellow travelers. (Dick himself claimed to have been raised Quaker, though the evidence supporting this is spotty).
Though our political and economic systems put the strong before the weak, coasting along with the status quo still seems the logical thing to do. And it’s not just our human institutions that are unjust: Dick finds fault with the very laws of causality, which enable innocent beings to suffer. But the tyrannical logic of the Black Iron Prison convinces us that nothing is wrong, hiding its injustice beneath the level of perception. Only in perceiving this wrongness, “balking” in the face of this covert injustice, can we be saved. The idea of divine secrecy—that God is camouflaged within everyday reality—runs throughout the Exegesis, and Dick frequently speaks of the deus absconditus, the hidden god, which enters our reality not from the clouds, in glory, but at the level of “the trash of the gutter.” This theology of obscurity explains why God would choose a lowly science fiction writer to receive a mystical revelation, and it led Dick to seek covert truths in his published fiction.
But Dick presents all of this as theory, and never as fact—or rather, he presents it as fact, and then promptly pulls the rug out from underneath each explanation. Throughout the Exegesis, Dick declares that, “at last,” he has found the ultimate explanation—but, within a page or two, he second-guesses every eureka. Thus the theology of the Exegesis is speculative: it proposes much but asserts nothing. It is, ultimately, not about the answers, but about the myriad possibilities that the questions themselves imply. It is a theology built on doubt—indeed, it throws the very division of faith and doubt into question.
Dick was never tempted to forge his ideas into a dogma, to declare himself a prophet, or to form a church based on his revelations. His interests were not ecclesiastical, but personal, analytical—and ultimately practical. The Exegesis is, for all its surface eccentricity, a rational exercise, a systematic attempt to arrive at a satisfying explanation for what happened to Dick in 1974.
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