And indeed, Dick himself begins with a discussion of 2-3-74 through the prism of his novel Ubik, where many of the characters are dead bodies lying in "cold-pac", while their ex-employer Glen Runciter seeks to communicate with them from the world of the living … maybe.
The first thing I noticed is that Lethem et al assume that anyone reading this book already knows what it is, and will only come to it after deep immersion in PKD's fiction. But what, if anything, does this text have to offer people who are not Philip K Dick?Īfraid that the answer might be "not much" I started in on it immediately lest it sit on my shelf unread for 20 years like In Pursuit of VALIS. It's still only about one tenth of the whole thing, but it's a start. Until last month, however, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt brought out a huge 900-page volume, co-edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson. So what was it?ĭick never intended The Exegesis for publication, and aside from In Pursuit of VALIS, a tiny selection of extracts from the book that was brought out in 1991, it has remained a thing of legend only. But then again, the light had diagnosed a potentially critical illness in his son which doctors had missed, and he had received information in dream states in dead languages he could not speak. Probably not: Dick's approach to 2-3-74 (as he called the experience, since the cosmic mind invasion was most intense between February and March) was not dogmatic but critical, and he was the first to suggest that it might have been a neurological event. Was he starting a cult? If not, would his fans do it for him? After all, Dick was heavily into theology. For still others, an unsavoury whiff of L Ron Hubbard hangs over the event. Others have argued that it was temporal lobe epilepsy. I recall a TV documentary in which Brian Aldiss dismissed it as the result of neurochemistry gone awry. When he died in 1982 it ran to approximately 8,000 pages of analysis, hypothesis and self-questioning.įor some, the pink laser beam is mere lunacy. Where had it come from? God? Aliens? A healthy vitamin solution he had quaffed hours earlier? Dick loved to speculate, so much so that this event inspired not only his late "VALIS Trilogy" but also a private work he called The Exegesis. But that was all eclipsed by what happened on 20 February 1974, when a pink laser beam filled his mind with arcane and beneficial knowledge. Sure, there was the paranoia, his prodigious appetite for amphetamines, his obsession with Linda Ronstadt and his fear that either the Black Panthers or FBI had raided his house – enough eccentricity for any lifetime, you might think.
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