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I missed the April 29 news item that Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is being published in a two-volume edition in autumn 2011 - autumn 2012. Since I never got very far into the extracts published as In Pursuit of Valis, I am interested primarily in terms of the further details of Dick's inside-out question (I meant to type "quest" but "question" seems better) re the meaning of 2-3-1974. I came across the reference while tracking down information about Laurence A. Rickels' forthcoming I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (the cover of which could easily be read as a single title rather than title and subtitle, a clever reference to the fact that Rickels kept being told his overall style of thought resembled Philip K. Dick's, a writer he had never had the slightest interest in reading until he began with Valis. (I just read about the Rickels book in an interview in the May/June Art Papers.)
Jeffrey Kripal cites Dick's exegesis as an example of the style of confronting the Impossible that he finds most interesting and productive, since Dick explores every possible avenue including that of his own mental illness. Kripal finds Thomas Disch's reductive reference to a possible stroke as exactly the same kind of reflexive avoidance of the issues that he finds in his own academic discipline of the study of religions, where the prospect that fiction and reality may combine in unsettling ways is rigorously excluded.
Kripal insists that such investigations should never be accepted at face value or read literally, ever, but that is not the same as dismissing them as something to be ignored unreservedly. His conclusions are remarkably parallel to mine except that we are discussing a bibliography that scarcely overlaps at all, beyond Eliade's deliberate covering of his tracks in his own fantastic fiction and Dick's obsessive determination to make sense of an experience that refused to make any. (Eliade said that he blended his own experiences in India with tales from yogic folklore so everyone would think the whole tale was made up.)
Kripal is actually operating within the limits established by the sociology of knowledge, which are less constricting than we ordinarily think. As Wittgenstein more or less wrote of one of his teaching stories, "...or would we have no way of deciding between these interpretations?" The limits of my language are the limits of my world. But they are not the only limits, as I have written in a post subsequent to this re-edited one. (It is actually a fairly flat-footed, obvious assertion that reality writes us as much if not more than we write reality...we operate within texts and tests laid down by others, no matter who the "others" turn out to be— that latter question being one of the points of contention between different versions of "common sense." It is possible to engage in a great deal of mystification, and mistaken demystification, regarding all this. I hope to address the muddle at some later date, though of course I may not ever do so, or even unmuddle my own muddling through.)
Jeffrey Kripal cites Dick's exegesis as an example of the style of confronting the Impossible that he finds most interesting and productive, since Dick explores every possible avenue including that of his own mental illness. Kripal finds Thomas Disch's reductive reference to a possible stroke as exactly the same kind of reflexive avoidance of the issues that he finds in his own academic discipline of the study of religions, where the prospect that fiction and reality may combine in unsettling ways is rigorously excluded.
Kripal insists that such investigations should never be accepted at face value or read literally, ever, but that is not the same as dismissing them as something to be ignored unreservedly. His conclusions are remarkably parallel to mine except that we are discussing a bibliography that scarcely overlaps at all, beyond Eliade's deliberate covering of his tracks in his own fantastic fiction and Dick's obsessive determination to make sense of an experience that refused to make any. (Eliade said that he blended his own experiences in India with tales from yogic folklore so everyone would think the whole tale was made up.)
Kripal is actually operating within the limits established by the sociology of knowledge, which are less constricting than we ordinarily think. As Wittgenstein more or less wrote of one of his teaching stories, "...or would we have no way of deciding between these interpretations?" The limits of my language are the limits of my world. But they are not the only limits, as I have written in a post subsequent to this re-edited one. (It is actually a fairly flat-footed, obvious assertion that reality writes us as much if not more than we write reality...we operate within texts and tests laid down by others, no matter who the "others" turn out to be— that latter question being one of the points of contention between different versions of "common sense." It is possible to engage in a great deal of mystification, and mistaken demystification, regarding all this. I hope to address the muddle at some later date, though of course I may not ever do so, or even unmuddle my own muddling through.)
