23

Auto-Anamnesis

It is not hard to understand why the Hymn of the Soul became important to Philip Dick, since the story resembles nothing so much as one of his late fictions. The protagonist of the Hymn bumbles along until he is awakened by a strange signal from beyond. This alerts him to knowledge that he already possesses but has been forgotten—or to use a favorite phrase of Dick's, “occluded.” In the Hymn, this recognition is sufficient to bring the buried knowledge and the ordinary everyday self into sync. Dick, however, did not allow such easy resolutions for his characters—nor, unfortunately, for himself.

In his February 1975 letter to Bush, Dick claims that he had first come across the Hymn only a day or two before writing her; as soon as he read it, “I knew I had found the key which put together just about everything I've been thinking, learning and experiencing.” 55 To prove his point, Dick immediately narrates, once again, the fish sign scene. “Can you see how close this is to the ‘Hymn of the Soul’?” he asks.

In this particular iteration of the golden fish story, though, Dick adds some new details. He claims he later went to the pharmacy looking for the delivery woman but found “they had no idea who she was, what her name was, or where she had gone, but she was gone, forever.” This obliviousness is in turn linked to Dick's ignorance about the phenomenon of anamnesis brought on by the fish sign: “as I'm sure you realize I did not know, had never heard of, such matters within the human heart, or mind, or history.” 56

This sort of anxious disavowal of knowledge recurs throughout the Exegesis, where it is often proclaimed in relationship to knowledge Dick already possesses. For example, Dick's letter to Bush is almost certainly not the first mention of the Hymn in Dick's diary. In an undated entry that appears between two letters dated December 23, 1974 and January 29, 1975, Dick addresses the topic of anamnesis, specifically the long sleep of the right hemisphere, which he casts again as “the seat of the unconscious.” 57 The moment at which it remembers (is disinhibited by the gold fish sign, the letter, etc.; cf. Epistle of St. Thomas) is the moment at which the Kingship of God, the Perfect Kingdom, floods back into being: back into awareness of itself, that it is Here; and it is here Now. 58

There is no extant Epistle of St. Thomas, so we have every reason to believe that Dick was here referring to the letter in the Hymn, the song embedded in the Acts of Thomas. Though Dick most likely wrote this extract only a few weeks before his letter to Bush, the discrepancy still underscores one of the most constitutive drives in the Exegesis: Dick's need to be surprised by knowledge he already has.

A more concrete example of this pattern is provided by a passage in Folder 50, which Dick wrote in early 1978. Dick is in total metaphysical despair, facing a “brick wall,” cut off from God. He scribbles a lamentation in German; the second half of the quotation is drawn from the Bach cantata “Sleepers Awake.” At the bottom of that page, as an unnumbered footnote, Dick declares that his “prayer” had been answered by “mistakenly reading” the Britannica entry on Jacob Boehme, the mystic cobbler mentioned earlier. Though it is hard to imagine how one reads an encyclopedia passage by mistake, this randomness is important to Dick because it removes his will from the equation, implying a cosmic or oracular intention behind the happenstance. God guides him to Boehme, in whom he discovers a secret sympathy across time. But the whole episode is complicated by the appearance, sixty-four pages earlier, of the unusual phrase “divine ‘abyss’,” a fundamental term in Boehme. Its appearance earlier in this folder, particularly in quotation marks, strongly suggests that Dick had begun reading Boehme—or more likely reading about him—well before he declared his German prayer. 59 As readers of Dick's letters know, Dick was an erudite man with a great memory, and, like many autodidacts, he liked to show off.

Yet in the Exegesis, amidst the research and knowledge he displays (both to correspondents and to himself), we often find the opposite pattern: Dick disguises what he knows. Why? One possibility is that, unconsciously at least, Dick yearned to recapitulate the event of anamnesis itself: the sudden re-emergence of knowledge “already” known from a state of occlusion. For Dick, such recalled knowledge was coterminous with awakening itself; as he once wrote, “to remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.” 60 As such, while the Exegesis is stuffed with knowing, it is also regularly punctuated with forgetting, as Dick plays hide-and-seek with himself, staging his “ahas!” in advance.

This strange loop also shows up in the Hymn. When the hero hears the words of the letter, he finds the same message already “traced on my heart”—a metaphor of internalized media inscription that goes back at least to Proverbs and Jeremiah. 61 But there is another way to read this loopy message, another way to understand how the call from without is mirrored by the script from within. As Dick himself writes in the Exegesis, “it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the Pearl).” 62 In addition to presenting a fantasy of mystical resolution through a “message ontology,” the Hymn also reminded Dick that in some ways he had set the whole thing up. Through the events of 2-3-74, Dick had sent himself a very convoluted letter. But in order to receive this prompt as a wake-up call, he needed to erase the hand he had in the deal.

One way that Dick forgot himself was to distance his texts from his own controlling authority. Such disavowal is a regular theme in the Exegesis, as well as in Dick's correspondence. In the “Constitutional Crisis” document, for example, Dick jokes that his books are forgeries because his “magic typewriter” actually wrote them. 63 Behind the joshing, Dick came to earnestly interpret his own work as being or containing information of soteriological import that he was not conscious of. (One example we have already described is the King Felix code in Flow My Tears.) In turn, this belief drives the endless allegorical interpretations of his earlier works offered up in the Exegesis.