Mindblowing insights from the afterword to Philip K. Dick's epic
Exegesis:
On the reality-distortion induced by reading PKD's works: "PKD's fiction taps into shamanic powers to shape and bend consciouness and the realities that project from it."
For whom was PKD writing his posthumously-published 9,000-page
Exegesis? For those born to read it. [
We were, and we
did!]
PKD wrote his
Exegesis in a state of ecstasy, literally "beside himself," and the
Exegesis embodies the Philip K. Dick who was beside the other one.
Is the
Exegesis a massive artifact from an unwritten novel that is trapping a character who lives on Mars? The afterword suggests that, like a 9,000-page shamanic song of the Upper Amazon, the
Exegesis needs to be
performed. "Singing it at about three minutes per page would take over four hundred hours, about ten weeks of a full-time job of the sort that a Philip K. Dick character might be trapped within, working at home from his Martian hovel, reading it aloud while the surveillance tapes whirred."
