VALIS i: VALIS
VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System, from an American film): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterised by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence. – Great Soviet Dictionary Sixth Edition, 1992
God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it’s exactly what you get as a phosphine after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that colour. (Valis, 21)
[…]
The cardinal point which Fat had made to us regarding his experience with the pink beam which had injured and blinded him was this: he claimed that instantly – as soon as the beam struck him – he knew things he had never known.
Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information. He started keeping a journal – had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his – Fat’s, not God’s – handwriting. (Valis, 22)
The term ‘journal’ is mine, not Fat’s. His term was ‘exegesis’, a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture […]
precis
Following the suicide of his friend Gloria (and his wife leaving him with their son Christopher), the narrator, PKD, enters a severe psychotic episode. His persona splits and he begins to project himself in the third person as Horselover Fat (an interlingual pun on Philip Dick).
In March 1974 Dick/Fat undergoes an experience when a woman wearing a fish symbol necklace comes to his door (with painkillers for toothache) in which he sees 1st century Rome superimposed on 20th century California. In response to this experience and as a way of trying to come to terms with it, Dick/Fat embarks on an ranging research project (which he calls his ‘exegesis’). Much of this is actually autobiographical since Dick did in fact have this encounter and did start keeping extensive notes (cosmological/philosophical speculations) which were found in boxes in his garage and published posthumously as The Exegesis of PKD. The exegesis tries to explain how information is being beamed into PKD/Fat’s mind in the form of pink light, how time does not actually exist except as a projection, how the world had been entrapped in a Black Iron Prison since apostolic times, from which it has only just been freed (this is the meaning of the event of 1974).
The distilled exegesis is included as an appendix.
Tractates Cryptica Scriptura
Dick tries to kill himself with a huge overdose of various pills following the death of another friend (this time to cancer), but is unsuccessful and ends up in a mental institution where he is visited by his friends Kevin and David.
Kevin and David are fairly sympathetic and indulge PKD’s split personality, speaking of Fat as the author of the exegesis. Even when he says that he is going to take a trip to China to find the fifth saviour.
The three of them come across a film starring and produced by a singer called Mother Goose. This film, VALIS, contains many of the same elements that are so important to PKD/Fat’s psychosis. It tells an incoherent story about a police state (like the black iron prison) ruled by a malicious president F.F. Fremount (think DT), which is overcome at the end of the film. The three/four of them are alarmed by the crossover and the fact that it suggests some kind of objective truth to what they all (including PKD/Fat) had thought of as a psychotic disorder. They hatch a plan to contact the producer through a photographer (who had worked on the film and also taken some publicity shots of PKD).
Mother Goose sends a cryptic letter asking PKD/Fat to complete a cypher beginning KING…
PKD/Fat knows that the missing word is FELIX – this is something that has been revealed to him through the information beam. Mother Goose is happy with the confirmation and invites them all to his ranch in Northern California. They visit him there, where they meet his wife and an associate called Mini (who did the music for the film, apparently filling it with all kinds of subliminal messages). They have a daughter, Sophia (as in St Sophia, holy wisdom) who is incredibly precocious and in fact seems to have a lot of information on the three of them. They begin to think that Mother Goose, his wife and Mini are actually pretty nuts (even though they just believe the same stuff as them). Sophia tells them that there are in fact no Gods now, only man has become his own God. Fat/Dick, thinks that Sophia is the saviour and they take her advice to leave. The encounter with Sophia cures PKD of his divided personality and Fat is reabsorbed into PKD.
They fly back home (PKD experiences another superposition of time and space – the ranch and the aeroplane). When they get back, they receive a phone call from Mother Goose’s wife to say that Mini had killed Sophia byt trying to extract information from her with a laser. PKD had had a dream the night before (When you walk towards the dawn, wear slippers) which he now realises was Sophia saying goodbye.
PKD’s madness comes back and Fat takes on independent existence again. He (Fat) leaves California to search for the saviour, KING FELIX, in Europe. PKD, Kevin and David receive the occasional message from him, and photographs. Eventually he comes back to California, but only briefly while he gets more funds together, and shows them all photographs of a Greek vase with Crick and Watson’s double helix around the top. He then sets off around the world again, following clues he thinks are being beamed at him by VALIS.
Meanwhile, PKD is at home, and he too is picking up subliminal messages, mostly from the TV, which might or might not be meaningful.
[…] the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially in the trash stratum.