Philip K. Dick: Valis |
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| Title: Valis Author: Philip Dick Published in: 1981 Number of pages: 272 ISBN: 1 85798 339 4 (paperback edition) |
 contact a personal search for the meaning of life |
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| Horselover Fat gravitates towards insanity after a friend of his has committed suicide and after his wife has left him with his only son. He experiences strange visions and notices disconcerting details in his daily life. He tries to commit suicide himself and fails. | If you know a little German and much Greek, you may be able to guess the true meaning of "Horselover" and "Fat". (See page 188 of the original for the solution). | |
| This is how the story begins. It is set against the background of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Drugs, Richard Nixon, Timothy Leary and rock music are some relevant key-words. | Background: 1960ies | |
| But the story quickly goes onto something more charming. Frequent quotations from ancient sources of wisdom and religious lore produce an atmosphere of mystery and great expectation. | religion and philosophy | |
| During the course of the story, Horselover Fat discovers that he is neither insane nor alone. Put on the right trail by a close friend Horselover Fat realizes how he is influenced by an unkown but seemingly benign intelligence, which will later be called VALIS. | Weltschmerz and insanity | |
| Dick uses a very straightforward and rather undramatic plot to weave together hitherto disconnected pieces of knowledge into a coherent propositon of an alien intelligence fulfilling the will of God. | simple plot, sophisticated allusions and hypotheses | |
| Divine inspirations and psychotic hallucinations are made indistinguishable by the author. | ||
| Some specimen quotations will best caputre the spirit of the book. If you want to know how all this can be be woven into a single thread, you have to buy the book: | quotations => | |
| My dear people, we are
already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is (1 John 3:1-2.) |
page 76 | humans = God |
| Hamlet was not written by Shakespeare; it was merely written by a man named Shakespeare... | page 80 | Hamlet |
| ...which accounts for some of the strange features of the German mind. | page 80 | Dick quotes profusely from enigmatic German authors and thinkers throughout his book! |
| Heraclitus wrote, "Latent form is the master of obvious form,"... | page 81 | Dick also seems to know and like the ancient Greeks. |
| His disciples asked him
what this parable might mean, and he said, "The mysteries of the kingdom of God are revealed to you; for the rest there are only parables, so that they might see but not perceive, listen but not understand" (Luke 8:9-10). |
page 84 | The book is full of quotations from and references to the Bible: some people are initiated others are to be "occluded". |
| "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn`t go away." | page 87 | reality |
| Fat had no concept of enjoyment; he understood only meaning. | page 92 | an-hedonism |
| Cancer represents a deliberate failure of the immune system of the body; the person turns it off. | page 94 | cancer |
| Ethics devolve directly from Yahweh to Moses; everybody knows that. Everybody but Horselover Fat, whose problem, at that moment, was that he knew too much. | page 98 | ethics |
| It finds its first expression in Goethe`s Faust, Part One, where Faust says, "Im Anfang war das Wort." He`s quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word. "Faust says, "Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat." "In the beginning was the deed." From this, all existentialism comes. | page 99 | Faust and existentialism |
| ...junkies have loyalty to one another, | page 100 | junkies |
| The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmolgy directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmoshere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a aplaned in the star-system Sirius. | page 112 | The Swiss author Erich von Däniken describes in his books how the northern African Dogon tribe have long ago celebrated astronomical events which were only discovered most recently. |
| But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are that man. | page 115 | humans = God |
| Fat, who had sought death, could not comprehend why Sherri was being allowed to die, and die horribly. | page 115 | Dick clearly presents the problem of theodicee. But he does not solve it satisfactorily. |
| ...the three-eyed people...they manifested themselves as cyborg entities: wrapped up in glass bubbles, staggering under masses of technological gear. | page 116 | Dänikens stone-age astonauts? |
| Later, he heard a voice thing inside his head: "There's someone else living in me and he`s not in this century." | page 123 | schizophrenia? |
| ...he was the master personality. He took over Fat, switched him off wine and onto beer... | page 124 | being possessed? |
| ...when Thomas found himself dying he would engram himself on the Christian fish sign. | page 124 | the fish sign |
| We are talking about interspecies symbiosis. | page 125 | a theme also taken up by Olaf Stapledon |
| This is the dream-time, which exists now, not in the past, the place where the heroes and gods dwell and their deeds take place. | page 125 | dream-time of the Australian Aborigines? |
| The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind. | page 125 | |
| For two thousand years the single rational element in our world had slumbered. In 1945 it woke up. | page 125 | |
| He viewed it exactly as Plato had viewed it in his own cosmology; the rational mind (noös) persuades the irrational (chance, blind determinism, ananke) into cosmos. | page 125 |  Plato and quantum physics: the
basic irrationality of the physical world |
| ...how can I endure the ersatz life I lead here | page 129 | This is typical of Dicks use of interspersed German words. |
| ...this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person. | page 131 | Weltschmerz |
| Phylogenic memory, memory of the species. Not my own memory, ontogenic memorey. "Phylogeny is recapitulated in ontogeny," as it is put. The individual contains the history of his entire race, back to its origins. Back to ancient Rome, to Minos at Crete, back to the stars. | page 132 | Phylogenic memory |
| Xenophanes was right. 'One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form of in the thought of his mind.` | page 133 | Xenophanes |
| Pascal said, 'All history is one immortal man who continually learns.' | page 135 | Pascal |
| Empedocles told his friends privately that he was Apollo. He, too, like the Buddha and Pythagoras, could remember his past lives. What they did not talk about was their ability to 'remember' future lives. | page 137 | Empedocles |
| Fat listed a number of saviors: the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus and Abu Al-Qasim Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah Abd Al-Muttalib Ibn Hashim (i. e. Muhammad). | page 138 | Saviours |
| That`s what the word 'parsifal' is supposed to mean in Arabic; it`s supposed to have been derived from 'Falparsi,' an Arabic word meaning 'pure fool.' | page 140 | Dick seems to know Richard Wagner quite well. |
| Pain and suffering made no sense to Fat; he could not fit it into the grand design. | page 142 | Once again the theodicee theme |
| 'You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?' Fat said. '"There are worse diseases than cancer."' | page 144 | A specimen of Dicks dark humour |
| 'I am programmed to self-destruct,` Fat said. 'The button has been pressed.' | page 145 | There is a streak of Weltschmerz throughout the book. |
'Gesegnet
sei dein Leiden, |
page 147 | Did Dick deliberately insert two spelling mistakes in the German quotation of Wagners Parsifal? |
| 'Pity`s highes power' is just bullshit | page 149 | bullshit |
| Everyone knows this, everyone who has gazed down helplessly at a sick or dying human or a sick or dying animal, felt terrible pity, overpowering pity, and realized that this pity, however great it might be, is totally useless. | page 149 | A blending of the Weltschmerz and theodicee atmospheres |
| I see Richard Wagner
standing at the gates of heaven. 'You have to let me in,'
he says. 'Iwrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail,
Christ, suffering, pity and healin. Right?' And they answer, 'Well, we read it and it makes no sense.' |
page 150 | Another example of Dicks sense of humour |
| Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked. | page 150 | two-value logic |
| The universe-organism dispatches a phagocyte. The phagocyte is Christ. | page 151 | Christ as a phagocyte |
| Fat sees a cosmic phagocytosis in progress, one in which in micro-form we are each involved. | page 152 | |
| So everything lingers
but a moment, and hastens on to death. The plant and the
insect die at the end of summer, the brute and the man
after a few years: death reaps unweariedly. Yet
notwithstanding this, nay, as if this were not so at all,
everything is always there and in its place, just as if
everything were imperishable ... This is temporal
immortality. In consequence of this, notwhithstanding
thousands of years of death and decay, nothing has been
lost, not an atom of the matter, still less anything of
the inner being, that exhibits itself as nature.
Therefore every moment we can cheerfully cry, Ìn spite
of time, death and decay, we are still all together!' Schopenhauer |
page 153 | Yes, Dick really seems to like the Germany weirdos: Schopenhauer |
| ... he, who sought the fifth Savior, could write his quest off on his state and Federal Income Tax. | page 155 | income tax |
| Then the Christian fish sign is Crick and Watson`s double helix. | page 164 | The riddle is partially solved... |
| We knew that apostolic Christians armed with stunningly sophisticated technology had broken through the space-time barrier into our world, and, with the aid of a vast information-processing instrument had basically deflected human history. | page 180 | apostolic Christians as ancient astronauts? Was Erich von Däniken right after all? |
| Fat`s circuits were already overloaded with information. The last thing he needed was more information... | page 183 | information overload |
| On page 188 Dick hints and Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel and the drug guru Timothy Leary, who were all prominent in the Sixties. | page 188 | |
| All the way back to Zoroaster. All the way back, in fact, to Osiris. And from Egypt to the Dogon people; and from there to the stars. | page 192 | Dogon wisdom |
| Gottesfreunde ... Finally we entered Germany and the Netherlands. You know of Meister Eckehart, then ... he was the first person to conceive of the Godhead in distinction to God. The greates of the Christian mystics. He taught that a person can attain union with the Godhead - he held a concept tht God exists within the human soul!... | page 194 |  Meister
Eckehart and the concept of
"Seelengrund" |
| An irruption from the collective unconscious, Jung taught, can wipe out the fragile individual ego. In the depths of the collective the archetypes slumber... | page 197 | Jungian archetypes |
| God can be good and terrible - not in succession - but at the same time. | page 199 | theodicee |
| This is called 'enthousiasmos' in Greek, literally, 'to be possessed by the god.' | page 199 | enthousiasmos |
| From Page 204 onwards Dick explains the mysterious role of the Fibonacci Constant as a sign of recognition between those who know more than some others | page 204 | Fibonacci Constant |
| 'You have a voice inside
your head now?' ... 'It`s a neutral voice Neither male nor female. Yes, it does sound as if it`s an artificial intelligence.' ... 'That`s the inter-system communications network... It stretches between stars, connecting all the star systems with Albemuth.' |
page 205 | voices in your head |
| 'VALIS is a construct ... it fires extremely short bursts of information at babies, engramming instructionis to them which will bleed across from their right hemispheres at clock-time intervals during their full lifetimes, at the appropriate situational contexts.' | page 206 | VALIS |
| 'Are you the judge of
the world?' ... 'Yes...' 'When does judgment begin?' 'You are all judged already from the start.` |
page 214 | Judgment Day |
| 'That is the most beautiful child I have ever seen. But that stuff about her being a computer terminal ...` | page 217 | child as computer terminal |
| Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves... | page 221 | humans = God |
| Evil does not die of its own self because it imagines that it speaks for god. Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself. | page 221 | humans = God |
| 'I am two years old ... I sent for you four years ago.' | page 224 | mystery |
| Pork could not be eaten under these circumstances; VALIS filled me with this urgent knowledge. | page 232 | VALIS and pork |
| A liquor store in West
LA got robbed and the clerk shot. An old man died at a
sub-standard nursing home. Three cars on the San Diego
Freeway collided with a lumber truck which had caught on
fire and stalled. The world continued as it always had. |
page 242 | Weltschmerz |
| From Metz he crossed over into West Germany, where the American dollar is worth nothing. | page 247 | dollar in Germany |
| The photos showed a Greek vase, on it a painting of a male figure who we recognized as Hermes. Twined around the vase the double helix confronted us, done in red glaze against a blakc background. The DNA molecule. There could be not mistake. | page 250 | Again the DNA theme |
| The divine intrudes
where you least expect it. 'Look where you least expect to find it...' |
page 256 | On how to find truth |
| Out of the countless possibilites of how the richness of facts could be woven into plausible explanations of the world, Dick has offered a particularly convincing one. | ||
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