The VALIS Trilogy

I am a huge Philip K. Dick fan. In addition to a dozen of his works, I read the entire 900 plus pages of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick several years ago, and found it fascinating. These three books, however, were overwhelmed by the madness, religion, and drugs. VALIS seemed like the Exegesis thinly wrapped in a pseudo autobiography. The Divine Invasion had a much better plot, but the extended lapses into details unknown to ordinary readers spoiled the balance of the work. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was much more like his other works, although the twists were all metaphysical and psychological, not sci-fi. Still, in sentences throughout all of this Dick’s wit shines. I especially liked “the Big Noodle, the AI system that show more processed Earth’s information, the vast artificial intelligence on which the government relied.” He ties it together with, “he had been feeding St. Anselm’s Proslogion to the Big Noodle with the idea of resurrecting the long discredited Ontological Proof for the existence of God.” I am still a huge fan, with many more PKD novels to read, but I need a break. My soul is exhausted. show less

Combines 3 novels

http://www.digital-falcon.com/articles/VALIS.shtml

Philip K. Dick’s direct encounter with a pink light shooting into his brain, which he called VALIS, occurred in March of 1974. He maintained afterward, as well as in the novel by that name, that as a result he was able to diagnose a condition in his son which would otherwise have been life threatening. Dick also identified the pink information beam as a god by whom he had himself been wounded.

In all his writing after the spring of 1974, including the material he called the Exegesis, Dick compulsively and brilliantly elaborated possible explanations of the VALIS episode. It can be argued that the pink flash in his brain was simply the precursor of the massive stroke which killed him in show more 1982. Why didn’t he recognize the experience in terms of brain-fault, early tremor, pain-signal of worse to come, generated from his own biology?

In VALIS, Phil Dick, the narrator, explains: “The information was fired at my friend Horselover Fat.� To which another character responds: “But that’s you. ‘Phil’ means ‘Horselover’ in Greek, lover of horses. ‘Fat’ is the German translation of ‘Dick.’� It may be that only the crazy, visionary aspect of the author could experience the wound as information rather than noise.

Instead of seeing the event as a failure of Dick’s personal biology, Horselover experienced it as an attack by VALIS which became the core event around which he organized brilliant explorations of the nature of consciousness and identity. The succeeding years were among the best and most creative of Dick’s life.

At one time Horselover speculated that he has been hit by an extraterrestrial information beam shot from his TV set. At another, he feared he was the victim of remote control tests by super-elite conspirators using receptors implanted in unsuspecting citizens.

According to the cipher beamed at Dick by VALIS, as interpreted by Horselover, the mute, deaf, telepathic, asthmatic, long-skulled, three-eyed Ikhnatons, originally from the Syrius star-system, survived the Age of Iron, ruled by the Empire from the Fall of the Temple in Jerusalem through Nixon’s resignation, and covertly influenced our history toward a fruitful end. The Age of King Felix began in August of 1974.

Dick experienced mind as “not talking to us but by means of us.� VALIS, Appendix # 35. He concluded that humans have suffered a “malfunction--a failure--of memory retrieval� lying in “our particular subcircuit.� Salvation comes through anamnesis, “the loss of amnesia.� Therefore the “external information� involves disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us.� Id #48.

Most encyclopedias report that, in 1974, American scientists detected a sub-atomic particle, the psi or J meson, which they interpreted as “a state composed of a charmed quark and a charmed antiquark.� Reading that in the papers at the time, I began chanting: lumen naturae, lumen gratiae, lumen fidei, light of nature, light of grace, light of revelation. Here comes Uncle Felix, the Rightful, Happy King!

Had Dick seen the etiology of his condition simply in terms of his nearly catastrophic blood pressure during his encounter with VALIS, he may have abandoned shamanic interpretation and settled for modern medicine. Instead, the event became a strange attractor around which the apparent chaos of his preceding experiences coalesced into a self-organizing, creative symphony of multiphrenic genius. show less