VALIS: a short book review

From the Tractates:

1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.

2. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time
is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases
and the Mind is complete.

5. One by one he draws us out of the world.

6. The Empire never ended.

38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as
parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.


VALIS is the story of Philip K Dick's psychotic break, written in a
mix of first and third person, with much of the psychosis placed on
his imaginary friend Horselover Fat. VALIS is the story of an author
writing about himself writing about himself having a psychotic
episode, what he thinks was the cause, and what may have happened as a
result. Some of the events are true; it is hard to know for sure
which.

Horselover Fat's theology becomes one of Gnostic dualism. The Mind
that created the universe is irrational, and as a result the universe
itself is irrational. Being part of the irrational universe, we have
no way of objectively gaguing our world's rationality unless we are
contacted by a rational entity from outside. Fat believes that his
episode was one such contact. PKD does not agree.

I did not know until I was reading VALIS that PKD coined the term
"Black Iron Prison". I had read the discordian BIP pamflet a few years
ago, so when I saw it in VALIS I had a brief feeling of the type of
time dysfunction experienced in VALIS -- here is a book from the '70s
which somehow perfectly predicts a metaphor that would be used decades
later by some nerd that... probably read VALIS at some point.
Religious experience over.

The rational outsider reaching into the irrational, illusory world to
free a trapped mind is I think one of the most important motifs in
PKD's work. Ubik and Palmer Eldritch had it even before PKD's
psychotic episodes. The Matrix and Inception borrowed from it to great
effect.

It is an optimistic counter to the Lovecraftian cosmic horror. VALIS
is the outer-outer god, greater than Azathoth himself, beaming the
truth into the dreams of the mad god. But maybe not too optimistic. Is
VALIS real or just another illusion of the irrational Mind? How are
we, as part of the irrational Mind, to know the difference?

Best not to think too hard on it.