20221227 - VALIS [Book Review Analysis and Summary]

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His home is no where, / He is hidden everywhere, / His home is now here.

#HAIKUPRAJNA - VALIS [Book Review Analysis and Summary]

https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/12/20221227-valis-book-review-analysis-and.html

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Hello readers, April and I hope everyone has been enjoying the holidays! We have been celebrating our tenth year together all month long, and will continue to celebrate into the New Year. 

Despite being one of my favorite books, it has taken me forever to parse my notes about VALIS by Philip K. Dick.

Like the rest of the books in the series, VALIS is a heavy Metaphysical Science Fiction story; I found it to be really reminiscent of ‘50s-’80s sci-fi TV/B-movies in a good way. 

The other books that are attributed to VALIS are done so only through this book’s themes, which featured callbacks to “The Divine Invasion,” “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer,” and “Radio Free Albemuth”.

Phil related Horselover Fat’s irrational quest to bring back a series of women who had died, who had wanted to die for various reasons, all while being close to Fat, Phil and their friends David and Kevin; from the get-go, VALIS is a story about mental illness and falling into the traps of logical fallacies, and how reality manages to deal with it through insanity.

Phil, in real life and in this fictional story, was writing the story in order to unpack his spiritual experiences revolving around the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a quasi-conscious ‘vortex’ that ‘incorporates its environment into arrangements of information’, information which is beamed to Phil or Fat via orange-pink ultraviolet light.

“I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.”

During this quest to find God while curbing insanity, the group began to believe that the universe itself was alive, that humans should be able to hear its information as a neutral voice in one’s mind.

An interesting spoiler (but not really because Phil and Fat’s identity is disclosed at the very start) for when one wants to reread the book! One of my favorite parts of VALIS is how I can merge Fat’s abstracted and Phil’s logical points of view, where Fat talking after Phil can be seen as just the first person narrator pausing before saying the next line in the third person. By the end, it was hard to tell who was real and where Fat or Phil really was, as Phil watching TV being his mind interpreting the symbolism of Fat’s travels was just as likely to be true as Fat’s travels being a fantasy made during Phil’s vigil.

While writing to process the deaths he wished to revert, Phil described the failure of his own suicide attempts as acts of God and debated whether or not He was merciful in saving him while being Just in letting others die. While Kevin’s opinion was that the universe was hostile and ‘consisted of misery’, this dynamic can be explained: Phil, in the past, had no idea why the divine intervened in his son’s death but not any of the girls’, while Phil, narrating in the present, realized he would not have gone on his quest otherwise.

Phil, needing the logic, displayed how he was the real person (or his own demiurge or Intellect), yet Fat was the main persona and continued to meditate on death by attaching himself to dying women, but Phil instead grew to reject Fat from the bodily system (a twist on a similar plot thread in Albemuth).

Unable to trust himself, after having personified the aspect of oneself that wishes to die, Phil had become afraid of Fat.

"It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned."

The group decided to meet with the Lamptons who made a movie named VALIS, which was a stylizing of Radio Free Albemuth's plot (and that achieved what Saddassa Sylvia and Nick Brady’s music was made to do). If you had read that book first, you should enjoy the callback as much as I did.  

The two groups meet, and Phil meets their daughter Sophia who was said to be the Saviour reborn; it was my interpretation that She and the idea of the Saviour were a manifestation of the aetheric fabric of spacetime, a single expression of the universe in itself, that by being mindful of anyone her thought-forms also became the physical forms of every point in spacetime.

The dread arose from the realization that they were being told how to escape from a prison that one had become lost within, that achieving unity with Sophia or VALIS or God meant that they would soon be freed, but that the time was yet to come and that they were still trapped; the cast began to display their failure to truly understand this soon after meeting Sophia, most evident in Phil’s failure to realize that VALIS’s immortality was an intangible one, that no real physical resurrection would occur outside of VALIS’s own.

Everyone, Sophia included, agreed that the blind-god Lamptons were crazy, but that Sophia was legitimate, however their little Society had seen themselves in the Samaels (said to be Ikhnaton's race) and realized that meant that they too were insane. 

A prevalent theme is the fear that someone you love will kill you, for the greater good; Phil was attempting to heal Fat, and I found that Phil being straightaway averted toward the cure to Fat's illness foreshadowed the threat of Mini and the Lamptons toward both him and Sophia.

Sophia had healed Phil by unifying him with Fat, however Phil failed to see that God, wearing a mask of Death under another mask of Love, was ending suffering by the merciful killing of the dying individual--Phil was asking for the dead to return, which was asking for a different thing.

Sophia’s death made the Lamptons complicit, while leaving Phil's group unaffiliated and thus legally and socially protected from them, but this caused Fat to return and continue his quest to find the Saviour.

It was unfortunate that Fat's entire premise stemmed from a misunderstanding of the necessity of suffering, mistaking the Demiurge for the One, and failing to see that Sophia indeed foresaw her own death.

When Kevin relapsed into talking about his dead cat, the group started to display how they failed to realize they could just think of the question and that VALIS would answer--the past and future were real, as present as the present, as accessible as the restroom; for me, that meant physical space and time were the true Black Iron Prison, that the intangible conception of the aetheric spacetime was considered "true reality". 

Fat's later quests returned fruitless because the Savior was intangible and within everyone and everything, but, despite this, Phil (his logical brain) realized he was told to keep vigil while Fat (his creative brain) continued to search the globe over.

“But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are that man.”

VALIS was a product of the exegesis of Philip K. Dick being turned into Metaphysical Fiction, along with the other books that are attributed to this book’s themes of the author’s interpretations of his own real life spiritual experiences. 

Above all, I thought that the author wanted to teach how Pity is love, how through sympathy does one's pain become a source of love and lessen the pain by securing a loving memory; by the Spear of Longinus metaphor, the deaths of the women would be what would heal the wound their deaths had made, so by pitying oneself, one can take a dispassionate perspective to their own situation and allow themselves to love themselves instead of grieve.

According to Phil, by labelling danger as a sin within all of us, Samael promoted the use of sin before tricking us into believing that it was our fault. By allowing phenomena to pass, one allowed that which prevails to shine and destroy the prison. By appealing to intangible thoughtforms, one burned away the illusions and secured the wisdom from otherwise insane discourse.

The Living Idea was found in the lowest levels of reality, "where you will least expect to find it," which is why Phil took up his vigil at the close of the book, to find Sophia in the things we write. To him, the “supra-temporal expression” of all life is what we actually mean by the term ‘god’ and “is what we worship, without realizing it, when we worship ‘god.’”

Thank you for reading. Please share your thoughts.

Allen W. McLean 

Read the rest of my VALIS reviews:

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/11/20221120-transmigration-of-timothy.html ]

The Divine Invasion [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/11/20221105-divine-invasion-book-review.html ]

Radio Free Albemuth [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/09/20220927-radio-free-albemuth-book-review.html ]

Original VALIS review [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2020/12/20201227-valis.html ]

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