In Pursuit of Valis

by Philip K. Dick

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  PLOT: It turns out the message which Albemuth is signalling Earth, the secret, is that our planet, solar system, us—we’re moving backward in time and it’s about to stabilize and change, and the jolt to us will be terrific. Our leaders know this but deny it. Time is about to end (lineal time) as a factor of life; it won’t reverse, as in COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD, but our present will dissolve as all the accretions of at least 3500 years will vanish, as if dreamlike. They never took place. Stability, and proper everyhing, will lock in at 1500 to 2500 BC (is it possible that an explosion, the Cretan civilization, took place then?[)] All events since then are progressively less real, as time runs out of charge ... Jesus was the first messenger from Albemuth come here to tell us that one day time would abruptly cease, to prepare us. Now Earth is full of messengers; they’ve made many of us so, due to our radio traffic which are [sic] energy; the noosphere, etc. And now is when it’s about to lock, but to them at Albemuth, they’re outside this kind of lineal time; it just is for them each year realer and realer (what we call Being). But they can penetrate at the point (sic) the place where our noosphere exists, which is circa 1960-1990. Our microwave et al. equipment receive and boost their t-p [tele-pathic] signals, radio signals. Their help was there but is now artificially boosted for this generation.

  “What Dead Men Say.” Infringement-FCC regs.

  The Albemuth message, though, corrects Dr. HK’s theory; there was no explosion, just that Being time slipped into lineal time for this solar system or planet ... hence myth of Garden of Eden days of every race on earth—it ended, we were cast out. The lineal time, which is the only time we recognize, is a slipped ontological coordinate of existence; each year should reinforce and totally renew, even add layers to each of us like patina; we should age in that sense, grow until each of us, qua entelechy, is perfected. “But what about dinosaur bones and all fossils?” we ask. Answer: Every art work breaks , even though it is complete. A bone China cup doesn’t age, but an accident can occur to it. This is what happened to all life; eventually, like all artifacts, each form breaks, but the entelechy escapes the brittle crystallized form and reappears in plastic rebirth. There is also change—this isn’t an unmoving, static world. But the processes we know as aging—the entropy of our world, and what we see of the cosmos; (contrast cosmos with universe). Everything lost should at the end of each turn be as renewed as at the end of the 24-hour cycle of an electric clock. Something is wrong in our world; we lose. An equilibrium is gone: and we sense it as defeat failure illness age and finally death. Something is out of balance; the two time-forces aren’t equal.

  “What would we notice as this true (retro) time jumps in ratio? A slowing of our normal lineal time? No, the infusing into our aging world of a bright energy, pouring everywhere, sparkling, vivifying the living things and the unliving. We would see a living energy, a sort of shining sap which pours all over, sparkles; and it changes whatever it fluxes itself into like a plasma of n-ions. This is time, true time, plus energy time. It would roll back the accretions which are false, that is, it would roll back the least-Being accretions ... it would add vitality to the Real, and cause the false totally to disappear, as if never there. This is time beginning to reverse itself: a direction. Experienced as energy to Being, as disappearance of the irreal/illusion.

  “These slowings and reversings would come in spurts. Not in a lineal fashion; that aspect is of wrong-way time. It would be like childbirth: in surges of energy outward onto the world. At Spring the cyclic life is at its peak; so reverse time would tend to peak with it.

  “And we’d have—for those who were influxed directly—the eerie feeling that the clock had been turned back ... hundreds, maybe thousands of years, depending on how much of this energy—and it is energy—infused each of them. Each would vary from the others touched; moved backward—receiving more. It has a quantity (years back) and quality: what one sees qualitatively.

  The U.S. Intelligence psychiatric profile on Dr. HK shows that “he was taken over by Dionysus thus lifting him outside time & space,” etc., like Nietzsche, but regards the experience as real.

  Always, what Zagreus-Dionysus[204] fears is that they will pen him up, not that they will kill him, after all, he is immortal. He must (one) either display his true strength and escape, or (to) submit and die; either way he is free. He has chosen to submit, in order to conceal his existence; and also they are “civilizing” him, teaching him that he should do that. But he comes to those snared like a small animal: in a trap, and becomes them. Dionysus was member of a visiting expedition. Had qualities of naivety and curiosity, was lured in by humans to their “game,” was gulled and slain. Now he doesn’t know his name (Parsifal, Christ, Siegfried). They murdered him—in fact they lured him to obtain what he had with him (whatever). Our ancestors. So their expedition went on and left him behind, left him here among us. He wasn’t as sophisticated; couldn’t watch detached or disinterestedly as the rest in his party did. Maybe he was younger than they in the party: a youth, a child, born on the star-flight... hence so naive. Human (adults) were more worldlywise than he. Now he can’t be trained by his own race, must be reborn here in us (they are free of the slaying power of runaway linear time; this is why he is immortal or eternal; it is how we ought to be and can be again). Their expedition entered our world from outside the linear runaway time dysfunction. Dion[205] migrated forward in lineal time, becoming civilized, “growing up,” into Zagreus and Orpheus and especially Christos. After that he ceased, (that was the perfection of his entelechy, but we’ll say that no growth took place in Being time on this world after 100 A.D., as reason). He returns as Christos; this is why he talked about “sending the Second Helper,” but meant himself, secretly. He had been murdered so often—the prone corpse in fawn garment, murdered—that he had learned to conceal himself ... and the best way was to forget (Lethe) who he was, so he couldn’t by accident blurt it out, as he had done as Jesus.

  Fear of imprisonment over all; if arrested, he’d rather bait the authorities (e.g. Pilate) into “killing” him, which would free him, rather than languish in small cage like trapped animal. He has affinity to small trapped animal because of what was done to him (in his natural form he is small: an infant, and vulnerable). (So he is the God of the vulnerable and trusting, and especially the snared; those helpless in traps). The fawn, the lamb ...those gulled by curiosity and childishness, wishing to play (with those older and more experienced).

  The God of innocence. Now he has forgotten his name, but his nature—and powers—remain. Occasionally anamnesis returns.

  He is in many of us (in protag of this novel). But mainly he is the cyclothemic person—oscillating between moods of tenderness and fury. Intoxication and sorrow.

  Dion was premey[206] (v.). He isn’t Jesus; he is Elijah and John the Baptist; meets Jesus the Christos who is a later incarnation, a more mature one ... Dionysus is too wild (protag’s research had led him to think they’re all one, culminating in Jesus; there are at least two of them, and it is Dion who takes him personally over).

  (c. 1974-75)

  Fat[207] 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. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his—Fat’s—not God’s—handwriting.

  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 from time to time was holy in origin & hence a form of scripture.

  One of his paragraphs impressed me enough to copy it out & include it here.

  “Summary. (etc—v. tractate)”[208]

  Fat developed a lot of unusual theories to account for his contact with God, & the information derived therefrom. One in particular struck me as thought-provoking. It amounted to a kind of mental capitulation by Fat to what he was undergoi
ng; this theory held that in actuality he wasn’t experiencing anything at all. Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy-beams emanating from far off, perhaps millions of miles away. These selective brain site stimulations generated in his head the impression—for him—that he was seeing & hearing words, pictures, figures of people, in short God, or as Fat liked to call it, the Logos. But, really, he only imagined he experienced these things. They resembled holograms. What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights & sounds. In effect, he no longer claimed that what he experienced was really there. Did this indicate he had begun to sober up? Hardly. Now he held the view that “they” or God or someone owned a long-range very tight information-rich beam of energy focussed on Fat’s head. In this I saw no improvement, but it did represent a change. Fat could now honestly discount his hallucinations, which meant he recognized them as such. But, like Gloria, he now had a “they.” It seemed to me a pyrrhic victory. Fat’s life struck me as a litany of exactly that, as for example the way he had rescued Gloria.

  The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one— in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the key to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur— your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality, & not only that—as if that weren’t bad enough—you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency. When in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes & processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar.

  & what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something. But what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

  In the midst of his shattered landscape Fat imagined God had cured him. Once you notice pyrrhic victories they seem to abound.[209]

  Either he had seen God too soon, or he had seen him too late. In any case it had done him no good at all in terms of survival. Encountering the living God had not helped to equip him for the tasks of ordinary endurance, which ordinary men, not so favored, handle.[210]

  Men & the world are mutually toxic to each other. But God—the true God—has penetrated both, penetrated man & penetrated the world, & sobers the landscape. But that God, the God from outside, encounters fierce opposition. Frauds—the deceptions of madness—abound, & mask themselves as their mirror opposites: pose as sanity, the masks, however, wear thin, & the madness reveals itself. It is an ugly thing.

  The remedy is here but so is the malady. As Fat repeats obsessively, “the Empire never ended.” In a startling response to the crisis, the true God mimics the universe, the very region he has invaded; he takes on the likeness of sticks & trees & cans in gutters—he presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer noticed. Lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality & us as well. God, in very truth, attacks & injures us, in his role as antidote. As Fat can testify to, it is a scary experience to encounter this. Hence we say, the true God is in the habit of concealing himself. 25 hundred years have passed since Heraclitus wrote, “Latent form is the master of obvious form.”

  At Y, the entity inc. me, evolves into its ultimate state (self), the info-firing, quasi-material, quasi-energy plasmatic nonhumanoid life form I call Zebra—from perhaps thousands or millions of years in the future. By then (“Y”) it is virtually pure knowing, pure information (& firing it back at/to me). It has died for the last time & now invades from “the other side” (upper realm) as well as from the future.

  This fits in with the “paranormal crisis discloses paranormal powers” & the hiding of those powers overruled by the life-threatening situation; this clearly states that I possess the powers. “I know, too”—i.e., am one of them.

  I arranged for my own 2-74 disinhibition. It’s not Jim[211] come back from the other side but me; & once 1 was an Essene. But it is indeed from the other side, no longer humanoid, & it’s in me now: 1 am right now it. “We shall see him as he really is & we shall be like him”—not him like us. This is a little different from saying “It’s ourselves in the future”; this says Zebra is specifically me.

  Fat’s obsessive idea these days, as he worries more & more about Sherri, was that the Savior would soon be reborn—or had been already. Somewhere in the world, he walked or would soon walk the earth.[212]

  Once more.

  (1978)

  Bishop Timothy Archer.[213]Mary Ann Domingo. Mother of

  Vince Domingo.

  Lora Domingo. Vince’s wife. S.W.P. [Socialist Workers Party].

  Vince is chairman of the Save the Marin County Three Committee (3 alleged (Black) terrorists[).] Time: 1970: Place: San Rafael.

  Mary Ann works for the Dept. of Labor as an editor of government pamphlets.[214]

  Vince wants Bishop Archer to speak at 3-C rally in behalf of civil rights & anti-war. Great hostility between his S.W.P. wife Lora & his mother, but his mother agrees to write the letter to Bishop Archer. Mary Ann is actually working for U.S, G-2.[215] She becomes Bishop Archer’s mistress to compromise him (because of his anti-war & pro civil rights stand). Bishop Archer is killed in an auto crash in either San Francisco or in the Golden Gate Bridge or Marin County; she was driving. Later she commits suicide.

  The Zadokite Scrolls.[216]

  There is a dig in the Dead Sea area by Catholic archaeologists. They’ve unearthed scrolls predating xtianity of a strictly Jewish sect. Not considered an important find but Bishop Archer has talked to the translator & confides in Vince—who is an atheist—that the scrolls convince Archer that there was no historic Jesus. Archer intends to step down as bishop. He is being tried on charges of heresy, for denying the trinity. Then before he can make his public statement regarding Jesus & the Zadokite document he dies in the auto crash. Few people (1) know what is in the Zadokite document & (2) that Archer was going to step down & what he was going to say—he was going to convert to Judaism.

  Sid Herz, orthodox Jewish friend of Vince, based on Avram Davidson.[217] Bishop Archer meets him through Vince.

  Part one of the novel: 1970, the anti-war movement. (1970). Bishop Archer.

  Part two: After the Vietnam War. Bishop Archer & Mary Ann are dead. 1981, i.e., the present. Vince is no longer politically active (for some reason) finds evidence that his mother murdered Bishop Archer. He has nervous breakdown as a result.

  Micky Hilliard—his therapist.

  Summary: He imagines that he is his dead friend Bishop Archer, who has returned to him from “the other side” (of the grave). Vince “must tell the world that he—Bishop Archer—was murdered by the U.S. government acting through Mary Ann, the Bishop’s secret mistress.” To verify that he is indeed Bishop Archer, Vince knows (or believes he knows) the contents of the Zadokite Document. Only the Catholic Church, which possesses the still-untranslated document, is in a position to confirm this.

  Father Shirai, who translated the scrolls. Friend of Bishop Archer. Will he confirm what Vince says? This will implicate not only Mary Ann (who is dead) but U.S. G-2 as well, & they are not dead.

  Vince, who may be psychotic, believes that U.S. G-2 assassins now plan to kill him (or “kill him again,” as it were). Only Lora believes him—at least the political part.

  But the real issue (actually) is the Zadokite document & its implications. Vince wants his friend Sid Herz to publish it (or what he claims is it) in a little Zionist rag that Herz puts out. All Vince really cares about is getting the Zadokite material published.

  Herz’s office is destroyed by “KKK/Nazis” in the L.A. area. Vince suspects the U.S. government.

  For this novel to work, it must be the case that what Vince wants Sid to publish is exa
ctly what Bishop Archer planned to publish—but was killed in the auto crash before he could publish it. Bishop Archer had access to the media (of course), but Vince does not; viz: Archer was a widely-known figure; Vince is a lunatic & not known to anyone. Vince has no connections whatever.

  Only the Catholic Church can confirm what Vince alleges is the articles of the Zadokite Document, known to Bishop Archer.

  Resolution: The Church decides that the value of saving an innocent man (Vince) from the condemnation that he is insane & probable murder by U.S. G-2, as Bishop Archer was (murdered) is more important than protecting Jesus’ image; & Father Shirm is instructed by the Vatican to release the text of the Zadokite Scrolls.

  Ending: Father Shirm says to Vince, “I believe you are Timothy Archer. It is a miracle.” U.S. G-2 gives up. Vince is released from the mental institution due to Micky Hilliard.

  Herz publishes (the Zadokite document); the Catholic Church confirms it is authentic. They (the Catholic Church) are the only ones in a position to confirm, since it is they who possess the scrolls. This is the essence of xtianity: truth & the life & vindication of one man—even a man who is a heretic—is more important than saving the whole edifice (of the Church); thus the Church proves its right to hold the keys to the Kingdom, &, by extension, validates Jesus & the teachings of Christ himself as the basis of the Church, since he & his teachings are its basis. There is now no point in U.S. G-2 killing or discrediting Vince. (n.: it is hopeless to try to discredit him in the face of an officially authenticated miracle[)]. The Church is pitted against the secular authorities, & the Church wins; & Vince is saved. & the truth—the Zadokite document—is published, Bishop Archer got what he returned for—i.e., wanted. Vince’s fear & paranoia become trust, & he splits with Lora who, as a SWP-er, is still hostile & suspicious & an atheist.

  (1981)

  Bishop Tim Archer.