In Pursuit of Valis
Page 22
I’m going to assign to him as his major view my Commedia[218] 3-coaxial realms view (as expressed in my Metz speech & which were going to be the basis for the 3rd novel in the Valis trilogy). He has been studying the Commedia & Sufi teachings, also Quantum mechanics (which he does not understand but nonetheless prattles on about). He is convinced that Dante’s 3 realms (Inferno, Purgatorio & Paradiso) are available in this life; & here he gets into Heidegger & Dasein (this makes historical sense, since Heidegger very much influenced Tillich, etc., contemporary Protestant theory).
Now, how does this relate to his later involvement with the Zadokite Document & the Anokhi mushroom?[219] The Zadokite sect knew how to get in to the Paradiso realm (alternate reality) in which Christ is here. (This clearly relates to Allegro’s “hallucination” theory;[220] likewise Hoffman’s ROAD TO ELEUSIS.)[221] It is quite simply the restored reality, & is potentially always available. What I want to stress is that none of these ideas is original with Bishop Archer. So I must invent a writer-scholar-philosopher-theoretician who advances this theory about the Commedia in his book(s), his published writing—something connected with California outre theorizing.
In other words from the beginning Bishop Archer is searching for Christ. The “Dante” formulation initially provides him with a theoretical framework as to how it can be done (or he thinks this is how it can be done. Now, he drops all this—& the California writer who is based on Alan Watts, in favor of the Zadokite scrolls & the anokhi mushroom; this is typical of him. I would have built on the first, constructed a synthesis, but this is not how Jim worked; he rushed from one thing to the next looking; this California writer is a Sufi. Edgar Barefoot is his name. This is set in the Bay Area. Bishop Archer meets Barefoot; they become colleagues: an Episcopal Bishop & a Sufi guru living on a house boat at Pier 5 in Sausalito. The name of all this is making God (or, as with Archer, Christ) immediately available to you as a living experience.
There is a certain quality of Jack Isidore[The “fool” protagonist in the PKD novel CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST (1975).] in Bishop Archer: The capacity to believe anything, any pseudo-science as theosophy. The “fool in Christ,” naive & gullible &—rushing from one fad to another, typical of California.
The Zadokite Document (scrolls) convinces Bishop Archer—who had devoted his life to “reaching across to the living Christ” (which makes sense given the fact that he is after all a Bishop—that Christ was “irrelevant” there is something more important. The expositor of the 200 BCE Zadokite Sect.
Archer’s involvement with Barefoot is “Ecumenical,” but with the Zadokite & Anokhi mushroom stuff he has ecumenically called himself out of xtianity entirely. Barefoot is crushed, heartbroken—an example of the casualties Archer leaves along the road behind him in his speed-rush Faustian quest, always exceeding itself, surpassing itself (it is really Dionysus that has hold of him). Barefoot, Calif guru that he is, acts as a rational stable counterpoint to Archer’s frenzy. Barefoot is authentically what he seems to be, claims to be: a spiritual person & teacher; he is not a fraud. He is always being demolished in discussions by other more formal thinkers, e.g. those at UC Berkeley, e.g. on KPFA. But—like Watts—he has his followers. He is really quite systematic & rigorous in his thinking. He does not foresee Archer suddenly abandoning him & flying off to Europe vis-à-vis the Zadokite scrolls—he, the Sufi, the non-xtian, is horrified when Archer turns his back on Christ. Archer declares that now he has found the true religion (at last). This very concept (“the true religion”) is foreign to Barefoot in fact that is one of his fundamental views: that all religions are equally valuable.
Ah. Archer has expropriated Barefoot’s views & peddled them as his own. Barefoot does not mind; he just wants the views per se to be promulgated.
What has happened is, Archer has grown weary of Barefoot’s “Dante’s 3 Realms right here” view, because there is no clear (i.e. easy) way to get to the top realm; Archer has become impatient & restless, &, before he learns of the Zadokite find, is discontented, is casting about for a new involvement. Barefoot was dumped before Archer latched on to the Zadokite stuff—it just didn’t show.
So when we meet Bishop Archer he is already involved in a fusion of Heidegger & Sufism—this means that the book will deal with California grotesques, which is okay. This is how we encounter him, like the grown ups in “The Cherry Orchard.”[222]
Barefoot claims actually to have experienced the 3 Realms. I win assign to him my “evasion equals time; Dasein[223] equals space” view. Archer can’t get the hang of it & wearies of trying; it takes too long. He wants instant solutions. The Anokhi mushroom will do.
This is how the young female protagonist meets Jeff Archer: in one of Barefoot’s seminars on his Sausalito houseboat. Maybe I won’t use flashbacks. (Remember: Jeff is based on me.) (1) (No—he has [name deleted] sense of humor: he is like one of the dopers in “Scanner”—funny & wonderful—like [name deleted]-Ernie Luckman.) Jeff is there to try to figure out what his father the Bishop is talking about. Has Bishop Archer met his mistress yet?
Her name: Angel Gale. Based on [name deleted]. She lives in Berkeley. I’ve never set a novel in Berkeley. Could she work in a record store & be into music? Based, too, on [name deleted]. Calm, rational.
The mistress: Kirsten Lundborg, efficient but sarcastic & bitter.
Jeff has the sort of brilliant hebephrenic humor of [name deleted] and [name deleted], up until the moment he kills himself. In contrast, Bill Lundborg is melancholy & emotional, filled with Sturm und Drang.
Like Angel, Jeff is into music, so they have a lot in common. He has an apartment on Protrero Hill. Has a male roommate who is a fag poet, [...] Sid Fitzpatrick.
Gay bar in S.F.: the Bloody Mary.
Dike friend of his based on [name deleted]: Connie Goldstein. She develops a crush on Angel.
Angel supposes that Jeff’s problem (he has a problem he won’t talk about) is that he is gay or fears he is gay; but in fact she is dead wrong; he is in love with Kirsten, his father’s mistress.
The basic story: Zagreus has seized control of Bishop Archer & drives him to his ruin. Whereupon Zagreus leaves the Bishop & enters Bill Lundborg. But in exchange for madness & death—the dues that Zagreus exacts—he confers a vision of Perfect Beauty (Pythagorean Kosmos).
So I have the Bay Area gay community, the Bay Area “Alan Watts KPFA” community, poetry & religion (non-xtian) & music & some dope. But this is not the doper subculture! They are all intellectuals except for Connie.
How about a Trot [Trotskyite] too, to bring in radical politics? Angel: former husband Hampton Squires .. Has a Russian friend whose real name is Nicholas Kaminsky, but he uses the name of Len Jones. Angel suspects him of being KGB. He owns a restaurant on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley & is based on [name deleted].
& a black guy [names deleted], Maury Rivers; he is a painter & burn. Angel is living in the little old house on Dwight Way off Sacramento that she & her husband owned.
(1981)
Chapter Six: Political and Ecological Concerns
Philip K. Dick
1405 Cameo Lane #4
Fullerton
Calif 92631
July 8, 1974: The First Day of the Constitutional Crisis.[224]
But the state of things is so dreary here in the U.S—they say the elderly and poor are eating canned dogfood, now, to stay alive, and the McDonald hamburgers are made from cows’ eyes. The radio also says that today when Charles Colson, the President’s former counsel, went into jail he still wore his Richard M. Nixon tieclasp. “California dreaming is becoming a reality,” is a line from a Mama’s & the Papa’s song of a few years ago, but what a dreadful surreal reality it is: foglike and dangerous, with the subtle and terrible manifestations of evil rising up like rocks in the gloom. I wish I was somewhere else. Disneyland, maybe? The last sane place here? Forever to take Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and never get off?
The landscape is deformed out of recognition by the Lie. Its gloo
m is everywhere, and we encounter nothing we recognize, only familiar things without the possibility of accurate identification. There are only shocks, until we grow numb, are paralyzed and die. When I suddenly stopped believing in the Lie I did not begin to think differently—I saw differently, as if something was gone from the world or gone from between me and the world which had always been there. Like a scrambling device that had been removed: deliberate scrambling. All, suddenly, was clear language. God seemed to seek me out and expressed things through things and what took place. Everywhere I saw signs along a path, marking His presence.
Any lying language creates at once in a single stroke a pseudo-reality, contaminating reality, until the Lie is undone. As soon as one lies one becomes separated from reality. One has introduced the falsification oneself. There is one thing no one can force you to do: to lie. One only lies for one’s advantage. It is based on an inner decision invisible to the world. No one ever says to you, “Lie to me.” The enemy says, You will do and believe certain things. It is your own decision to falsify, in the face of his coercion. I am not sure this is what the enemy wants or anyone [sic; anyhow?] the usual enemy. Only a Greater Enemy, so to speak, would want that, one with greater objectives, and a clearer idea of what the ultimate purpose of all motion is.
Sometime in the past, about three months ago, I must have become aware for the first time in my life that the cause of misery was the Lie and that the enemy, the real enemy, was a liar. I remember somewhere along the line saying loudly, “He is a liar; he is a liar,” and feeling it to be very important, that discovery. I forget—or rather I guess it does not matter—what specific lie by which person made it all change. There was a person, there was a lie. A week after I realized that with no possibility of evading it everything altered radically for me, and the world began to talk, in a true language of signs: silently. The Lie had slipped away. The Lie deals with talk, written or spoken. Now it’s gone. Something else shines forth at last. I see the cat watching it at night, for hours. He has seen it all his life; it is the only language he knows.
I think a lot about my early childhood and remember events in it vividly, which I guess is a sure sign of senility. Also events that took place within the past ten years seem dim and not really a part of me. Their sadness is gone: used up. I encounter new fresh sadnesses in my remote past, like stars that burst into life when I notice them. When I pass on, they again are forgotten. Usually, however, senility is a gradual process; mine came on abruptly when I noticed the cat trying to discern what was causing me pain (I had stomach flu) and then what he could do to help me. He finally got up on my abdomen transversely and purred. It helped, but then when he jumped down the pain returned, whereupon the cat got up again. He lay on me for hours, purring, and finally the disturbed rhythm of my stomach began to match the pace of his purrs, which made me feel much better. Also the sight of his jowly face gazing down at me with concern, his keen interest in me his friend—that changed me, to suddenly open my eyes (I had been lying for an hour on the couch) and see his concerned large furry face, his attention silently fixed on me. It was not an illusion. Or, put another way, his field of energy, his strength, was at that moment greater than mine, small as he was, since mine had dimmed from the flu and his was as always. Perhaps his soul was at that unusual moment, that critical moment, stronger than mine. It is not usual for a small animal’s soul to be larger than a man’s. He warmed me and I recovered, and he went his way. But I changed. It is an odd senility, to be comforted and healed by a small animal who then goes on as always, leaving you different. I think of senility as a loss of contact, a drop in perception, of the actual reality around one. But this was true and in the present. Not a memory.
The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits there forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It’s best not to talk about this. I’ve tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can’t find any. I’m trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can’t even discern that any more. Perhaps I sense the Lie gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.
But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us.
Its sense of timing is perfect. But most important it knows everything. It can make no mistakes. It must be back for a reason.
(8 July 1974)
I can suppose no explanation but the Gnostic one. Creation is not only irrational, it is only semi-real or even only seeming; “rational,” then, signifies real; “irrational” signifies, irreal. Here lies the ontological value of Gnostic knowing—Gnosis itself. “Knowing” signifies “knowing that the irreal is irreal” & being able, then, to counter-distinguish the truly real (these categories relate to Pan-Indian doctrines of Maya = The Grand Illusion both inner & outer). What must be realized is that, like hallucination, the merely seeming can exert decisive power over you, & it is precisely this deplorable state (of ignorance & hence enslavement) that is reversed by Gnosis.
Now about Tagore.[225] He is Lord Krishna. His presence here signifies two things, one good (rescue, extrication) the other bad (terrible danger; the on-going destruction of the ecosphere). This is, time of need; Tagore alerts us to our peril, warns us of the consequences to us & to him—Holy Wisdom; we will kill him & cause him to depart thus we have a clear choice. This has a non-oriental Zoroastrian quality. We choose good or evil, &, in choosing, choose life & God or death & God; forsaking us; Jesus: This is like the O.T.! YHWH often speaks thus to Israel through the prophets!
Ach; this perforce makes me a Biblical prophet: “Cease your evil ways or good will abandon you (i.e. the world); & you will destroy yourselves.” & the N.T. comes into it as well in that our evil actions injure God—we again “crucify” him—&, in true N.T. fashion, he has taken on our sins (in the form of passion & death) voluntarily, this incarnation leading to his suffering & death is not forced on him, he is here for this reason as a protest, to awaken us to what we are doing; vis: if we understand that in wounding the ecosystem we wound God, we may-should thereby—know to cease.
Hence, I see Judo-xtian themes here, quite beyond Pan-Indian, & I continue to identify Tagore with Christ (yet still he is Lord Krishna, paradoxically).
My perception of this in terms of Teilhard [de Chardin]: point omega & the noosphere correlates my total exegesis, my 2-3-74 experience & VALIS with Tagore & his mission as vox [voice] & anima of the ecosphere.
But the final ultimate purpose of VALIS & DI is not to analyze or report but to predict, as John the Baptist (Elijah) did 2000 years ago: the imminent coming—Le return—of the Savior. This is clear from the internal evidence of the two novels. What this makes me think is: remember how when Tom Disch visited me in 1974 I strongly suspected that it was Elijah whose spirit had taken me over (being then also the Baptist)?[226] I very soon pondered the utterance derived from Scripture. Elijah will return shortly before Christ returns, preparing the way. Well, hence Elijah shows up in DIVINE INVASION & his ability repeatedly to incarnate himself is discussed!
& ever since the eleventh grade I have heard the still small (low, murmuring) voice.[227]
Let me say this: if you start with Tagore as the premise & work backwards, 2-3-74-2-75 et al. becomes logical: Eli
jah came, before the second advent to prepare the way—no; not Elijah; the spirit of Elijah! Now, if this be the case re 2-74-2-75, was it futile? Well, I wrote the [VALIS] trilogy[PKD termed VALIS (1981), THE DIVINE INVASION (1981), and THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER (1982) the “VALIS trilogy.”] about it, & have already gotten the first two into reasonably good circulation, one [VALIS] a low-priced mass-distribution paperback, the other [THE DIVINE INVASION] an expensive hardback library edition, each read solo, tells of the Savior coming.
It was not up to the Baptist to teach the xtian kerygma but, rather, to announce the imminent coming of the long-awaited messiah. There is (in VALIS) a vague kerygma but it is only guesswork (what Sophia says, & she dies anyhow): the Savior is still yet to come, at the end of VALIS, explicitly, as if she, too, like the Baptist, only prepares the way “for one Creator.” (“Who is yet to come.”) Both novels are essentially anticipatory! Even DI! Since in DI YHWH has come but not disclosed to the world his presence (yet).
(1981)
I must ask what God wants of me: to promulgate Tagore’s kerygma? or to sacrifice myself? As of today I see only the latter as lying within my power; I do not have the strength left for the former, so he cannot want the former. I must emulate Tagore. The vision of Tagore both is a kerygma & contains a kerygma. My receiving it changes everything. It is no longer, “The Savior is coming” but (& this is much more complex & is new): “The Savior is here as the ecosphere; we are crucifying him by wounding the ecosphere & if we do not stop, he will depart this world & abandon us to our doom.” Thus the ecosphere is viewed as holy, sentient, unitary, & its psyche is Christ himself.
(1981)
Chapter Seven: Two Self-Examinations
Listening to the Platt tape[228] I constme by the logic presented that Valis (the other Mind) which came at me from outside & which overpowered me from inside was indeed the contents of my collective unconscious, & so technically a psychosis, since this is how you define psychosis (it certainly would explain the animism outside, & the interior dissociated activity) but—well, okay; it would account for the AI voice, the 3 eyed sibyl, & the extreme archaicism of the contents. & seeing Rome CAD[229] 45 would simply be psychotic delusion—I did not know where or when I really was.