***
Isn't it an oxymoron to say, I am not myself? Isn't this a verbal contradiction, a statement semantically meaningless? Fat turned out to be Thomas; and I, upon studying the information in my dream, conclude that I am my own father, married to my mother, when she was young—before my own birth. I think the cryptic mention that, "Now and then one or two wizards are born" is supposed to tell me something. A sufficiently advanced technology would seem to us to be a form of magic; Arthur C. Clarke has pointed that out. A wizard deals with magic; ergo, a "wizard" is someone in possession of a highly sophisticated technology, one which baffles us. Someone is playing a board game with time, someone we can't see. It is not God. That is an archaic name given to this entity by societies in the past, and by people now who're locked into anachronistic thinking. We need a new term, but what we are dealing with is not new.
Horselover Fat is able to travel through time, travel back thousands of years. The three-eyed people probably live in the far future; they are our descendents, highly-evolved. And it is probably their technology which permitted Fat to do his time-traveling. In point of fact, Fat's master personality may not lie in the past but ahead of us—but it expressed itself outside of him in the form of Zebra. I am saying that the St. Elmo's Fire which Fat recognized as alive and sentient probably abreacted back to this time-period and is one of our own children.
8
I DID NOT THINK I should tell Fat that I thought his encounter with God was in fact an encounter with himself from the far future. Himself so evolved, so changed, that he had become no longer a human being. Fat had remembered back to the stars, and had encountered a being ready to return to the stars, and several selves along the way, several points along the line. All of them are the same person.
Entry 13 in the tractate: Pascal said, "All history is one immortal man who continually learns." This is the Immortal One whom we worship without knowing his name. "He lived a long time ago but he is still alive," and, "The Head Apollo is about to return." The name changes.
On some level Fat guessed the truth; he had encountered his past selves and his future selves—two future selves; an early-on one, the three-eyed people, and then Zebra, who is discorporate.
Time somehow got abolished for him, and the recapitulation of selves along the linear time-axis caused the multitude of selves to laminate together into a common entity.
Out of the lamination of selves, Zebra, which is supra- or trans-temporal, came into existence: pure energy, pure living information. Immortal, benign, intelligent and helpful. The essence of the rational human being. In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man, Horselover Fat being just one example. The in-breaking deity that Fat encountered in 1974 was himself. However, Fat seemed happy to believe that he had met God. After some thought I decided not to tell him my views. After all, I might be wrong.
It all had to do with time. "Time can be overcome," Mircea Eliade wrote. That's what it's all about. The great mystery of Eleusis, of the Orphies, of the early Christians, of Sarapis, of the Greco-Roman mystery religions, of Hermes Trismegistos, of the Renaissance Hermetic alchemists, of the Rose Cross Brotherhood, of Apollonius of Tyana, of Simon Magus, of Asklepios, of Paracelsus, of Bruno, consists of the abolition of time. The techniques are there. Dante discusses them in the Comedy. It has to do with the loss of amnesia; when forgetfulness is lost, true memory spreads out backward and forward, into the past and into the future, and also, oddly, into alternate universes; it is orthogonal as well as linear.
This is why Elijah could be said correctly to be immortal; he had entered the Upper Realm (as Fat calls it) and is no longer subject to time. Time equals what the ancients called "astral determinism." The purpose of the mysteries was to free the initiate from astral determinism, which roughly equals fate. About this, Fat wrote in his tractate:
Entry 48. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed "astral determinism." We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plásmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. "The Empire never ended."
Siddhartha, the Buddha, remembered all his past lives; this is why he was given the title of buddha which means "the Enlightened One." From him the knowledge of achieving this passed to Greece and shows up in the teachings of Pythagoras, who kept much of this occult, mystical gnosis secret; his pupil Empedocles, however, broke off from the Pythagorean Brotherhood and went public. Empedocles told his friends privately that he was Apollo. He, too, like the Buddha and Pythagoras, could remember his past lives. What they did not talk about was their ability to "remember" future lives.
The three-eyed people who Fat saw represented himself at an enlightened stage of his evolving development through his various lifetimes. In Buddhism it's called the "super-human divine eye" (dibba-cakkhu), the power to see the passing away and rebirth of beings. Gautama the Buddha (Siddhartha) attained it during his middle watch (ten P.M. to two A.M.). In his first watch (six P.M. to ten P.M.) he gained the knowledge of all—repeat: all—his former existences (pubbeni-vasanussati-nana). I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.
It strikes me as an interesting paradox that a Buddha—an enlightened one—would be unable to figure out, even after four-and-a-half years, that he had become enlightened. Fat had become totally bogged down in his enormous exegesis, trying futilely to determine what had happened to him. He resembled more a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.
"Holy fuck!" as Kevin would have put it, about the encounter with Zebra. "What was THAT?"
No wimpy hype passed muster before Kevin's eyes. He considered himself the hawk and the hype the rabbit. He had little use for the exegesis, but remained Fat's good friend. Kevin operated on the principle, Condemn the deed not the doer.
These days, Kevin felt fine. After all, his negative opinion of Sherri had proven correct. This brought him and Fat closer together. Kevin knew her for what she was, her cancer notwithstanding. In the final analysis, the fact that she was dying mattered to him not in the least. He had mulled it over and concluded that the cancer was a scam.
Fat's obsessive idea these days, as he worried more and more about Sherri, was that the Savior would soon be reborn—or had been already. Somewhere in the world he walked or soon would walk the ground once more.
What did Fat intend to do when Sherri died? Maurice had shouted that at him in the form of a question. Would he die, too?
Not at all. Fat, pondering and writing and doing research and receiving dribs and drabs of messages from Zebra during hypnagogic states and in dreams, and attempting to salvage something from the wreck of his life, had decided to go in search of the Savior. He would find him wherever he was.
This was the mission, the divine purpose, which Zebra had placed on him in March 1974: the mild yoke, the burden light. Fat, a holy man now, would become a modern-day magus. All he lacked was a clue—some hint as to where to seek. Zebra would tell him, eventually; the clue would come from God. This was the whole purpose of Zebra's theophany: to send Fat on his way.
Our friend David, upon being told of this, asked, "Will it be Christ?" Thus showing his Catholicism.
"It is a fifth Savior," Fat said enigmatically. After all, Zebra had referred to the coming of the Savior in several—and in a sense conflicting—ways: as St. Sophia, who was Christ; as the Head Apollo; as the Buddha or Siddhartha.
Being eclectic in terms of his theology, Fat listed a number of saviors: the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus and Abu Al-Qasim Muhammad I
bn Abd Allah Abd Al-Muttalib Ibn Hashim (i.e., Muhammad). Sometimes he also listed Mani. Therefore, the next Savior would be number five, by the abridged list, or number six by the longer list. At certain times, Fat also included Asklepios, which, when added to the longer list, would make the next Savior number seven. In any case, this forthcoming savior would be the last; he would sit as king and judge over all nations and people. The sifting bridge of Zoroastrianism had been set up, by means of which good souls (those of light) became separated from bad souls (those of darkness). Ma'at had put her feather in the balance to be weighed against the heart of each man in judgment, as Osiris the Judge sat. It was a busy time.
Fat intended to be present, perhaps to hand the Book of Life to the Supreme Judge, the Ancient of Days mentioned in the Book of Daniel.
We all pointed out to Fat that hopefully the Book of Life—in which the names of all who were saved had been inscribed—would prove too heavy for one man to lift; a winch and power crane would be necessary. Fat wasn't amused.
"Wait'll the Supreme Judge sees my dead cat," Kevin said.
"You and your goddam dead cat," I said. "We're tired of hearing about your dead cat."
After listening to Fat disclose his sly plans to seek out the Savior—no matter how far he had to travel to find him—I realized the obvious: Fat actually was in search of the dead girl Gloria, for whose death he considered himself responsible. He had totally blended his religious life and goals with his emotional life and goals. For him "savior" stood for "lost friend." He hoped to be reunited with her, but this side of the grave. If he couldn't go to her, on the other side, he would instead find her here. So although he was no longer suicidal he was still nuts. But this seemed to me to be an improvement; thanatos was losing out to eros. As Kevin put it, "Maybe Fat'll get laid by some fox somewhere along the way."
By the time Fat took off on his sacred quest he would be searching for two dead girls: Gloria and Sherri. This updated version of the Grail saga made me wonder if equally erotic underpinnings had motived the Grail knights at Montsavat, the castle where Parsifal wound up. Wagner says in his text that only those who the Grail itself calls find their way there. The blood of Christ on the cross had been caught in the same cup from which he had drunk at the Last Supper; so literally it had wound up containing his blood. In essence the blood, not the Grail, summoned the knights; the blood never died. Like Zebra, the contents of the Grail were a plasma or, as Fat termed it, plásmate. Probably Fat had it down somewhere in his exegesis that Zebra equaled plásmate equaled the sacred blood of the crucified Christ.
The spilled blood of the girl broken and drying on the pavement outside the Oakland Synanon Building called to Fat, who, like Parsifal, was a complete fool. That's what the word "parsifal" is supposed to mean in Arabic; it's supposed to have been derived from "Falparsi," an Arabic word meaning "pure fool." This of course isn't the actual case, although in the opera Parsifal, Kundry addresses Parsifal this way. The name "Parsifal" is in fact derived from "Perceval," which is just a name. However, one point of interest remains: via Persia the Grail is identified with the pre-Christian "lapis exilix," which is a magical stone. This stone shows up in later Hermetic alchemy as the agent by which human metamorphosis is achieved. On the basis of Fat's concept of interspecies symbiosis, the human being crossbonded with Zebra or the Logos or plásmate to become a homoplásmate, I can see a certain continuity in all this. Fat believed himself to have crossbonded with Zebra; therefore he had already become that which the Hermetic alchemists sought. It would be natural, then, for him to seek out the Grail; he would be finding his friend, himself and his home.
Kevin held the role of the evil magician Klingsor by his continual lampooning of Fat's idealistic aspirations. Fat, according to Kevin, was horny. In Fat, thanatos—death—fought it out with eros—which Kevin identified not with life but with getting laid. This probably isn't far off; I mean Kevin's basic description of the dialectical struggle surging back and forth inside Fat's mind. Part of Fat desired to die and part desired life. Thanatos can assume any form it wishes; it can kill eros, the life drive, and then simulate it. Once thanatos does this to you, you are in big trouble; you suppose you are driven by eros but it is thanatos wearing a mask. I hoped Fat hadn't gotten into this place; I hoped his desire to seek out and find the Savior stemmed from eros.
The true Savior, or the true God for that matter, carries life with him; he is life. Any "savior" or "god" who brings death is nothing but thanatos wearing a savior mask. This is why Jesus identified himself as the true Savior—even when he didn't want to so identify himself—by his healing miracles. The people knew what healing miracles pointed to. There is a wonderful passage at the very end of the Old Testament where this matter is clarified. God says, "But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings, and you shall break loose like calves released from the stall."
In a sense Fat hoped that the Savior would heal what had become sick, restore what had been broken. On some level, he actually believed that the dead girl Gloria could be restored to life. This is why Sherri's unrelieved agony, her growing cancer, baffled him and defeated his spiritual hopes and beliefs. According to his system as put forth in his exegesis, based on his encounter with God, Sherri should have been made well.
Fat was in search of a very great deal. Although technically he could understand why Sherri had cancer, spiritually he could not. In fact, Fat could not really make out why Christ, the Son of God, had been crucified. Pain and suffering made no sense to Fat; he could not fit it into the grand design. Therefore, he reasoned, the existence of such dreadful afflictions pointed to irrationality in the universe, an affront to reason.
Beyond doubt, Fat was serious about his proposed quest. He had squirreled away almost twenty thousand dollars in his savings account.
"Don't make fun of him," I said to Kevin one day. "This is important to him."
His eyes gleaming with customary cynical mockery, Kevin said, "Ripping off a piece of ass is important to me, too."
"Come off it," I said. "You're not funny."
Kevin merely continued to grin.
A week later, Sherri died.
Now, as I had foreseen, Fat had two deaths on his conscience. He had been unable to save either girl. When you are Atlas you must carry a heavy load and if you drop it a lot of people suffer, an entire world of people, an entire world of suffering. This now lay over Fat spiritually rather than physically, this load. Tied to him the two corpses cried for rescue—cried even though they had died. The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.
What I feared was a return by Fat to suicide and if that failed, then another stretch in the rubber lock-up.
To my surprise when I dropped by Fat's apartment I found him composed.
"I'm going," he told me.
"On your quest?"
"You got it," Fat said.
"Where?"
"I don't know. I'll just start going and Zebra will guide me."
I had no motivation to try to talk him out of it; what did his alternatives consist of? Sitting by himself in the apartment he and Sherri had lived in together? Listening to Kevin mock the sorrows of the world? Worst of all, he could spend his time listening to David prattle about how "God brings good out of evil." If anything were to put Fat in the rubber lock-up it would be finding himself caught in a cross-fire between Kevin and David: the stupid and pious and credulous versus the cynically cruel. And what could I add? Sherri's death had torn me down, too, had deconstructed me into basic parts, like a toy disassembled back to what had arrived in the gaily-colored kit. I felt like saying, "Take me along, Fat. Show me the way home."
While Fat and I sat there together grieving, the phone rang. It was Beth, wanting to be sure Fat knew that he had fallen behind a week in his child support payment.
As he hung up the phone, Fat said to me, "My ex-wives are descended from rats."
"You've got to get out of here,
" I said.
"Then you agree I should go."
"Yes," I said.
"I've got enough money to go anywhere in the world. I've thought of China. I've thought, Where is the least likely place He would be born? A Communist country like China. Or France."
"Why France?" I asked.
"I've always wanted to see France."
"Then go to France," I said.
"'What will you do,'" Fat murmured.
"Pardon?"
"I was thinking about that American Express Travelers' Checks TV ad. 'What will you do. What will you do.' That's how I feel right now. They're right."
I said, "I like the one where the middle-aged man says, 'I had six hundred dollars in that wallet. It's the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life.' If that's the worst thing that ever happened to him—"
"Yeah," Fat said, nodding. "He's led a sheltered life."
I knew what vision had conjured itself up in Fat's mind: the vision of the dying girls. Either broken on impact or burst open from within. I shivered and felt, myself, like weeping.
"She suffocated," Fat said, finally, in a low voice. "She just fucking suffocated; she couldn't breathe any longer."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. '"There are worse diseases than cancer.'"
"Did he show you slides?"
We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
"Let's walk down to Sombrero Street," I said; that was a good restaurant and bar where we all liked to go. "I'll buy you a drink."
We walked down to Main St. and seated ourselves in the bar at Sombrero Street.
"Where's that little brown-haired lady you used to come in here with?" the waitress asked Fat as she served us our drinks.
The VALIS Trilogy Page 13