Here we are. It’s Friday and we’re onto Chapters 8 and 9. Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of featuring Erik Davis who talked about the “high weirdness” of Dick and hallucinatory fiction. I’m still buzzing over what Erik had to say. The keyword I’m taking away from the interview is “Chapel Perilous.” When I first read Erik’s response to my question, I nodded my head. Somehow, knowing there are contours — however vaguely defined — to the “dark night of the soul” relieves some small degree of anxiety I’ve taken up while treading Dick’s literary dark waters. There’s a way out and through. Or as Erik Davis writes, “there is such a thing as too many synchronicities.”
Did Dick ever make it out, in his life? I don’t know. But we could consider the literary toolkit — typewriter, pen, keyboard or what-have-you — as one critical, makeshift raft across the sea of inextricable oddities. Art can become a healing balm for the gnostic-shot psyche.
Hallucinatory Fiction: A Book That Takes the Rug Out From Under You
Erik Davis touches on something we’ve all been feeling as we read on. Dick’s story is highly confusing. At times muddled in a brutal self-analysis, at other times floating into high-minded metaphysical speculation. Is this fiction or autobiography? Erik comments in our interview:
So even though it is a very readable work, it confuses you about where to draw the line between reality and fiction, brutal autobiography and crazy fantasy, religion and satire. The more you know about PKD’s “real” life, the more confused in some ways you are about how to take it. It uses the criss-cross and confusion between different genres to create a kind of reading event in the reader (or some readers anyway) that would be impossible with more straight story-telling.
Arguably, this is a great working definition for Hallucinatory Fiction as a story-telling method. Not to be played with lightly!
VALIS is a masterpiece whose power partly lies in its ability to disorient and enchant the reader. I suspect that for readers today it continues to resonate, as our world in many ways has simply become more PhilDickean.
There’s more we can think about from Erik’s interview, but I’ll save that for the chapter commentary. For now, take the advice that there can be “too many synchronicities” with you as we delve into the latter half of the book.
Here goes.
Chapter 8
We’ll go over this chapter lightly. I’ve received some feedback about going too deep into the metaphysical theologizing Dick often does. The good news is, if you’ve been having trouble getting through it, the book becomes more fiction around this point.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this chapter is that Fat’s alter ego, Phil Dick, the voice of the novel, develops a theory about himself (er, Fat). VALIS is Fat in the future. “It all had to do with time.” Fat was all three people: the gnostic Thomas, the future VALIS, and the present Fat. A holy trinity of sorts. But Phil Dick didn’t have the heart to “tell” Fat. Not yet at least.
Fat starts traveling the world looking for a savior, which he is now convinced is one of the main messages of VALIS. He goes on a quest for the Grail [1]; which Phil points out is an erotic one, a quest to resurrect and reunite with the dead: Gloria and soon, Sherri.
When Sherri dies, Fat takes it all surprisingly well. Something interesting happens with the narrative: Fat and Dick go out and have a few drinks together, where Fat and Dick admit to each other: “You can’t exist without me,” in a double-entendre sort of way.
We end the chapter with a few notes that are metaphysical and important to the plot. The first is the story of Parsifal. The fool who persisted in his folly and saves himself — Dick points out this is a gnostic myth creeping back up in Western literature. A saved savior. Fat is searching for himself. Dick writes that “Fat is dead,” again telegraphing a change in the novel’s design. Fat’s tractates theorize that the savior comes in many forms and many times throughout human history. He calls this being a “Phagocyte,” that being VALIS, a “microform” of the healthy twin Universe intended to invade ours destroy the Black Iron Prison.
“So everything lingers but a moment, and hastens on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of summer, the brute and the man after a few years: death reaps unweariedly… Yet not withstanding this, nay, as if this were not at all, everything is always there and in its place… Therefore, every moment we can cheerfully cry, ‘In spite of time, death and decay, we are all still together!'”
I recommend checking out the full passage from Schopenhauer that Dick quotes.
We move to the next chapter!
Chapter 9
In which we are introduced to VALIS the meta-novel. Fat’s friend, Kevin, invites him to go see a movie. The movie’s name is, sure enough, VALIS. Starring a rock group named “Mother Goose.”
Eric Lampton is the musician behind Mother Goose, who also happened to write the screenplay and star in the film. We are treated with an in-depth description of, to say the least, a surreal, kitsch scifi film:
“Low budget sci-fi flick, I said to myself. This is what gives the field a bad reputation.”
Dick knocks his very own authorship lineage here — a pulp scifi novel writer himself.
In this science fiction story, the Nixon never existed. Instead there is a president named “Ferris Fremount.” And the progatonists appear to be situated in a “small record firm” by the name of Meritone Records in Burbank. Nicholas Brady owns the record store, playing an electronic genius. Mother Goose — the real life “Eric Lampton” — plays a drugged out songwriter who is paid to write songs for Goose. Goose has a wife named Linda. Brady uses a high-tech scifi sound mixer — one that uses his brain to convert laser signals into sound — to compose music. Linda has no sex organs, as one scene reveals.
A jealous Brady tries to kill Eric Lampton in order to get to his wife, but this attempt ultimately fails. Not before revealing to us that Eric is a robot: Brady’s sound machine bursts his head, shattering it into a thousand electronic pieces. Linda seems to be able to reverse time and heal Eric, who, upon his revival, speaks with the voice of president Fremont.
“Do you understand this?” I asked Fat, leaning over to whisper.
“Christ, no,” Fat said.
And I’m sure many of us are feeling that way. I won’t go into a play-by-play. Suffice to say an epic fight entails between Eric Lampton — who ends up getting shot with a beam of energy. His eyes are replaced with new eyes, and a third eye that opens in his forehead. Eric starts playing music with possible subliminal messages about killing President Fremount. We see Fremount surrounded by women dressed in red, white and blue uniforms. They, too, have no sex organs. They’re chanting. “Kill Brady!”
We learn about “Project VALIS,” which in the movie is exactly what Fat named it: “Vast Active Living Intelligence System.” There is a hint that VALIS is in orbit around Earth as a satellite. Whatever it is, Fremount and his cronies can’t get it it. The final scene is Fremount celebrating his re-election — but his face is Brady’s.
A series of questions ensue on the ride home between Phil, Kevin and Fat. Interpretations and griping for answers. The details of the movie are uncanny, including even a little clay pot — like Fat’s — on one of the sets. It has a DNA symbol on it. The movie also seemed to mash up different times — a single scene with a barefooted girl wearing pre-modern clothes. Kevin hypothesizes that the early Christians are controlling time and embattled with the evil demiurgic president Fremount.
“You know, you’d have to take a fucking magnifying glass and go over stills from the flick, single-frame stills. One by one by one by one.”
Dick realizes he has a few connections in the movie industry — alluding to Dick’s real life Do Androids Dream being made into a movie itself. He decides to reach out and try to contact the VALIS film-makers and try to get a copy of the stills. It’d be impossible to go over every nuance in the banter and manic euphoria of the characters at this point. They chatter away at all the odd connections. The symbolism. A few important links are made — the screenplay was likely written shortly after Fat’s encounter with VALIS in 1974, for instance. Fremount might be a metaphor for Nixon — who also left office in 1974 and Fat attributed to, possibly, a divine intervention on part of VALIS. Lastly, we here that the music was done by Mini, who does “Synchronicity Music.” Kevin listened to it and had a strange dream of a Celtic ceremony — he had “gone back in time to his origins.”
Commentary
Erik Davis has explicitly described chapter 9 as having thematic importance for VALIS and P.K.D.’s writing as a whole. I couldn’t say it better, so I’ll share his statement from the interview:
“Part of the challenge or creative trial of VALIS is not about extracting a message or core philosophy, but about watching it reflect your own desire and strategies to find or extract such a message. So what reference are you going to look up on wikipedia? What parts do you want to accept or reject? It’s a reflexive book, in other words, which is partly how you open the doors to Chapel Perilous. Along these lines, one of the most important chapters is chapter 9, which is the hinge in the book between the more-or-less autobiographical section and the more-or-less SF-fantasy section. And what does Dick and his pals do there? They go to see a trashy SciFi movie and they look for hidden messages, just like you are doing with the book VALIS. Read that chapter closely, think about how they interpret the film, and more importantly, how they interpret it together, in an enthusiastic conversation between turned-on pals. These kinds of far-ranging, critical, and speculative conversations are a key part of the path, though they can lead in wayward directions. And they also hold out the sense that popular culture can be the vehicle of gnosis.”
So, what Wikipedia pages are you turning to after this chapter? What are you Googling? What were your favorite parts of this banter?
For myself, I was riding the train home from Manhattan, nose buried into the book and glued to the philosophical banter. I felt as if I had just stumbled upon the movie VALIS myself, the whole uncanny nature of the book had wound itself up into this bizarre chapter reflecting upon itself. Reality felt weird and electric. So for me, anyway, I experienced a kind of midnight emotion; a trembling enthusiasm upon encountering the numinous, and good company to share it with.
If there’s one thing that struck me about what the characters said, it was the idea that the ancient Christians, outside of time, could be working on the world in such a subversive way. It’s a crazy idea, admittedly, yet it holds power. And why is it? My own cultural origins perhaps (I was raised Catholic)? I remember being struck by the idea, hearing for the first time of Dick’s experience of ancient Rome overlaid with our own time. What if that was possible? What would that even mean?
That’s where we leave it this Friday. See you Monday for chapter 10. Contributions from Richard Doyle are in talks and likely to be coming up soon!
Notes
[1] Dick mentions that the “Grail” was, in some ancient literature, synonymous with the Philosopher’s Stone. Fat may in fact be his own Savior. He is the stone, but he doesn’t know it yet.
Featured image by Robert Jimenez, “A Philip K. Dick Moment.”