VALIS

"I need someone to show me the things in life that I can't find"

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

 

The hero saw a flash of pink light, which obviously means aliens are broadcasting a message to him about ancient wisdom reincarnate in a theatrical toddler and a conspiracy involving Roman Emperor Richard Nixon and alternate reality movie productions. There can be no other explanation for pink!

 

An online acquaintance claiming to have known Philip K. Dick described him as "a beautiful mind" with both implications that carries. We've likely all seen it in action or experienced it to a smaller extent: intelligence sees connections between ideas, but hyper-connectivity skips the crucial steps of analysis, verification or a full review of whatever flight of fancy you've so unwittingly boarded. If you're truly unlucky the damn train of thought canalizes and you lose your return ticket, to slightly overextend the metaphor.

VALIS is not PKD's last book (and far from his best) but it was the beginning of the end, and the best known manifestation of his last years increasingly fixated on the delusion that he had received a personal, gnostic revelation in a flash of light reflected off a pretty girl's neck wear, that all of reality was a sham and only he (and his hero's helpers) could see it. To be sure, a glance back at his career indicates he was always headed in that direction. His stories make such profitable Hollywood (mal)adaptations particularly for their persistent undercurrent of paranoia, the impostors and conspiracies lurking around every plot twist. His intemperate consumption of hippie-era narcotics merely sped along his decline.

Still, VALIS stands out from his other stuff in the same reality-warping vein like Ubik or Palmer Eldritch or Flow My Tears. For one it's littered with real-world reference characters, and unlike in Flow My Tears they're quite plot-irrelevant. For another, the plot itself is largely irrelevant. All you really need to know is that something, some events here and there, have altered Horselover Fat's mood and thereby triggered a deeper sink or brief surfacing from insanity - because this is a book about insanity, whether the author intended it as such or not. As such, it can be even more painful to read than A Scanner Darkly, depending on your life history.

 

I remember around twelve I realized being smart enough for introspection means smart enough to realize everything that's wrong with you... while still lacking recourse. Possibly the gruesomest moments in VALIS come during the author's self-projection's brief moments of clarity, especially when he outlines his experiences' far more plausibly parsimonious explanations to no avail, expounding his own absurdity even as he embarks on a lifetime's obsessive search for a lost marble. There's an especially cruel twist to that lingering self-reflection allowing him to realize he's gone off the deep end but unable to pinpoint where or how and spending an entire novel on the unspoken lost hope that if only he could, if he could only locate that tipping point... ah, but there are more important messianic children to locate now, aren't there?

Wake up one day to find yourself missing, with no clue as to how long. It's a more common and more justifiable fear than we care to admit, and it doesn't require alien lasers.

For my own part, I won't be reading The Divine Invasion. I'd rather go back to his early years' short stories and remember him as the author of Second Variety and The Golden Man.