The VALIS Trilogy

by Philip K. Dick

  "You mean not guided by a mind. I suggest you turn to Xenophanes."

  "Sure," Fat said. "Xenophanes of Colophon. 'One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not right—'"

  "'Fitting,'" Dr. Stone corrected. "'It is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.' And the important part, Fragment 25. 'But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind.'"

  "But he could be irrational," Fat said.

  "How would we know?"

  "The whole universe would be irrational."

  Dr. Stone said, "Compared with what?"

  That, Fat hadn't thought of. But as soon as he thought of it he realized that it did not tear down his fear; it increased it. If the whole universe were irrational, because it was directed by an irrational—that is to say, insane—mind, whole species could come into existence, live and perish and never guess, precisely for the reason that Stone had just given.

  "The Logos isn't rational," Fat decided out loud. "What I call the plásmate. Buried as information in the codices at Nag Hammadi. Which is back with us now, creating new homoplásmates. The Romans, the Empire, killed all the original ones."

  "But you say real time ceased in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. Therefore these are still Roman times; the Romans are still here. This is roughly—" Dr. Stone calculated. "About 100 A.D."

  Fat realized, then, that this explained his double exposure, the superimposition he had seen of ancient Rome and California 1974. Dr. Stone had solved it for him.

  The psychiatrist in charge of treating him for his lunacy had ratified it. Now Fat would never depart from faith in his encounter with God. Dr. Stone had nailed it down.

  5

  FAT SPENT THIRTEEN days at North Ward, drinking coffee and reading and walking around with Doug, but he never got to talk to Dr. Stone again because Stone had too many responsibilities, inasmuch as he had charge of the whole ward and everyone in it, staff and patients alike.

  Well, he did have one brief dipshit hurried interchange at the time of his discharge from the ward.

  "I think you're ready to leave," Stone said cheerfully.

  Fat said, "But let me ask you. I'm not talking about no mind at all directing the universe. I'm talking about a mind like Xenophanes conceived of, but the mind is insane."

  "The Gnostics believed that the creator deity was insane," Stone said. "Blind. I want to show you something. It hasn't been published yet; I have it in a typescript from Orval Wintermute who is currently working with Bethge in translating the Nag Hammadi codices. This quote comes from On the Origin of the World. Read it."

  Fat read it to himself, holding the precious typescript.

  "He said, 'I am god and no other one exists except me.' But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal (imperishable) ones, and they protected him. Moreover, when Pistis saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was angry. Without being seen, she said, 'You err, Samael,' i.e., 'the blind god.' 'An enlightened, immortal man exists before you. This will appear within your molded bodies. He will trample upon you like potter's clay, (which) is trampled. And you will go with those who are yours down to your mother, the abyss.'"

  At once, Fat understood what he had read. Samael was the creator deity and he imagined that he was the only god, as stated in Genesis. However, he was blind, which is to say, occluded. "Occluded" was Fat's salient term. It embraced all other terms: insane, mad, irrational, whacked out, fucked up, fried, psychotic. In his blindness (state of irrationality; i.e., cut off from reality), he did not realize that—

  What did the typescript say? Feverishly, he searched over it, at which Dr. Stone thereupon patted him on the arm and told him he could keep the typescript; Stone had Xeroxed it several times over.

  An enlightened, immortal man existed before the creator deity, and that enlightened, immortal man would appear within the human race which Samael was going to create. And that enlightened, immortal man who had existed before the creator deity would trample upon the fucked-up blind deluded creator like potter's clay.

  Hence Fat's encounter with God—the true God—had come through the little pot Oh Ho which Stephanie had thrown for him on her kickwheel.

  "Then I'm right about Nag Hammadi," he said to Dr. Stone.

  "You would know," Dr. Stone said, and then he said something that no one had ever said to Fat before. "You're the authority," Dr. Stone said.

  Fat realized that Stone had restored his—Fat's—spiritual life. Stone had saved him; he was a master psychiatrist. Everything which Stone had said and done vis-à-vis Fat had a therapeutic basis, a therapeutic thrust. Whether the content of Stone's information was correct was not important; his purpose from the beginning had been to restore Fat's faith in himself, which had vanished when Beth left—which had vanished, actually, when he had failed to save Gloria's life years ago.

  Dr. Stone wasn't insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.

  I'll be goddamned, Fat thought.

  In that simple sentence, "You're the authority," Stone had given Fat back his soul.

  The soul which Gloria, with her hideous malignant psychological death-game, had taken away.

  They—note the "they"—paid Dr. Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity; but they failed to find and remove the bullet. The fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of Freud's original attack on the psychologically injured person; Freud had understood: he called it a trauma. Later on, everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet; it took too long. Too much had to be learned about the patient. Dr. Stone had a paranormal talent, like his paranormal Bach remedies which were a palpable hoax, a pretext to listen to the patient. Rum with a flower dipped in it—nothing more, but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said.

  Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat's life. To get to Stone, Fat had had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God's mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act of the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured.

  I wonder where Leon Stone practices now. I wonder what his recovery rate is. I wonder how he got his paranormal abilities. I wonder a lot of things. The worst event in Fat's life—Beth leaving him, taking Christopher, and Fat trying to kill himself—had brought on limitless benign consequences. If you judge the merits of a sequence by their final outcome, Fat had just gone through the best period of his life; he emerged from North Ward as strong as he would ever get. After all, no man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in. But Dr. Stone had added the missing element to Fat, the element taken away from him, half-deliberately, by Gloria Knudson, who wished to take as many people with her as she could: self-confidence. "You are the authority," Stone had said, and that sufficed.

  I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another ser
ies of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second. Stephanie had come close when she made the little ceramic pot Oh Ho and presented it to Fat as her gift of love, a love she lacked the verbal skills to articulate.

  How, when Stone gave Fat the typescript material from the Nag Hammadi codex, had he known the significance of pot and potier to Fat? To know that, Stone would have to be telepathic. Well, I have no theory. Fat, of course, has. He believes that like Stephanie, Dr. Stone was a micro-form of God. That's why I say Fat is nearly healed, not healed.

  Yet by regarding benign people as micro-forms of God, Fat at least remained in touch with a good god, not a blind, cruel or evil one. That point should be considered. Fat had a high regard for God. If the Logos was rational, and the Logos equaled God, then God had to be rational. This is why the Fourth Gospel's statement about the identity of the Logos is so important: "Kai theos en ho logos" which is to say "and the word was God." In the New Testament, Jesus says that no one has seen God but him; that is, Jesus Christ, the Logos of the Fourth Gospel. If that be correct, what Fat experienced was the Logos. But the Logos is God; so to experience Christ is to experience God. Perhaps a more important statement shows up in a book of the New Testament which most people don't read; they read the gospels and the letters of Paul, but who reads One John?

  "My dear people, we are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is."

  (1 John 3:1/2)

  It can be argued that this is the most important statement in the New Testament; certainly it is the most important not-generally-known statement. We shall be like him. That means that man is isomorphic with God. We shall see him as he really is. There will occur a theophany, at least to some. Fat could base the credentials for his whoe encounter on this passage. He could claim that his encounter with God consisted of a fulfillment of the promise of 1 John 3:1/2—as Bible scholars indicate it, a sort of code which they can read off in an instant, as cryptic as it looks. Oddly, to a certain extent this passage dovetails with the Nag Hammadi typescript that Dr. Stone handed to Fat the day Fat got discharged from North Ward. Man and the true God are identical—as the Logos and the true God are—but a lunatic blind creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat's question, "Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?" receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: "Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos," which, according to Fat, is living information.

  Perhaps Fat had discerned a vast mystery, in calling the Logos living information. But perhaps not. Proving things of this sort is difficult. Who do you ask? Fat, fortunately, asked Leon Stone. He might have asked one of the staff, in which case he would still be in North Ward drinking coffee, reading, walking around with Doug.

  Above everything else, outranking every other aspect, object, quality of his encounter. Fat had witnessed a benign power which had invaded this world. No other term fitted it: the benign power, whatever it was, had invaded this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified him but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.

  The universe might be irrational, but something rational had broken into it, like a thief in the night breaks into a sleeping household, unexpectedly in terms of place, in terms of time. Fat had seen it—not because there was anything special about him—but because it had wanted him to see it.

  Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground—set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.

  Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects—poisonous ones—or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms—which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us—have been found all over the world.

  What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed—such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. "Disclose" might in this case equal "theophany." The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which had come here at some time in the past ... and perhaps, as Fat conjectured, had slumbered for nearly two thousand years in dormant seed form as living information in the codices at Nag Hammadi, which explained why reports of its existence had broken off abruptly around 70 A.D.

  Entry 33 in Fat's journal (i.e., his exegesis):

  This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.

  A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:

  Each object is independently alive.

  Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.

  Fat had found a kind of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains—by us—undetected. It mimics objects and causal processes (this is what Fat claims); not just objects but what the objects do. From this, you can gather that Fat conceives of Zebra as very large.

  After a year of analyzing his encounter with Zebra, or God, or the Logos, whatever, Fat came first to the conclusion that it had invaded our universe; and a year later he realized that it was consuming—that is, devouring—our universe. Zebra accomplished this by a process much like transubstantiation. This is the miracle of communion in which the two species, the wine and bread, invisibly become the blood and body of Christ.

  Instead of seeing this in church, Fat had seen it out in the world; and not in micro-form but in macro-form, which is to say, on a scale so vast that he could not estimate its limits. The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord. And with this process comes not just sentience but—sanity. For Fat this would be a blessed relief. He had put up with insanity for too long, both in himself and outside himself. Nothing could have pleased him more.

  If Fat was psychotic, you must admit that it is a strange sort of psychosis to believe that you have encountered an inbreaking of the rational into the irrational. How do you treat it? Send the afflicted person back to square one? In that case, he is now cut off from the rational. This makes no sense, in terms of therapy; it is an oxymoron, a verbal contradiction.

  But an even more basic semantic problem lies exposed, here. Suppose I say to Fat, or Kevin says to Fat, "You did not experience God. You merely experienced something with the qualities and aspects and nature and powers and wisdom and goodness of God." This is like the joke about the German proclivity toward double abstractions; a German authority on English literature declares, "Hamlet was not written by Shakespeare; it was merely written by
a man named Shakespeare." In English the distinction is verbal and without meaning, although German as a language will express the difference (which accounts for some of the strange features of the German mind).

  "I saw God," Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, "No, you just saw something like God, exactly like God." And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, "What is truth?"

  Zebra broke through into our universe and fired beam after beam of information-rich colored light at Fat's brain, right through his skull, blinding him and fucking him up and dazing and dazzling him, but imparting to him knowledge beyond the telling. For openers, it saved Christopher's life.

  More accurately speaking, it didn't break through to fire the information; it had at some past date broken through. What it did was step forward out of its state of camouflage; it disclosed itself as set to ground and fired information at a rate our calculations will not calibrate; it fired whole libraries at him in nanoseconds. And it continued to do this for eight hours of real elapsed time. Many nanoseconds exist in eight hours of RET. At flash-cut speed you can load the right hemisphere of the human brain with a titanic quantity of graphic data.

  Paul of Tarsus had a similar experience. A long time ago. Much of it he refused to discuss. According to his own statement, much of the information fired at his head—right between the eyes, on his trip to Damascus—died with him unsaid. Chaos reigns in the universe, but St. Paul knew who he had talked to. He mentioned that. Zebra, too, identified itself, to Fat. It termed itself "St. Sophia," a designation unfamiliar to Fat. "St. Sophia" is an unusual hypostasis of Christ.

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