This book, like other books from the substance abused period of 60s and 70s (?), at the plot level, talks about rationality, insanity, mental hospitals, substances, related depression, suicide, and the general downward spiral of life which has lost its anchor and doesn’t really know what and where to call home.
But, at the idea level, it explores the nature of reality as an illusion. VALIS is an acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System – a perturbation in the reality field, caused by something not of our world. The protagonist (PKD, the author with another name) witnesses it, and tries to make sense of it.
What PKD does for us is takes this theme of questioning the perceived reality, trying to fathom the unknowable which many sci-fi books explore in their own ways, at times by imagining potential futures, and at other times through alternate scenarios or displaced realities, but often, a lot of sci-fi books fail to reach escape velocity, and end back in the same human drama that they try to transcend in the first place.
I guess in the case of VALIS, the fiction was never the point. The framing of the book seems to be the introduction of the relatively obscure thoughts in his Exegesis. And then the author trying to put in some sort of fictional narrative to explore what happens to him in his perceived reality. Making sense of VALIS being the key driver and illusory nature of reality the key idea.
In his real world, he believed that “God or someone calling himself God, had fired precious information”. To give us an understanding of how he feels about it, he quotes from an aria by Handel, ‘Deeper, and deeper still’ to give us an opposite reference point to consider:
And in his case, he is on the diagonally opposite end of this darkness in the blaze of noon – he was illuminated by some otherworldly light. And rest of his life becomes an exercise in making sense of and making peace with that event.
“Total eclipse! No sun, no moon,
All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
Oh, glorious light! No cheering ray
To glad my eyes with welcome day!
Why this deprived Thy prime decree?
Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!”,
After that peak of an experience, trying to live through routine life’s much blander days, in his despair, he says “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him.” And one can almost feel his seemingly infinite loss.
In his fictional world – “The exegesis [...] an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense of the inscrutable.” After comparing it to borderline mental illness, he says, not only just that, but “you ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize.”
To put his thoughts in recognizable forms, he borrows from, reflects on and quotes from a wide range of thoughts, philosophies to set the context and background to what he wishes to say.
On the illusory nature of reality, he gives us – ‘that our world is only seeming’; it is only “Obvious structure” which is under the mastery of an unseen “latent structure”, and he quotes Heraclitus, “The nature of the things is in the habit of concealing itself.”
Here’s him borrowing from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to explore reality, as if, it were a maze
“There is no route out of this maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
PARSIFAL: I move only a little, yet already I seem to have gone far.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, here time turns into space.”
**
The Exegesis which VALIS keeps referring to is 8,000 pages of notes left behind by PKD to explore the events of 1974. The printed book, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick is 900 pages long. One can feel the anguish of the author, seeking to rediscover and pin down his experience – revising, reframing, thinking afresh, trying every which way to fathom the elusive, his remaining life becoming a meditation on that single event. Little we know as to how some of these things work. The human brain is still one of the darker, underexplored secrets of science, consciousness, reality. The author believed his experience was real, and that is good enough at times. Reality itself is a function of so many variables – the observed, the limited equipment that we have for observing, and our lived background where we project the observed to arrive at ‘reality’. Everyone’s reality can be pretty unique. PKD tried to explain it to himself, and because life gifted him with something otherworldly to consume and be consumed by, he, through his thoughts, leaves us with so many new/ old thoughts in a reframed way – real or not, they are quite unique – a very non-routine thing in this routine existence. And just for that, it is a book worth reading.
Perhaps my only gripe with the idea is around some of the clunkiness it roots itself in on one end. It believes that anything prior to 1974 was a sort of implanted memories for entire world and the world was living around 100 AD in 1974. This seems quite complicated. And quite random. The beauty of this universe is in its simplicity, the elegance of the construct, in its use of really nothing to create this elaborate, vivid, brilliant manifestation – and hence, something about it, the arbitrary nature of 1974 feels a bit random and sticks out. On the other end, the clunkiness roots in the belief that there needs to be a saviour to bring back the golden days, and the book eventually turns to a search for that potential saviour – all interesting but seems to turn the book back into one of those ending on a little disappointing note kind of SF, finding hurried solutions in escapist arguments – externalising salvation. (I set myself for disappointment by seeking too much from SF)
Despite this, about the core idea, I can keep talking about and thinking about it for hours. At some level and in certain moods, I try to ascribe to similar ways of considering the universe – as an illusion, maya, call it with whatever name, and this is where some of the fundamental thoughts about considering the universe converge in the past, in different cultures, in different schools of thoughts, in different thought chains that have been handed down to us, the finest ones tend to regard this ‘reality’ as illusory, and world as ‘seeming’. And the amazing thing is that now, when we do understand a little bit more scientifically, it all seems to converge to a similar illusory reality.
On the fundamental units and particles that seem to form us, this is what Michio Kaku says in Parallel Worlds:
“But according to string theory, if we had a supermicroscope that could peer into the heart of an electron, we would see that it was not a point particle at all but a tiny vibrating string. It only appeared to be a point particle because our instruments were too crude.
This tiny string, in turn, vibrates at different frequencies and resonances. If we were to pluck this vibrating string, it would change mode and become another subatomic particle, such as a quark. Pluck it again, and it turns into a neutrino. In this way, we can explain the blizzard of subatomic particles as nothing but different musical notes of the string. We can now replace the hundreds of subatomic particles seen in the laboratory with a single object, the string.”Isn't this convergence beautiful?
Seemingly, we are an arrangement, a form, not really the content. But this form takes on all our meaning for us.
**
Highly recommended to anyone interested. Like any good book, opens so many doors.