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I’m on Philip K. Dick book number 7 — VALIS, published in 1980. In it, he talks about his experience seeing God (in a revelation in March 1974). I’ve long known that PKD believed he had seen God, and I’ve long never wanted to hear anything about it. Seeing God = religions zealot to me. Religious zealots tend to ramble, to be too serious and to sound kinda uncomfortably angry towards the people they’re ranting towards. No thanks. I’ll stick with time-travelling androids who get addicted to heroin and then discover that what they thought was 1959 is actually 2089.

Lo and behold, VALIS is maybe the best book of his I’ve read. It is hilarious, self-deprecating, really smart and moving. I don’t believe he saw God, but I don’t care, because the book is too good (if a little rambly).

One reason it works is the framework. It’s told in the first AND the third person. The narrator is a science-fiction writer named Philip K. Dick who talks about “his friend” Horselover Fat, the latter of which claims to have seen God. But very early on, PKD admits in the book that HE is Horselover Fat.

Sentence 1:

Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals.

Page 3:

I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.

Sometimes, he purposefully switches “Horselover Fat” with “I”. Other times he describes a conversation between himself and Horselover Fat. It’s funny, and also very in line with other PKD books which often have people whose identities switch back and forth without warning.

2) The real kicker is that the narrator PKD is highly suspicious of Horselover Fat and his vision. He sometimes thinks Horselover Fat is just crazy or going through a period of depression — even though he also admits, sometimes on the same page — that HE is Horselover Fat. Having a narrator questioning himself disarms the suspicion that YOU as a reader have! It’s ingenious, and very very funny.

Fat developed a lot of theories to account for his contact with God, and the information derived therefrom. One in particular struck me as interesting, being different from the others. It amounted to a kind of mental capitulation by Fat to what he was undergoing. This theory held that in actuality he wasn’t experiencing anything at all. Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams emanating from far off, perhaps millions of miles away…

What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds. In effect, he no longer claimed that what he experienced was actually there. Did this indicate he had begun to get better? Hardly. Now he held the view that “they” or God or someone owned a long-range very tight information-rich beam of energy focussed on Fat’s head. In this I saw no improvement, but it did represent a change.

I mean, that’s kind of awesomely tripped out.

Finally, part of liking a lot of one author’s books is that you like the author as the person you imagine him to be. I am starting to believe that I know what PKD would have been like: a mixture of gentle/tolerant/funny mixed with angry activist/drop-out. I picture him angrily reading the newspaper in the morning, swearing at every government figure mentioned for their corruption and evil-doing. Then I picture him happily attendeing a cocktail party of his inner circle, wearing a second-hand jacket over a wrinkled shirt, genuinely liking and appreciating every person there. Maybe he’s rambling to someone about a new history of the Roman Empire he read, but he’s mostly a soft-spoken genial person. I bet he was a good listener. He probably never paid a speeding ticket in his life. He probably had unruly eyebrows and bad breath. I bet he had a weakness for drugs and a favorite basketball team. And I bet he never really thought of himself as anything else than someone who liked to write books.

Except that he also saw God one day in March 1974.

I like this guy! VALIS gives you more of him than any of the others that I’ve read. I guess that’s why I like it.

| Tags: pkd