Notes on VALIS
To this, Father Larry said enigmatically, "I have cried all the tears I can cry for that girl."
Fat could not tell if that meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. (95-96)
Item: Sherri has reasons like Hamlet has reasons, which is to say "reasons." Not even close to being as grand as Angela Carter's Albertina, her motives are just barely dusted over with the slightest bit of tragic necessity: under the pixie dust she's just mean. True stories have no beginning, says Terrence McKenna, and Sherri's story is cycles within cycles of her resentment and the eliciting of it in others. "A week later, Sherri died" (126). No Aufhebung for Sherri!
Item: It's taking a long, confusing time to read it (mostly on trains) - I've been distracted enough that I've retained only the slenderest of memory of PK Dick's actual biography, such that "Horselover Fat" has about as much indexical power as "Tristram Shandy." The narration is sometimes entirely and doggedly tracking Fat's befuddlement at the deity's malfeasance, and sometimes waggling its eyebrows at the reader, like Hoffmann's narrators (I'm thinking of "Automata" in particular), all while jabbing you in the eye with an actual quote from an actually published novel by the actual goddamn author. By some freak of neural weather, I was able, for the first half of the book, to shut out the historical record on which the text nevertheless keeps blithely hanging lampshades.
That initial irruption of the first person on page 11 I took to be in happy correspondence with poststructuralism, but the equation "Horselover Fat = I" is quickly gainsaid, and HF becomes a "he," leaving a residue that eventually comes to be "Phil = I". It's not the death of the author, but the insufficiency of literature to contain a psychotic break. HF's second psychiatrist says,
"Everybody who comes in this door wants to die. That's what mental illness is all about. You didn't know that? I'm telling you, I'd like to hold your head under water until you fought to live. If you didn't fight, then fuck it. I wish they'd let me do it." (84)
It's easy to invoke Dr Schreber here, but I'll do it anyway. Forecourts of Heaven!
Somewhere on the internet it says that any science fiction novel has three dates: the date it was written, the date it is set, and the date it is about (hearsay). Fat, we know, is convinced that all three overlap at all times, and as Mckenna argues, he wasn't half wrong.
...he got very close [holograms], his intuition was red hot when he reached the conclusion that a unified abstract structure lay behind the shifting always tricky casuistry of appearances. The concept he needed was that of fractals and fractal mathematics. The infinite regress of form built out of forms of itself built out of forms of itself unto infinity.
[Sadly, this is how I've been feeling about Jacob vs. Smokey's binary frenemy hoedown, and it's boring! Please, writers, make it freaky beautiful again.]
Question: Is VALIS the first instance in literature of a character's pet cat named Chairman Mao?
One more quote from McKenna: "Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time."
Only tangentially related, but pretty:
VI - The Grifter
Originally uploaded by gravitybomb
Fat could not tell if that meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. (95-96)
Item: Sherri has reasons like Hamlet has reasons, which is to say "reasons." Not even close to being as grand as Angela Carter's Albertina, her motives are just barely dusted over with the slightest bit of tragic necessity: under the pixie dust she's just mean. True stories have no beginning, says Terrence McKenna, and Sherri's story is cycles within cycles of her resentment and the eliciting of it in others. "A week later, Sherri died" (126). No Aufhebung for Sherri!
Item: It's taking a long, confusing time to read it (mostly on trains) - I've been distracted enough that I've retained only the slenderest of memory of PK Dick's actual biography, such that "Horselover Fat" has about as much indexical power as "Tristram Shandy." The narration is sometimes entirely and doggedly tracking Fat's befuddlement at the deity's malfeasance, and sometimes waggling its eyebrows at the reader, like Hoffmann's narrators (I'm thinking of "Automata" in particular), all while jabbing you in the eye with an actual quote from an actually published novel by the actual goddamn author. By some freak of neural weather, I was able, for the first half of the book, to shut out the historical record on which the text nevertheless keeps blithely hanging lampshades.
That initial irruption of the first person on page 11 I took to be in happy correspondence with poststructuralism, but the equation "Horselover Fat = I" is quickly gainsaid, and HF becomes a "he," leaving a residue that eventually comes to be "Phil = I". It's not the death of the author, but the insufficiency of literature to contain a psychotic break. HF's second psychiatrist says,
"Everybody who comes in this door wants to die. That's what mental illness is all about. You didn't know that? I'm telling you, I'd like to hold your head under water until you fought to live. If you didn't fight, then fuck it. I wish they'd let me do it." (84)
It's easy to invoke Dr Schreber here, but I'll do it anyway. Forecourts of Heaven!
Somewhere on the internet it says that any science fiction novel has three dates: the date it was written, the date it is set, and the date it is about (hearsay). Fat, we know, is convinced that all three overlap at all times, and as Mckenna argues, he wasn't half wrong.
...he got very close [holograms], his intuition was red hot when he reached the conclusion that a unified abstract structure lay behind the shifting always tricky casuistry of appearances. The concept he needed was that of fractals and fractal mathematics. The infinite regress of form built out of forms of itself built out of forms of itself unto infinity.
[Sadly, this is how I've been feeling about Jacob vs. Smokey's binary frenemy hoedown, and it's boring! Please, writers, make it freaky beautiful again.]
Question: Is VALIS the first instance in literature of a character's pet cat named Chairman Mao?
One more quote from McKenna: "Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time."
Only tangentially related, but pretty:
VI - The Grifter
Originally uploaded by gravitybomb