VALIS and happily ever after
Hey, this is kind of dick to do but I’m kinda busy at work for once and I don’t have time to write it out. VALIS was given to Ben by Locke in season 4. When Ben said he had already read it, Locke told him to read it again, because he might have missed something.
But the book VALIS seems to hold some great ideas to explain the alt timeline. can anyone who’s read it connect it well so people who haven’t read it understand it? I was thinking along the lines of the alt universe being the black iron prison (controlled by MIB) and the jesus fish Horselover Fat sees being the catalyst that frees him from the prison and allows him to see other memories, like what happened in this episode.
boo me.
“the jesus fish Horselover Fat” !?!
Please. Someone. Explain this.
Here’s some quick info courtey of wikipedia:
The gist of it:
VALIS is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick’s gnostic vision of one aspect of God.
VALIS is the first book in the VALIS Trilogy of novels including The Divine Invasion (1981), and the unfinished The Owl in Daylight. Together with Dick’s last book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) (thematically related to the unfinished trilogy and included in several omnibus editions of the trilogy as a stand-in for the unwritten final volume), VALIS represents Dick’s last major work before he died. Radio Free Albemuth, a posthumously published earlier version of VALIS, is not included as a component of the VALIS trilogy.
Side info:
The main character in VALIS is Horselover Fat, an author surrogate. “Horselover” echoes the Greek etymology of the name Philip, while in German, Dick’s surname means “fat”.
Dick, as narrator, states early in the book that the creation of the character “Horselover Fat” is to allow him some “much needed objectivity.” In this particular work the narrator is also a fictional character provided as a cool, pragmatic counter-point to Horselover’s slow disintegration.
Even though the book is written in the first-person-autobiographical, for most of the book Dick treats himself and Fat as two separate characters; he describes conversations and arguments with Fat, and harshly if sympathetically criticizes his opinions and writings. The major subject of these dialogues is spirituality, as Dick/Fat is/are ostensibly obsessed with several religions and philosophies, including Christianity, Taoism, Gnosticism and Jungian psychoanalysis, in the search for a cure for what he believes is simultaneously a personal and a cosmic wound. Near the end of the book the messianic figure, incarnated by the child Sophia (a name associated with Wisdom in many Gnostic texts, literally meaning “wisdom” in Greek [ Σοφία]), temporarily cures him, and the narrator describes his surprise that Horselover Fat has suddenly disappeared from his side.
Summary:
VALIS has been described as one node of an artificial satellite network originating from the star Sirius in the Canis Major constellation. According to Dick, the Earth satellite used “pink laser beams” to transfer information and project holograms on Earth and to facilitate communication between an extraterrestrial species and humanity. Dick claimed that VALIS used “disinhibiting stimuli” to communicate, using symbols to trigger recollection of intrinsic knowledge through the loss of amnesia, achieving gnosis. Drawing directly from Platonism and Gnosticism, Dick wrote in his Exegesis: “We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction – a failure – of memory retrieval.”
At one point, Dick claimed to be in a state of enthousiasmos with VALIS, where he was informed his infant son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. Routine checkups on the child had shown no trouble or illness; however, Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to ensure his son’s health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. His son survived thanks to the operation, which Dick attributed to the “intervention” of VALIS.
Another event was an episode of supposed xenoglossia. Supposedly, Dick’s wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and discovered that he was speaking Koine Greek-the common Greek dialect during the Hellenistic years (3rd century BC-4th century AD) and direct “father” of today’s modern Greek language- which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koine Greek was originally used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. However, this was not the first time Dick had claimed xenoglossia: A decade earlier, Dick insisted he was able to think, speak, and read fluent Latin under the influence of Sandoz LSD-25.
I read that book the day after they showed it and I was like, ‘Whoa!” It seemed perfect to base a theory on and around and still kinds of hold true, especially with this last episode.
Someone wrote up a a really good summary and had some good points about the stories parrellels but that was a long time ago, I doubt if it is still up.
hahaha. ok. Horselover Fat is the main character, it is the meaning of the author’s name (Phillip is horse or horseloves in greek and Dick is Fat in German).
Horselover sees a Jesus Fish pendant on a delivery girl’s necklace which reminds him of past memories that aren’t his (similar to how charlie’s hand against the window reminded des of his other life).
this all happens after he gets hit by a warm bright pink light, which could be replaced by love in Lost. It’s hard to explain without reading the book but its a super great read. (Phillip K Dick wrote the books that the movies Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and others were based on)