I'm a little slow to respond sometimes... I've had a flag stuck on your
message for months and never got around to typing a response 'til now.
Jones Beene wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry Blanton"
I am 100% neo-pagan. What a relief to know!
Then what you need, brother, is a clear message from
on-high...
VALIS by the former and current highness himself, Philip K.
Dick, is a one of the most thought provoking pieces of
Sci-fi in recent memory. (published in 1981, a year before
his heart gave out from too many 'crosses', so to speak). At
least, this is all what I have been told by one "Horselover
Fat", a Vo-lurker and mystic who sometimes posts under other
aliases. or else it was a Tulpa-projected homunculi,
condensed out of the aether by a schizophrenic human mind no
longer in bodily existence.
Like all of PKDs works, which is to say.novels being so far
ahead of their time so as not to even be aware of their own
future literary importance (i.e. sloppily put together and
in great need of reediting)
(I would take issue with that, at least with regard to Scanner Darkly
... but that's not the point of this response, and considering the
dedication in that particular novel, perhaps it was treated
exceptionally by Dick himself.)
this one is better appreciated
when summarized, updated and put into modern parlance and
iconicity.
Before you update Valis too heavily ;-) , let me ask you what you know
of the reality of the events described in the original version?
It is allegedly semi-autobiographical. Certainly the scene in which PD
in the book suddenly starts receiving weird images from who-knows-where,
which he later speculated resulted from a sudden drop in GABA levels in
the brain, was a real-life experience. PD supposedly invested a lot of
effort and time in trying to figure out what had happened to him during
that incident, and this book was part of that.
And what's all this Elvis stuff? The singer in the book was Clapton,
was he not? Or am I confused? (A common feeling with PD's work.)
Some inspiration for your post seems to have come from here:
http://www.churchofmoo.com/proclamations/cow-g10.html
as I found when I googled elvis, dick, and valis in an effort to see if
anybody online had a clue who the singer in the book "really" was.
I think it's interesting to note that Eric Clapton experienced a
religious transformation of some sort just around the time in which the
book was set. He came out with one album consisting almost exclusively
of Gospel music (sorry, don't recall the name). I always assumed
Clapton was the real-world model for the rock singer in the novel, who
had experienced something along those lines, and whose name was
suggestively similar to Clapton's (disrecall it just now, darnit).
The point I'm working up to is to ask if you know if there was a
real-world connection between Clapton and Dick at that time (or Dick and
Elvis, for that matter), and if so, was there any further factual basis
to the strange goings-on in the book (aside from the flash-cut pink
images-on-the-wall sequence)? I've been wondering about this off and on
for ... oh, a couple decades, maybe... since I first read the novel.
When Christ is portrayed as Snake-On-A-Stick,
... it's because of a quote from John, comparing him with the bronze
snake which Moses had cast and had lifted up on a stick. God only knows
why John chose to compare Jesus with Moses's one and only idol (which
was finally taken down and burned by Hezekiah some 700 years later,
IIRC) but then I often feel that way about passages in John.
