欧宝娱乐

I semi-regularly freak out over my own consistency on goodreads. What do I do about reading a novel that is contained in a book with multiple novels, what cover do I choose, what about books that I read multiple times, do I keep the original date that I read it or update it to the newest date? So many stupid things to waste my time worrying about when there are so many other stupid things I could be wasting my time worrying about.

For my own peace of mind, I'll state here that I read this book first in May of 2001, and then again in about October 2001, and then a third time this past week, January 2012. No one gives a shit about this, but it seems important that I make this all clear. The third time reading Valis though, is not as an individual novel, but as part of the Library of America Philip K. Dick collection, called something like Valis and other Later Novels, which is a lie, because it also contains The Maze of Death, which is a novel from the mid-1960's and firmly planted in Dick's more sci-fi period, but it does contain a bit of the same themes that Dick returned to in his later 'crazy' novels.

Publicly, let me say I'm sorry Karen. I should have never recommended this novel to you. I love it, but I can see how it would be tedious to you. At least I see it now. If it makes you feel any better, maybe Philip K. Dick really did have a visionary experience and had the mysteries of the universe opened up to him, and if that is the case then time is a total illusion and you didn't really waste anytime at all reading the book, and soon the prison of our reality will be broken and we will all return to the true world where time and space don't exist. What is a few days of slogging through a book you didn't enjoy when a timeless eternity awaits?

I don't know what to say about this book. It's a brilliant piece of insanity? It's a remarkable fictionalized auto-biography of the authors descent into insanity? It's amazing to me that he had the lucidity to see himself in the manner he does in this book and be able to write this book and still be in the grip of the problems he seemed to have had. He's so critical of himself and is calling bullshit about his own far-out theories, but still he was chugging along with his Exegesis and trying to grapple with the ideas his character Horselover Fat (Philip Dick) is trapped by.

At the time I read Valis for the first time I was trapped in some of the same thought patterns that Horselover Fat is. I never thought I was contacted by a God-like entity, but my brain was fried on pre-Socratic cosmology. Whenever I want to tie my brain in knots I still return to trying to figure out what Parmenides could have meant in his "Poem". On one hand it's nonsense, the One, nothing changes, nothing moves, there is only the One, but on the other hand what does he really mean? He is the person who Plato writes as besting Socrates not once, but twice (can the Eleatic Stranger be anyone other than him, or one of his students?). The figure of Parmenides shuts down the young Socrates in Parmenides and again shows him that he is wrong in the Eleatic trilogy of dialogues that in the chronology of Socrates 'life' (life being here literary life, it's open to debate if any of the encounters with Socrates really happened or how they happened or if they are merely a literary device for Plato), come right before what make up the Pre-Trial, Trial and Death of Socrates. If you've read most of the big Plato dialogues you know that Socrates pretty much always wins, even when he is sentenced to die or actually drinks the hemlock, he still wins the philosophical arguments, he's always the wise 'foolish' type who through a few innocent questions tears down whole systems of thought and replaces them with his own. In his encounters with the philosopher from Elea though he is put up against the ropes and his own tricks are used against him. It's like Plato is saying at the base of your philosophy you were wrong, you were wrong when you started, and you were wrong at the end, and for your errors you are now sentenced to die, you corrupted the youth, not through what the Athenians tried you for, but for not getting what Parmenides meant.

Add to Parmenides the cosmologies hinted at by Heraclitus, and more explicitly stated in the fragments of Empedocles and you get a very different view of the world then the dominant views that would take old in the 'mainstream' post-Socratic / Judea-Christian worldview. There were hold outs, Gnostic views and whatnot but they were generally snuffed out through orthodoxy to a relatively child-like and reassuring creation story that a majority of Americans still believe today. Look at Empedocles for example, this whole cosmology is based on the conflict between two poles, creation and destruction. Something coming together and something pulling everything apart. It's vague on details that we'd call scientific today, but it reads a whole lot like the big bang, with two forces, say gravity (through matter and the stars, light) playing against the repellent energy of dark matter. Everything gets destroyed at some point only to give birth to something new.

I'm not saying the ancients knew more then we did, or that they were necessarily right or even that there was some grand conspiracy to 'cover-up' the truth or anything. It's just that when you start to see the ideas of the universe that were out there, we picked one of the dumber ones to believe in for a few thousand years. Might as well put the planet on the back of some fucking turtles.

When you start thinking too much about some of the things the Pre-Socratics wrote you open yourself up to some very weird avenues of thoughts. To gerry-rig reality to fit into some of these 'theoretical' ideas you start calling an awful lot of things into question, and they can be fun little games to play in your head, but if you took them too far they are liable to drive you completely insane.

I wasn't insane, I was just stuck in ideas of Idealism and the themes of this book were the type of things that I enjoyed amusing myself with, for quite a bit of grad school one point oh, I enjoyed sketching out what Parmenides could have meant more than I enjoyed actually doing the work I should have been doing, and got myself so confused with the ideas I was thinking about I couldn't even begin to write a simple paper about Parmenides for a class I was taking dealing solely with him and his appearance in Plato. I wasn't insane, but I was shut down (the Pre-Socratics weren't the only people giving my brain trouble, Deleuze and Levinas were also influencing me to play thought games that were making me totally unproductive).

Shouldn't I be talking about the book though? No, but I guess I should Parts of the book deal with things like this. They are about the idea that the world we know is a corrupt version of Reality that we are imprisoned in. Philip K. Dick's crazy alter-ego, Horselover Fat is tuned into the 'real' state of the world when Valis, an entity not of this world, beams a pink light into his brain and reveals itself to him. The book is about what happens after you gain this kind of knowledge, and alone know the 'truth' about the world. It's about more than this, too. There are a lot of themes going on, and while I give this book five stars, if I'm honest about the overall structure of the book there are weak spots and loose ends that need tying up. There are corners Dick writes himself into that have no satisfying way out of. But for me at the time I first read this, it was like being turned on to a new author that was working on some of the same things that had been running through my head for the past year or so. I read it now as a fascinating picture of the author himself, and I'm in awe by the honesty in the book.

Two more Philip K. Dick books to go and then I'll try to tackle the Exegesis.