The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 17: The (Re)Programmer
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 17: The (Re) Programmer
In early November 2021, I received an email from BICS informing me I had won a prize. I had been invited to Las Vegas the following month along with 28 other essay winners to receive a cheque from Robert Bigelow. I arranged to fly out to Vegas with Ali a few days before the ceremony. There were places I wanted to introduce her to in a Desert Southwest she’d not been to before – we planned on driving into Arizona for a few days before returning to the glitz of the world’s gambling capital.
Just before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport, my eyes fell on the copy of VALIS I’d bought after Vallée had cited it as one of his literary inspirations at the 2017 Philip K. Dick Film Festival. I’d not yet read it – fiction being a luxury for me in an otherwise endless stream of research material to get through. An 11-hour trip to Las Vegas would be just the ticket for some diverting fiction to help the time pass.
From the start, VALIS wasn’t what I expected – this was no Blade Runner, Total Recall or The Man In The High Castle.
It relates the journey of PKD’s protagonist Horselover Fat (thinly veiled code for PKD himself: ‘horse lover’ being a translation of the Greek name ‘Philip’; ‘Fat’ a translation of the German ‘dick’ – also translatable as ‘thick or ‘heavy’) to uncover the nature of reality; this after Fat is struck, apparently from space, by a beam of pink light, which seems to have emanated from an orbiting space probe. The probe is part of the mysterious ‘Vast Active Living Information System’ – VALIS - and has been sent to Earth from a distant star system, for what purpose, who knew. On a first reading, it didn’t take a shrink to see that it had been influenced by a lifetime of drug-taking.
I was a quarter of the way in, somewhere over the Canadian Arctic, and still struggling with the whole thing, when PKD hit me with the weird word (in a long line of weird words) ‘hylozoist’. His next sentence, helpfully, told me a hylozoist was someone who believed the universe was ‘alive’, nudging me out of near slumber.
A few pages further on, Horselover says: ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,’ which put me in mind of Hoffman’s interface.
A chapter later, in what we are told is Fat’s ‘exegesis’ – his analysis of Gnostic Christianity’s vision of the world (I told you it wasn’t an easy read) – Fat starts talking about: ‘a projected hologram-like interface (my emphasis) of the ‘universe we creatures inhabit.’ Alongside Hoffman, I now had Mitchell’s theory in my head.
Next, I read and reread a passage that began to hint at why Vallée had been so drawn to VALIS.
‘Fat was our link with that entity, VALIS, which appeared to have power over all of us … Not only does it fire information to us, but when it wants to it can take control (my emphasis again). It can override us. That expressed it perfectly. At any moment, a beam of pink light could strike us, blind us, and when we regained our sight (if we ever did) we could know everything or nothing and be in Brazil four thousand years ago; space and time, for VALIS, meant nothing.’
What was Philip Dick thinking of when he conjured up a beam of light that could erase memory; or, if I’d read it right, cast us into the past? Psychedelics aside, what kind of mind had dreamed this stuff up?
VALIS, PKD wrote through Fat towards the end of the book, ‘is information, living information,’ an idea, as I was aware, that had been coming of age amongst physicists around the time VALIS had been published. Energy and information, as Vallée had informed us in New York, being two sides of the same coin. ‘VALIS is a construct,’ a character explains a few pages later, ‘an artifact (that’s) anchored here on Earth, literally anchored. But since space and time don’t exist for it, VALIS can be anywhere and anytime it wishes to. It’s something they built to program us at birth.’
I closed the book as an announcement went over the intercom we were descending into Las Vegas.