[59:50] Late at night, stoned and drunk, glancing at VALIS: it is highly experimentaclass="underline" absolutely unofficial, anti-official junk art (i.e., protest art); made of the garbage of the vernacular, informal in structure, incorrect in viewpoint: it speaks for and in the language of, the fashion of, a segment of society normally so disenfranchised that even Binky Brown doesn’t act as its voice—a certain kind of troubled young isolate asking schizophrenic questions like, “Is the universe real? Is God good?” Superstitious and artless and crude? Is that what VALIS is? Or is it very deliberate and careful, carefully fashioned by the most advanced artistic devices possible, in order to give voice to these, the final frontier of disenfranchised people—as my mail shows! Psychotic or nearly so, alone and brilliant. No one has ever spoken for them—and in their own way of expressing themselves. This is an artifact, not a sincere (naïve) confession; John Clute is wrong! And it will someday so be recognized. It is a cunningly, professionally contrived artifact, i.e., work of protest art, anti-bourgeois and anti-official, but anything but naïve. It is evident that I spent years figuring out how to write it. It is not spontaneous autobiography; it is a forgery, a very artistic forgery; only someone knowing about modern nonobjective protest art—especially that of Weimar!—would know what VALIS really is. It is like a Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can. It is very avant-garde. It is not what it seems to be—it is not quasi-psychotic confession; it is an artifact. Look out; it will delude you. Yes, it is picaresque! And it is a maze; it deliberately deceives—for the highest possible reason: not an artistic one, but to raise die rote fahne.4 It is of the 30s. It is dada out of antifascist Weimar. It is, in the final analysis, revolutionary (and does not have to do with religion; it has to do with revolutionary action against the state!).
Scanner gave voice to the 60s street people. VALIS provides a voice to yet another—and even more despised—group—the adolescent loner intellectual, very much like Jack Isidore! This is a very Christian deed on my part, but its main implications are (1) artistic; and (2) revolutionary. It is true modern art—that of the refuse stratum of the computer hacker and Dungeons & Dragons era. (Post dope, as it itself states.) It is as if Jack Isidore has been revealed as secretly wise: a fool in Christ. And Horselover Fat is no schizoid, as was Jack Isidore; he grieves over lost and dead loved ones. His is the apotheosis of Isidore—Isidore grown into tragic maturity, yet still himself: and it is to him that is granted the vision of Christ, as if by Christ, of Christ, to Christ.
Folder 60
[60:A-1] “The sacred mushroom and the cross.”
Elijah sending a portion of his spirit back to Elisha.
The Zadokite scrolls. Superior to Christianity, in relation to which the Gospels are a somewhat attenuated derivation (secondhand).
Nothing to do with Roman Catholic suppression. And no U.S. G-2 intrigue. Not set in the 60s and nothing to do with civil rights nor antiwar. No seances. Nothing to do with vulgar, popular credulity.
In a sense this will be about: what it should have been like, i.e., Qumran and a brilliant translator with a totally new and radical concept as to the real meaning of Christianity, in conjunction with a truly profound professional theologian. Episcopalian, not Roman Catholic.
This will not be Zoroastrian nor Kabbala, since (1) both are known; and (2) I used them in V and VR. This is new.
But possibly Malebranche and Sankara and Kant? And Spinoza? And Plato—the meta-abstraction; i.e., what I have figured out since I wrote V and VR. I.e., from October 1980 on. All consigned to the Zadokite scrolls. Orphism and Pythagoreanism.
Sacraments: mushroom bread and broth. In conjunction with the Orphic rites described by Jane Harrison. Zagreus? The miraculous child—the toys. Light, gold. Jacob Boehme’s pewter dish—the translator has connected this with the Orphic golden tablets.
The infancy of Zadok. Miraculous child of light. The Hebrew Zagreus.
The miraculous child of light, Zadok, is killed, dismembered and eaten; the messianic banquet; this confers (1) immortality; and (2) godlike knowledge. (The translator associates this with [1] Zagreus; and [2] the two trees in the garden of Eden.)
The communicants are “restored to their pre-fallen state before the soul fell into earthly incarnation in the tomb that is the body”—obviously a mixture of Hebrew and Orphic, hence Platonist and Pythagorean thought; this fusion is what interests both the translator and the Bishop.
Zagreus to Zadok to Jesus. The translator who is an atheist believes that “Zadok” is a cypher for the hallucinogenic mushroom bread and broth. But the Bishop believes otherwise. (Here I have to take into account The Road to Eleusis.5 I should probably explicitly refer to it.) (But not to John Allegro’s book.6) The effect of the flash of light on or from the gold object (toy? vessel?) is viewed as crucial. It induces (?) memory of having been a—God? Welclass="underline" prefallen man (cf. The Book of Adam and Eve7)—the “Cave of Treasures”—the augmented vision/eyesight,➊ whatever “prefallen man” may signify. Man who ate of the tree of knowledge and acquired the knowledge that “the Elohim” have.
Their theory: at one time (“in the beginning,” as with Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind) we (humans) could see these “primordial archetypal ideas” but no longer can—quite a modification of Malebranche. This is what the eating of the miraculous child of light confers (in conjunction with a flash of light from the golden toys or vessel): ability to see these “primordial archetypal ideas used as the basis of creation—i.e., Plato’s eide. (Here the meta-abstraction is understood and presumed.) (I.e., the percipient no longer empirically sees the particular; the lens optic percept system provides a clue that triggers off the appropriate a priori eidos.)
All this light business relates to the fourth gospel. (And to Zoroastrianism.) The translator figures out (or speculates) based on the use of light in Orphic rites that literal light is involved—something to do with eyesight and the optic nerve and a jolt to the brain and triggering off selective phosphene activity. The phosphenes—optic neurons—are a primordial sense system by which the “archetypal ideas or eidei” were originally a priori perceived, but like the bicameral mind, it has atrophied. Why, the hallucinogenic mushroom bread and broth sets off phosphene activity! As mescaline, peyote, LSD, etc., do.
➊ This augmented eyesight the translator and Bishop connect with Malebranche’s concept of “primordial archetypal ideas used by God in creating the universe”—probably Plato’s eide.
[60:A-9]
[60:A-15]
VALIS is a titanic work of art based on a titanic artistic vision (2-3-74). I have completely rendered the fool in me (H. Fat the evolved Jack Isidore) onto paper, and this fool is Christ; so I have rendered Christ onto paper; the Savior is in VALIS but not where it says—i.e., the cosmic Christ—no: as Fat. And what does this say of me? I contain Christ—Horselover Fat/Jack Isidore/Thomas.