This superimposes the two plots: Valisystem A and To Scare the Dead. Wow!
Plot: from inside he learns the Albemuth whale’s mouth sign and how to fashion the ideograph.46 A mysterious organization imperils him; he’s taken over and subjected to psychological testing to acquire from him the contents of his mind. The psych tester of it draws the whale’s mouth sign under duress, in a “trance,” later finds it and doesn’t remember having made it. Protag cannot figure out if these are his powers, or Theirs. But they work in his behalf.
He keeps seeing the sign . . . like emblem for beer company, used in their ads on billboards; he sees little kids gazing at it, or like emblem for Kentucky Fried Chicken places, where kids always go.
Nobody else can discern it but him (and there must be others like him; this is main plot element; his conviction, his search). They call it “an eye, with a pupil.” (The fried chicken designer swears this.) A scientist, when asked to analyze it as a symbol, decides it’s the Earth within its magnetic or electrostatic plasma, which is blue. No one but God’s Own know it as it is built up, in layers.
Men become what they are not, are transformed; but this doesn’t mean into their opposite. What they become can’t be predicted (I guess the best bits from each, the ideal pieces, are all retained and used to form the new pattern, plus pieces never used but needed, even if contrary to the person’s ego and values as they were). Like, his friend could be one who has changed who was/is a Nazi; the best parts of that: the remnants in that person to be preserved (micro paradigm of mankind).
One of the most long-lasting and major plot ideas comes when the head of the mysterious organization commissions the building of an observatory like place to screen incoming signals from VALIS; work on The Project begins. It orbits the earth and will be visible to the world, once the parts are joined . . . when they are joined, they form the Albemuth sign, although it was impossible to discern this beforehand (he tried to be sure of that: “the sum is greater than the whole of its parts,” etc.).
But the signals are interchanged throughout and among everything, even on the “mundane” plane. The Trash of the gutter “con-spire” to signal people information. I think reserved for last should be the scene with the little things of the gutter talking to him (to the former or still Antagonist).
Amazing, how like Tears this is . . . the Antagonist must not be desk man, but still, isn’t he a cop? Maybe a fanatic of some kind? Maybe never an Interior VP by him, like Buckman was. Always outer, except final scene, when he walks in alley and trash talks to him. [ . . . ]
Nutty Soviet theory: a vast explosion in future, and we are traveling backward in time for limited period. An explosion so that what we see now as movement toward form is reverse of explosion, or implosion; but we see the universe as expanding . . . why? Because our perceptions are backward, too. Or maybe space isn’t going backward, but must expand to counterbalance time which is running backward, etc. Anyhow, he (Dr. NK) announces, soon we will reach moment of explosion; he’s calculated that, by running film backward. Soon all the pieces should be in place. Living in this reverse period, we’ve learned to adjust subtemporal events to fit. It’s total sweep that’s backward, not “subtemporal” adjustments which we instigate due to misperception; he carefully discerns and divides these from the sweep; these adjustments are all errors due to our basic perceptual reversal. We have introduced erroneous views and acts stemming from them; however, none of these acts have any effect, we still run away from the explosion ahead in time (actually are now moving—aw fuck). A see-saw. Anyhow, there would be a two way time-motion simultaneously:
The explosion took place. Everything flew apart. We are in that flying apart (expanding universe) but see it backward, in that already part of the time flow has corrected itself and is carrying us in the correct direction; otherwise we would move away from the explosion forever. But we are moving, or anyhow there is the orthogonal flow within the flow going opposite to the direction we perceive; a mobius strip with time running both ways at once. This can easily be represented in terms of gravity, when a boomerang is thrown out. . . . at this moment the time-flow is far greater in one of the two directions, but he has picked up the weaker other, and it is the correct one, the direction we were going in before the Accident. This one is the rectifying flow (the Holy Spirit: restoring!!!).* This retroflow, Dr. NK says, must grow stronger, will grow stronger, until it balances the wrong way one (now stronger); overcomes and reverses our direction so we’re heading back toward the original explosion which took place in the Authentic Future (the big bang!!!). We must move back toward it, finally. Anyhow, Dr. NK detects with his instruments a growing current of retrotime; this is why it exists; this was the normal flow-direction until the Accident. If Dr. Kozyrev is correct, and time is energy, then reverse time (which throws us “forward” away from the Big Bang) causes us to lose energy, which we call movement toward entropy; however, if we could gather—latch onto—the other time-flow, which also is energy, we (each of us) could regather the energy lost in the “forward” time flow toward entropy! We could get it back because it is gathering in precisely the sense that our regular time is losing heat or energy or charge. This gives us our parity, equilibrium equation for time which it now lacks and should have. (And shows why first it is absurd to say “the universe gains energy,” as Dr. Kozyrev says—where does it gain it from? It cannot gain or lose. Entropy is losing energy; energy and matter are the same; it’s losing matter.) So: we have an eternal total double-entry same total of both time-flow energies at any segment of the universe so extended.
Look how we run-down, wear out, age . . . think what charge, what rebirth, resurrection, new life, the retrograde time-flow would give us! All that we’d lost, too: and a keen vision of the past-as-alive, the past not qua past, but past qua future!!!!!!! Heading for it as surely as we normally head toward say the year 2100 A.D. The future in retro would be 100 A.D. just as surely, but gaining energy and life, through retro time as one moved!
The universe does not go through serial cycles, but moves backward through its own life continually. We are at a point where the thrust backward is vast in comparison to true time, that is, time toward completion of true form before the accident. The universe is in a stall, a doublebind! This may be an anomaly; once it reaches either end point, this may be overcome. One can see that; it doesn’t repeat itself. We are now in the process of being thrust back incorrectly, away from form-completion; nonetheless, already the other direction time is somewhat strong and its rate of ratio growth is great. Once the direction is reversed and we’re again going in the correct way, then we may take a different destiny line (alternate track) and not come to the original explosion; avoid it.
And maybe this isn’t even the whole universe; maybe we’re part of a subsystem moving in this wrong direction. We do know when the Accident took place: about 6 billion years ago. But we could change directions before that; we don’t go back to that; we’re now moving away from it, and what you and I should look for is not going back 6 billion years and rectifying that mistake, but wrong-way thrown-back time “slowing” and regular time regaining dominance; we should watch for our cosmos moving the proper direction in time, which would be a reverse from what we are used to—in the direction of our past. It is not reaching this explosion 6 billion years ago that is important for us, but slowing our movement away from it and reversing and moving backward into our own past.