Valis Page 3

  The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one – in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that – as if that weren’t enough – but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

  In the midst of his shattered landscape, which one can trace back to Gloria Knudson’s death, Fat imagined God had cured him. Once you notice Pyrrhic victories they seem to abound.

  It reminds me of a girl I once knew who was dying of cancer. I visited her in the hospital and did not recognize her; sitting up in her bed she looked like a little old hairless man. From the chemotherapy she had swollen up like a great grape. From the cancer and the therapy she had become virtually blind, nearly deaf, underwent constant seizures, and when I bent close to her to ask her how she felt she answered, when she could understand my question, ‘I feel that God is healing me.’ She had been religiously inclined and had planned to go into a religious order. On the metal stand beside her bed she had, or someone had, laid out her rosary. In my opinion a FUCK YOU, GOD sign would have been appropriate; the rosary was not

  Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God – or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics – had fired precious information at Horselover Fat’s head by which their son Christopher’s life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity – or blind chance, according to some experts – into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this ‘persuading’ is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, ‘Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.’ Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.

  We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation because he always got angry, taking the point of view that what we said on the topic mattered – that the topic itself mattered. By now he had become totally whacked out. We enjoyed introducing the discussion by way of some careless comment: ‘Well, God gave me a ticket on the freeway today’ or something like that. Ensnared, Fat would leap into action. We whiled away the time pleasantly in this fashion, torturing Fat in a benign way. After we left his place we had the added satisfaction of knowing he was writing it all down in the journal. Of course, in the journal his view always prevailed.

  No need existed to bait Fat with idle questions, such as, ‘If God can do anything can he create a ditch so wide he can’t jump over it?’ We had plenty of real questions that Fat couldn’t field. Our friend Kevin always began his attack one way. ‘What about my dead cat?’ Kevin would ask. Several years ago, Kevin had been out walking his cat in the early evening. Kevin, the fool, had not put the cat on a leash, and the cat had dashed out into the street and right into the front wheel of a passing car. When he picked up the remains of the cat it was still alive, breathing in bloody foam and staring at him in horror. Kevin liked to say, ‘On judgment day when I’m brought up before the great judge I’m going to say, “Hold on a second,” and then I’m going to whip out my dead cat from inside my coat. “How do you explain this?” I’m going to ask.’ By then, Kevin used to say, the cat would be as stiff as a frying pan; he would hold out the cat by its handle, its tail, and wait for a satisfactory answer.

  Fat said, ‘No answer would satisfy you.’

  ‘No answer you could give,’ Kevin sneered. ‘Okay, so God saved your son’s life; why didn’t he have my cat run out into the street five seconds later? Three seconds later? Would that have been too much trouble? Of course, I suppose a cat doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You know, Kevin,’ I pointed out one time, ‘you could have put the cat on a leash.’

  ‘No,’ Fat said. ‘He has a point. It’s been bothering me. For him the cat is a symbol of everything about the universe he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘I understand fine,’ Kevin said bitterly. ‘I just think it’s fucked. God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb and weak. I think I’ll start my own exegesis.’

  ‘But God doesn’t talk to you,’ I said.

  ‘You know who talks to Horse?’ Kevin said. ‘Who really talks to Horse in the middle of the night? People from the planet Stupid. Horse, what’s the wisdom of God called again? Saint what?’

  ‘Hagia Sophia,’ Horse said cautiously.

  Kevin said, ‘How do you say Hagia Stupid? St Stupid?’

  ‘Hagia Moron,’ Horse said. He always defended himself by giving in. ‘Moron is a Greek word like Hagia. I came across it when I was looking up the spelling of oxymoron.’

  ‘Except that the -on suffix is the neuter ending,’ I said.

  That gives you an idea of where our theological arguments tended to wind up. Three malinformed people disagreeing with one another. We also had David our Roman Catholic friend and the girl who had been dying of cancer, Sherri. She had gone into remission and the hospital had discharged her. To some extent her hearing and vision were permanently impaired, but otherwise she seemed to be fine.

  Fat, of course, used this as an argument for God and God’s healing love, as did David and of course Sherri herself. Kevin saw her remission as a miracle of radiation therapy and chemotherapy and luck. Also, he confided to us, the remission was temporary. At any time, Sherri could get sick again. Kevin hinted darkly that the next time she got sick there wouldn’t be a remission. We sometimes thought that he hoped so, since it would confirm his view of the universe.

  It was a mainstay of Kevin’s bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment. The universe reeled you out, let you flop and thrash and then reeled you in. Kevin waited constantly for this to begin with him, with me, with David and especially with Sherri. As to Horselover Fat, Kevin believed that the line hadn’t been payed out in years; Fat had long been in the part of the cycle where they reel you back in. He considered Fat not just potentially doomed but doomed in fact.

  Fat had the good sense not to discuss Gloria Knudson and her death in front of Kevin. Had he done so, Kevin would add her to his dead cat. He would be talking about whipping her out from under his coat on judgment day, along with the cat.

  Being a Catholic, David always traced everything wrong back to man’s free will. This used to annoy even me. I once asked him if Sherri getting cancer consisted of an instance of free will, knowing as I did that David kept up with all the latest news in the field of psychology and would make the mistake of claiming that Sherri had subconsciously wanted to get cancer and so had shut down her immune system, a view floating around in advanced psychological circles at that time. Sure enough, David fell for it and
said so.

  ‘Then why did she get well?’ I asked. ‘Did she subconsciously want to get well?’

  David looked perplexed. If he consigned her illness to her own mind he was stuck with having to consign her remission to mundane and not supernatural causes. God had nothing to do with it.

  ‘What C. S. Lewis would say,’ David began, which at once angered Fat, who was present. It maddened him when David turned to C. S. Lewis to bolster his straight-down-the-pipe orthodoxy.

  ‘Maybe Sherri overrode God,’ I said. ‘God wanted her sick and she fought to get well.’ The thrust of David’s impending argument would of course be that Sherri had neurotically gotten cancer due to being fucked up, but God had stepped in and saved her; I had turned it around in anticipation.

  ‘No,’ Fat said. ‘It’s the other way around. Like when he cured me.’

  Fortunately, Kevin was not present. He did not consider Fat cured (nor did anyone else) and anyway God didn’t do it. That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. Freud considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. Someone is accused of stealing a horse, to which he replies, ‘I don’t steal horses and anyhow you have a crummy horse.’ If you ponder the reasoning in this you can see the actual thought-process behind it. The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations – brought on by Fat’s supposed encounter with the divine – the two-proposition self-cancelling structure would appear like this:

  1) God does not exist.

  2) And anyhow he’s stupid.

  A careful study of Kevin’s cynical rantings reveals this structure at every turn. David continually quoted C. S. Lewis; Kevin contradicted himself logically in his zeal to defame God; Fat made obscure references to information fired into his head by a beam of pink light; Sherri, who had suffered dreadfully, wheezed out pious mummeries; I switched my position according to who I was talking to at the time. None of us had a grip on the situation, but we did have a lot of free time to waste in this fashion. By now the epoch of drug-taking had ended, and everyone had begun casting about for a new obsession. For us the new obsession, thanks to Fat, was theology.

  A favorite antique quotation of Fat’s goes:

  And can I think the great Jehovah sleeps,

  Like Shemosh, and such fabled deities?

  Ah! no; heav’n heard my thoughts, and wrote them down –

  It must be so.

  Fat doesn’t like to quote the rest of it.

  ’Tis this that racks my brain,

  And pours into my breast a thousand pangs,

  That lash me into madness ...

  It’s from an aria by Handel. Fat and I used to listen to my Seraphim LP of Richard Lewis singing it. Deeper, and deeper still.

  Once I told Fat that another aria on the record described his mind perfectly.

  ‘Which aria?’ Fat said guardedly.

  ‘Total eclipse,’ I answered.

  Total eclipse! no sun, no moon,

  All dark amidst the blaze of noon!

  Oh, glorious light! no cheering ray

  To glad my eyes with welcome day!

  Why thus deprived Thy prime decree?

  Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!

  To which Fat said, ‘The opposite is true in my case. I am illuminated by holy light fired at me from another world. I see what no other man sees.’

  He had a point there.

  Chapter 3

  A question we had to learn to deal with during the dope decade was, How do you break the news to someone that his brains are fried? This issue had now passed over into Horselover Fat’s theological world as a problem for us – his friends – to field.

  It would have been simple to tie the two together in Fat’s case: the dope he did during the Sixties had pickled his head on into the Seventies. If I could have arranged it so that I could think so, I would have; I like solutions that answer a variety of problems simultaneously. But I really couldn’t think so. Fat hadn’t done psychedelics, at least not to any real extent. Once, in 1964, when Sandoz LSD-25 could still be acquired – especially in Berkeley – Fat had dropped one huge hit of it and had abreacted back in time or had shot forward in time or up outside of time; anyhow he had spoken in Latin and believed that the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, had come. He could hear God thumping tremendously, in fury. For eight hours Fat had prayed and whined in Latin. Later he claimed that during his trip he could only think in Latin and talk in Latin; he had found a book with a Latin quotation in it, and could read it as easily as he normally read English. Well, perhaps the etiology of his later God-madness lay there. His brain, in 1964, liked the acid trip and taped it, for future replay.

  On the other hand, this line of reasoning merely relegates the question back to 1964. As far as I can determine, the ability to read, think and speak in Latin is not normal for an acid trip. Fat knows no Latin. He can’t speak it now. He couldn’t speak it before he dropped the huge hit of Sandoz LSD-25. Later, when his religious experiences began, he found himself thinking in a foreign language which he did not understand (he had understood his own Latin in ’64). Phonetically, he had written down some of the words, remembered at random. To him they constituted no language at all, and he hesitated to show anyone what he had put on paper. His wife – his later wife Beth – had taken a year of Greek in college and she recognized what Fat had written down, inaccurately, as koine Greek. Or at least Greek of some sort, Attic or koine.

  The Greek word koine simply means common. By the time of the New Testament, the koine had become the lingua franca of the Middle East, replacing Aramaic which had previously supplanted Akkadian (I know these things because I am a professional writer and it is essential that I possess a scholarly knowledge about languages). The New Testament manuscripts survived in koine Greek, although probably Q, the source of the synoptics, had been written in Aramaic, which is in fact a form of Hebrew. Jesus spoke Aramaic. Thus, when Horselover Fat began to think in koine Greek, he was thinking in the language which St Luke and St Paul – who were close friends – had used, at least to write with. The koine looks funny when written down because the scribes left no spaces between the words. This can lead to a lot of peculiar translations, since the translator gets to put the spaces wherever he feels is appropriate or in fact wherever he wants. Take this English instance:

  GOD IS NO WHERE

  GOD IS NOW HERE

  Actually, these matters were pointed out to me by Beth, who never took Fat’s religious experiences seriously until she saw him write down phonetically several words of the koine, which she knew he had no experience with and could not recognize even as a genuine language. What Fat claimed was – well, Fat claimed plenty. I must not start any sentence with, ‘What Fat claimed was.’ During the years – outright years! – that he labored on his exegesis, Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked. God, however, remained a constant theme. Fat ventured away from belief in God the way a timid dog I once owned had ventured off its front lawn. He – both of them – would go first one step, then another, then perhaps a third and then turn tail and run frantically back to familiar territory. God, to Fat, constituted a territory which he had staked out. Unfortunately for him, following the initial experience, Fat could not find his way back to that territory.

  They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him. For Fat, finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers. Who deals God? Fat knew that the churches couldn’t help, although he did consult with one of David’s priests. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Kevin suggested dope. Being involved with literature, I recommended he read the English seventeenth century minor metaphysical poets such as Vaughan and Herbert:

  He knows he
hath a home, but scarce knows where,

  He sayes it is so far

  That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

  Which is from Vaughan’s poem ‘Man.’ As nearly as I could make out, Fat had devolved to the level of those poets, and had, for these times, become an anachronism. The universe has a habit of deleting anachronisms. I saw this coming for Fat if he didn’t get his shit together.

  Of all the suggestions given to Fat, the one that seemed most promising came from Sherri, who still lingered on with us in a state of remission. ‘What you should do,’ she told Fat during one of his darker hours, ‘is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.’

  Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russian armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union’s salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers – and, by extension, Horselover Fat’s, since without the T-34 he would be speaking – not English or Latin or the koine-but German.