Valis, by Philp K. Dick

I've rarely spoken of this and I have never written about it. I never wanted to be seen as a deep individual who may have touched something outside our realm of reality. It's Christmas Day as I write this, so it seems appropriate. It's also applicable to this rambling review.

It was back in 2012 and I was struggling with various mental issues. Several devastating events occurred in a very short period of time. My father died. He meant very little to me, but it still hit hard. I witnessed a man shot in a WalMart parking lot. My stepdaughter, who at the time was my only lifeline to any sort of family, was moving across the country. I was still recovering from a painful divorce and struggling with a nasty drinking problem.

I had crippling anxiety. I couldn't lie down and close my eyes without feeling severe vertigo. I felt like I was falling whenever I tried to sleep. When I did sleep my dreams were terrifying.

I felt like I had no friends other than decrepit potheads and drunks. Being with them wasn't good, but it was better than being alone.

I sought out help and began seeing a therapist. She was a good doctor and didn't necessarily jump right into medication to fix her patients' problems. Plus I was afraid to try it. Things have a tendency to work in the opposite ways for me. Caffeine, for instance, makes me sleepy. The doctor could not guarantee the medication wouldn't make me worse. Uh uh, I wasn't going to take the chance.

I didn't want to go on the way I was going. Reading, movies, nothing held any meaning. I was at the end of my rope and I was desperate.

I was never a praying man. Raised in the Catholic Church, I gave up any notions of religion at an early age. In fact I was almost violently opposed to it for a long time.

I had the shakes one evening and I did something I've never done before. I asked for help. I spoke aloud. I asked if God was there, and if he was and could hear me, could he please, please help me. I wasn't asking for happiness on a platter, but I wanted some sort of sign. An indication that there was hope for me.

Nothing happened right away, but within a day or two there was something.

My old computer used to pick up snatches of radio stations or something. Phrases would come through the speakers now and then. It was usually staticky gibberish. I was standing in my living room, doing nothing. Just standing there, and I heard something come through the ether. Three words: "Believe in God".

I was stunned. My first thought, cynic that I am, was that I merely caught a smidgen of a sermon. Or did it really even happen? Was it my imagination? I wasn't in the best mental shape, and I wasn't sleeping well. Or was it something more?

Philip K. Dick claims to have been contacted by something divine. He had visions, or perhaps they were hallucinations. He was a known user of drugs.

Dick's visions colored his writing for the remainder of his life. He chronicled them in thinly veiled fictional novels like The Divine Invasion, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio Free Albemuth, and most notably, Valis.

There are two protagonists in Valis. There is science fiction author Philp K. Dick. And there is a paranoid schizophrenic named Horselover Fat. 'Philip" in Greek, means fond of horses. "Fat" is German for Dick.

Horselover Fat has an experience similar to the one Dick, the author of Valis, claims to have had. It spirals him into a vortex of paranoia and depression. Seeking answers inside his overcrowded-yet-brilliant mind, Fat writes hundreds of pages of Gnostic ideas and speculation. Much as Dick himself did with his fabled Exegesis.

When a cynical friend sees a low budget science fiction movie called Valis, which seems to provide clues to Fat's delusional ravings, a small group seeks out the rock star-filmmaker to find answers to the endless questions that plague Horselover Fat. Along the way they meet a child who may be the embodiment of God, and Horselover Fat disappears, leaving the character Philip K. Dick alone to figure things out.

Valis stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It's a living artificial intelligence that could bring about humanity's salvation, or perhaps its demise. One thing is certain, in the Valis movie-within-the-book an American president named Ferris F. Freemont needs to be defeated. He's a right-wing conman who finagled his way into power by scaring people into believing in a shadowy internal conspiracy menace within the American citizenry.

Clearly Dick was onto something.

It's uncertain what really happened to real-life author Philip K. Dick. His grasp of reality was thin, and he was considered unhinged by many. But if a divine being truly did reach out and touch the mind of a human being, would they not be considered insane by society? Isn't our civilized world the very embodiment of insanity?

All that is certain is Dick's health, both mental and physical, deteriorated and he died at the age of fifty-four. Perhaps he found the answers he desperately sought in the end. Or maybe the beginning of some other form of existence for him.

Apostle or madman, the reader can decide. Either way it's a fascinating and disorienting trip to read his work. This is pure science fiction, and it ain't Star Wars or Trek.

As for me, I did find inner peace. Perhaps the incident I described above helped. I became a more spiritual person, even if I am still highly skeptical about the bearded old man with a book in one hand and lightning bolts coming from another.

I don't find spirituality in some building with a bunch of acolytes. I look instead into my own heart. I see divinity in the words of great writers, in the images of filmmakers, the beauty in music. I see it in the birds and the bees, in the sky and in flowing water. I see it in the love I receive from my wife and from other wonderful people in this maddening, confusing, heartbreaking world of wonders and horrors.

Written by Mark Sieber