➊ “Through” meaning “past.” Gotten past the angels.
[83:127] September 10, 1980
I have to realize that the revelation about the reality of the Prison is a genuine revelation; it exists down through the ages and it exists now. I saw it: Prison and Empire, the tunnel of history. When I say “revelation” I mean divine disclosure of the nature of history . . . and that I had correctly depicted this archetype in Tears, that Tears was true; a timeless condition of man’s servitude to the Empire, man enslaved; and the rest of the revelation was of the genuine secret underground Christians fighting it. How easily I forgot this revelation and sought for obscure meanings! [ . . . ]
3-74 can’t be understood except in terms of the narrative told in Tears; this narration is the real purpose of it all (but I was so surprised by 3-74 that I forget that). But as a writer I should realize: It is what is written that matters; that is the goal. First I told the story (in Tears) and then an example of what I told (freedom) took place in regard to me. So I experienced the very release that I had written about. Thus my extrication is a dazzling example of the power of God to rescue, and I can then apply it to the general narrative, to history, and see how it is done and that it is done. The name of all this (3-74) is information. [ . . . ]
Could the “Acts” material in Tears decode to mean: where the Prison is, He is there, too? I think so. I think that is it—and this is also true—very true—of the two-word cypher. I wrote the Prison narrative, and God put in the Christian narrative. Together these two parts form the complete story. (My story by itself is only half the story; the rest—the good part—I didn’t know.) The story is not just “There is a prison” but “and it is under attack by the Christians, by Christ Himself.” This is quite different.
As to the question, “Who is the information for?” I will probably never know; perhaps information is information and exists for its own sake.
[83:130] September 13, 1980
Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages:
The imagination was continually striving, and in vain, to express the ineffable by giving it shape and figure. To call up the absolute, recourse is always had to the terminology of extension in space . . . ([>]).
But still the contemplation of the absolute Being ever remains linked up with notions of extension or of light (note, [>]).
The mystic imagination found a very impressive concept in adding to the image of the desert, that is to say, extension of surface—that of the abyss, or extension in depth. The sensation of giddiness is added to the feeling of infinite space . . . ([>]).
In my six and a half years of working on my exegesis I have often said, “l have found it.” I don’t want to do that one more time, one in an endless series of failure. It seems almost as if the mere saying of it causes it to permutate to some other explanation. But I do think that the night I was talking on the phone to KW and realized that in 3-74 I experienced Medieval vertical—which is to say Gothic—space, and this meant that I had ontologized reality in terms of Medieval use of space, time and causality, and hence Valis was God or Christ (it is the same); I think then I had it: that the vast volume of vertical space that I experienced in 3-74 (as well as the transformations in time as if I were seeing down a time axis extending thousands of years) meant that I had abreacted to a Medieval worldview, and within that view a theophany was logical, i.e., possible.
Theophany and miracle and pronoia in the modern worldview, the way we organize space, time and causation now would make no sense; so God provided a meaningful context in which these could logically occur.
[ . . . ]
But I ramble. All I want to say is that Valis was God, that 3-74 was theophany, miracle and pronoia, and pronoia based on an intelligent analysis of me and my situation, not whim and not (on the other hand) something rigidly determined, which is to say something reflexive and mechanical. My sinister destiny was abolished; tampered with, so to speak, in the sense that the Greco-Roman mystery religions taught. It was a supreme adjudication of my case, and the books were, as the EB says, closed.
I am tired. I’ve labored for over six and a half years to fathom 3-74, to figure out if it was (as I suspected) a theophany and example of pronoia or if it just seemed so because it had the pragmatic effect of these. I am now satisfied that all three did in fact take place. I have been relentlessly skeptical and relentlessly imaginative and I have done enormous research and tried out as many possible theories as I could come up with.
The desert and abyss finally won my assent, as if by weariness. The negative way to God, perhaps.
[83:136] Fascinating, the view that the dialectical struggle of the two historical constants—the Empire and the Christians—gives rise to Valis the Cosmic Christ, who builds his body out of the “stockpile of parts” created by the antithetical struggle. The Empire, of course, has no idea that the very struggle itself gives rise to the Cosmic Christ, so-to-speak feeds him, feeds him ever newer parts for his macrosoma. (Presumably the secret authentic Christians do know this; they don’t need to win to win, so to speak.) (All they need do is keep the historical struggle going.)
[83:138] But I banalize my conclusions by these obsessive notes, and I must give them up; I realized this from reading the 9-2-80 pages. My mind worries and scurries, contradicts itself, comes to conclusions and then arbitrarily drops them; the exegesis does not build. There is no accumulative factor.
Nonetheless (without repeating the arguments; I always repeat my arguments, stating them again and again in exactly the same words, like a stuck LP) I will say: I found myself in 2-3-74 involved with theophany, miracle, pronoia and enthusiasmos by the Second Comforter. Now, I will certainly natter on past this point, worry and ponder and obsessively write for years to come; but this is a kind of tribute on my part to the importance of what I underwent, what I saw, what I learned; it is a way of preserving the memory of it all, this endless rehashing: that is the real point, to keep the memory—which is so cherished—alive. After all, it has been over six and a half years, now! And I don’t want to forget. Valis was the Christian God, whether YHWH or Christ; and inside me “Thomas” was the paraclete, and I have really always known this but was reticent to say so and hesitant to believe. Weariness has brought me to the point where I can say, I have followed all the lines of argument and this is where they lead; they lead to where I knew, at the time it happened, I was. But this is what an exegesis of a mystical experience is for, to develop it rationally, so that it can be expressed in words. Words fail in the end, though. But the attempt must be made.
Because the basis of reality is a verbal (written) narrative, the Empire suppresses information and the Christians generate it. Valis is, after all (as I saw) primarily an information-processing entity (though he be Christ). A recent development in the Empire’s strategy is the invention of disinformation, which is far worse than noninformation (the mere lack or suppression of information); this is a Pigspurt invention, and very effective. A handy rule-of-thumb would be, You can tell which side is which by observing whether they’re generating information or whether they’re suppressing it or sending out disinformation; no formal adherence to Christianity is necessary. (I’ve worked all my life with no formal ties to it.)
Valis and information—and the generation of information—can’t be separated. The Empire and the suppression of information can’t be separated. So the dialectic is information versus non- or anti-information, out of which Valis, the Cosmic Christ, step by step comes into being, generated by the antitheses. The Cosmic Christ exists now but is incomplete. The Empire, which by suppressing information is therefore in a sense the anti-Christ, is put to work as half of the dialectic; Christ uses everything (as was revealed to me): in its very act of suppressing information, the Empire aids in the building of the soma of the Cosmic Christ (which the Empire does not realize). Since the basis of reality is a sacred narrative—information—the generation of new information is an act in the Ground of Being, in the ontology of th
e sacred itself.
Reality is based on information, on a sacred narrative; and Valis generates information. Valis is ipso facto the generator of reality, as are the genuine Christians, those who generate new information, for whatever reason. The sacred narrative on which reality is based (“Acts”) can be seen as latent in new information generated by selfunaware Christians; the sacred narrative “Acts” being the Ground of Being replicates itself in the microforms of newly generated information. This is what William Burroughs discovered (but interprets differently).
To locate the spontaneous generation of the sacred narrative—“Acts”—in newly-generated information is to stumble on the truth of what constitutes the Ground of Being . . . and to plunge into the Christian illo tempore, where Christ is real.
[83:150] Premise: Valis is a meta-system that at our level does not exist at all because at our level only its plural constituents exist as such. Valis is an organization, a structuring, of these constituents, in which they are unified into one entity. Meanwhile the plural constituents at our level behave—or seem to behave—as if unrelated to one another. An entirely new and higher way of organizing the ontological categories by which perception is structured must be reached by the observer. Thus in a sense Valis does not exist, but is brought into existence parallel with the percipient’s awareness of it, this having to do with the participant-observer of quantum mechanics. The percipient must participate in being Valis to be aware of Valis. However, Valis is real and is subsuming progressively more and more of its environment. Its internal complexity continually grows. Its metabolism seems to be information and the processing of information. Its plural constituents are arranged in such a way as to constitute a language or information or messages; if you cannot see the arrangement you cannot read the message. And you cannot perceive Valis.
So in a sense perceiving Valis is reading the message that Valis has ar ranged constituents into. Not necessarily understanding the message but recognizing it as a message.
Valis is both there and not there. When it is not perceived it is not there (as opposed to: when it is not there it is not perceived). It is a way of perceiving reality—which demands a percipient—but when perceived it has definite and intricate characteristics; it is not vague. It consists of structure but a percipient is necessary for that structure to come into being. But the structure is not in the percipient’s mind imposed or projected onto reality. Valis did not exist until it was perceived; therefore to experience it is to effect a repair in the Ground of Being (Valis being considered as the Ground of Being). One highly important element about Valis is that it is eternal, although it changes; it can be added to, become more complex, arborizing and reticulated, but once a constituent is incorporated into it that constituent can never cease to be. Thus Valis lies outside the flux of the world we see. However, Valis’ world is this world differently perceived, not another world; but it is a quantum leap upward in hierarchy, in which plural constituents become a unity by reason of integrating structure. That structure is added—supplied—by the percipient.➊
Valis and the perception of Valis occur simultaneously, and neither can be separated from the other, ever, at any time.
Valis is everywhere—that is, it can be perceived everywhere. It is not in a meta-reality but is a meta-system made entirely from this reality.
➊ By perceiving Valis he participates in the sudden total transformation from plural unrelated constituents to a unitary structure. It is as if Valis feeds off the percipient’s perception of structure using perception of structure as structure. But this is an acausal relationship, a kind of parallelism; it is ex nihilo. Valis came out of nothing. Reality did not evolve into Valis. It became Valis when perceived as Valis. There are no antithetical forces in Valis; the dialectic does not exist when Valis does. But when Valis ceases to exist, there again is the dialectic. Valis uses the dialectic to come into greater being, to grow, assimilate its environment, incorporate new pieces, make itself more inclusive and complex: more Valisish. Valis could be compared to the point at which a liquid becomes saturated or when water freezes, except that perception of this is necessary for it to occur. What if I were to say, ice is water seen a certain way? There you have an analogy.
Even more strange, Valis induces a potential percipient to perceive it and thus cause it (Valis) to occur . . . thus it can be said that during its nonexistence Valis is able to cause its own existence. At the time that it laid down steps to bring itself into existence it did not yet exist. Thus it treats time differently than we do; it is not passive in relation to time. When it thus brings itself into existence it is already an extensive system. Hence one can say, Valis comes and goes but is always in a sense present. The percipient sees Valis because Valis causes the percipient to see it, but Valis did not come into existence until the percipient saw it. Thus the effects of Valis are felt before Valis exists, and these effects are to be regarded as acausal; they have no cause because their cause does not yet exist. It will exist later; then, retroactively, these effects will have had a cause. What is represented here is total homeostasis: an entity that is entirely self-generating, on which nothing acts but its own internal volition. Therefore in a sense it can be said that Valis is (or becomes) anything that acts to cause it to come into existence, which is to say, by perceiving it. This involves laws of physics about which we know nothing, I would think. What certainly is involved, indubitably, is not a more complex entity than we normally know of or have ever heard of, but an entity operating under laws different from the laws we are aware of, including ontological categories of perception organized in ways we have never heard of. Greater complexity is not the key to Valis; utilizing of more complex physics is the key to Valis. In a certain real sense Valis is very simple; it is a unit. You could think of it as a protozoon, a single cell at a higher level of reality, where the laws of space, time and causation are different; and it makes use of that difference. We humans are very complex forms that matter takes at this ontological level of reality, or, if you will, at this level of physics; Valis is a very simple organization at the next level up. The billions of constituents of our level form a single cell at its level; these constituents are subsumed and yet at the same time at this level of reality they go about their business as usual. So in a sense Valis has no effect on this world. But in another sense it has complete control of this world. Both statements are equally true, depending on whether you can see Valis or not.
This especially applies to the patterns that Valis is or creates in our world in which broad sequences of events add up to a coherency. It can be said: There is coherence; there is not coherence. Coherence and Valis are the same. Since Valis in a very literal way is our world, its internal structure is a latent (concealed) coherence of our world. (All the constituents of Valis are elements of our world; it—Valis—has nothing else to draw on and it needs nothing else to draw on.) Thus it is possible when viewing Valis to view Valis as our world and our world as Valis.
One can say of Valis, then, that Valis is a way our world can be seen to be. Its structure is the structure of our world. Developments in Valis are developments in our world. Volition in Valis is volition in and of our world. There is no difference between Valis and our world except that Valis is a certain way of seeing our world in terms of it being a kind of single unit all parts of which are interconnected purposefully and everything is coherent. (In other words it is precisely what Pythagoras called kosmos: the orderly fitting-together of the beautiful.) Viewed this way it operates from internal necessity without the need of any sort of adventitious deity. It is not world to God—creation to Creator—but having its own logic and making its own choices. It chooses continually after examining all the possible choices arranged as information into a sort of narrative made out of language. Nothing created it; it brought itself into being ex nihilo by willing the perception of it—of necessity from within itself, which is a self-awareness. Thus the percipient of Valis and Valis are part of one field.
&nb
sp; The flux world is real because the dialectic is real, and it is the mechanism by which Valis advances up the ladder of its own evolution—Valis, then, is not static. It is permanent but this is a dynamic permanence. Equilibrium must always exist in Valis; the antithetical forces of the dialectic are in a secret partnership in and as Valis. This is why Valis’ main device in dealing with the flux world—in order to use it to generate new bits for Valis—is enantiodromia, the conversion or backward turning of something when it reaches an extreme into its opposite. It is by this and this mainly if not alone that Valis evolves.
Possibly we would see Valis as a flicker of on-off, on-off, on-off, a flip-flop back and forth in its ceaseless dialectic that is in it but beneath it or rather enclosed within the palintropos harmonie of Valis; Valis as our world is this flip-flop; Valis as a coherence is palintropos harmonie. All this is very much what Heraclitus taught and he would probably have called Valis Logos.
[83:157] Well, frankly it would seem that I had a somewhat Platonized version of Taoist ecstatic experience with the Absolute. I had some experience with the Christian Absolute (the Godhead), some with the Platonist and Neoplatonist (the One), with Brahman . . . but my inquiry has certainly just now—surprisingly—led me toward Taoism, my old, old stomping-ground. In Taoism we have the flux; we have the constants in the flux; we have the dialectic—and between two sides very similar if not identical to Yang and Yin, or to Parmenides’ Forms I and II—and most of all, there is Valis which I see fits the description of the Chiang Tao:
An unchanging unity (the permanent Tao) was seen as underlying the kaleidoscopic plurality . . . ineffable reality, experienced in ec stasy, that lies at the origin of the universe and behind or within appearances.70