What I see is a threat that only someone fighting off psychosis could appreciate: the disappearance of world along two routes: (1) comprehensibility; (2) believability. Viz: you could find yourself understanding it but not believing it to be real—my 10-volume meta-novel—or finding it real but being unable to make any sense out of it—3-74 and VALIS. On the bright side, however, this has permitted me to formulate some formidable epistemological and, finally, theological questions, and even a few halting tentative answers. “We are all but cells in a colossal mad brain that both makes and perceives reality”—something like that, the main thrust being that there is some relationship between the creating of reality and perceiving of it (v. my dream supra): the percipient is cosmogenitor, or, conversely, the cosmogenitor wound up as unwilling percipient of its own creation.
The way out of the solipsistic trap is to presume God, since world is dubitable. Thus there is self and there is other, and this other is powerful, benign, wise, loving, and perhaps most important of all, able and willing to provide—in fact guarantee—world (under the conditions of Cartesian epistemology). “God is the final bulwark against non-being” becomes “. . . against isolation.”
[90:134:G-79] This is my idiosyncratic road to God. For others—who have not been the doubt, who have not known 32 years of doubt, this would not seem to constitute proof. But I say: I do not have it within my own power to compel my own assent to anything but my doubting self; thus on my own I possess no sense of knowing anything but myself, which is a sentence to hell, perpetual unrelenting hell. “Wer wird mich erlösen?”14 My argument is a variation of Cartesian reasoning (and in my opinion an important one) and so it is in an honorable tradition. I say with Malebranche that I see all things in God; it is God who extricates me from my solipsistic prison. I did not write 35 novels and 150 stories without coming to a good understanding of the sinister implications of no world, irreal world, inscrutable world—that second only to the gift of life itself is the gift of world, of the other. Perhaps it is even a greater gift, since it involves all creation. (Viz: I might well choose personal death over the extinction of the cosmos.) What I see people ordinarily saying is that world of its own accord impinges on us: impinges coherently and convincingly. The Cartesians show that this is not the case. I say, the whole cosmos could be presented to me and yet I would not find it real unless God himself bestowed on me the essential gift of my finding it convincing, a gift that through my own powers of reasoning and observation I find myself incapable of acquiring, a state I on my own cannot achieve. I cannot persuade myself and I cannot compel myself to believe; unless God compels me I will not believe, and if I do not believe, I am doomed to a certain kind of hell. I know from experience that God can compel that assent, for he did this by a rustle of color in the grass. He can absolutely impinge on me; he can break into my prison world and destroy it—burst the prison, release me. That my assent might be compelled by perceptual and cognitive occlusion and amnesia does not in the slightest matter to me because the ends justifies the means, since I cannot live at all unless I’m taken out of my private prison. That is why I see the issue as one of belief on my part, not on the truth of what I believe. I know now that if there is something that is true I will never on my own know it. Or if I know it I will not believe I know it. Like Victor Kemmings at the end of “Frozen Journey” I may have reached reality and can’t believe it. That essential belief lies outside my power.
My argument that (I have proof that) God exists is odd. I do not say, “I know God exists because I experienced/perceived him in 3-74”; that is dubitable as an argument because my experience may have been a hallucination (I experienced it but it was not real). But I can say, “I know that God exists because I believe I experienced You above and beyond myself; and I know of no way that I can go beyond Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ by my own power; on my own I cannot add any knowledge to that self-knowledge. Yet I believe I know of Your existence, so I conclude that some agency with the power to disclose Your existence to me and thus to compel my assent to that disclosure exists, and I can only conceive of God as possessing the power, since, pragmatically, this is cosmogenesis, and I define God as ‘he who causes to exist what exists.’ ” In other words I cannot doubt that I believe, and I know of no way that I can believe on my own power, unaided. Therefore the Cartesian proposition “cogito ergo sum” is not the limit to what I can be certain of: I can say, “I know that I believe, and since I know that I cannot compel into existence my own belief, I conclude that something beyond myself exists that has compelled this belief; therefore I not only know that I exist, I know that something beyond myself exists (by reason of my belief).”
[90:G-122] I saw reality (3-74) as it really is; I began to see in 2-74. Relatedness not by time, space and causation but by articulating arborizing phylogons, I know—can’t I believe? What does it take?
[90:G-131] I will conclude this nightmare marathon analysis by noting that my 10-volume meta-novel can herewith be newly—and perhaps finally correctly—understood. And it serves a very valuable (Gnostic) purpose, to emancipate the cosmogenitor from his own world, to which he is fallen victim. In terms of this, VALIS can be seen as the logical culmination of the total corpus. Likewise “Frozen Journey.”
[90:G-141] What is most remarkable is not just perceiving one’s soul in and hence derived from the divine mind, but to see that soul as a complex of ideas, interacting to form a coherency: one’s soul as something that can not only be known but also thought: soul, then, as idea—and taking the form of ideas or sub-ideas clustered together: reduced to or derived from what may in the final analysis be words. That’s why the term “thing” is the wrong term. It is information. It is a unique interception by one idea of another, a crossing, an ideational intersection: certain notions about freedom, magic, religious beauty (as expressed by the Grail theme and the Good Friday spell), revolutionary covert activity connected with elements of the Civil War, animals as they appear in children’s books, something to do with the old-fashioned countryside and light, music, writing; but most of all a sense of the divine as if not only am I a notion in the divine mind but I as its notion contain in and as myself a notion of it. In other words I fade off into it, and it fades off into me, as if each is aware of and related to the other.
Folder 77
Early 1981
[77:G-8] You won’t believe this later when you’re not ripped, but your 10 volume meta-novel is “the secret stolen past the angels in one’s hands”—the story that (1) each of us lives in a unique individual world; (2) it is spurious; (3) it is fed to us by the plasmate—this is told in VALIS if you add it (VALIS) to the corpus; and (4) we have some control over our individual worlds, since somehow it derives from us; it isn’t just imposed on us (e.g., “Frozen Journey,” Maze—really the whole corpus). So it adjusts and accommodates to our perceptions and preconceptions of it.
One vast artistic vision, all the way from “Wub” to DI, with particular emphasis on Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man, VALIS, “Chains . . . Web” and DI. (This last my dream. That sustains me. I cannot now be separated from my work.)
Here is sooth: VALIS is not as important as supernatural revelation about God and the universe as it is about me as a person—unique and individual and suffering—and my vision (Weltanschauung). Me and my own private vision; this is what we call art (as with van Gogh and his vision). Therefore it is not theologically meaningful but artistically. The theological, etc., stuff in VALIS has value as my construct/vision/dream: likewise DI. Vis-à-vis reality it has no relevance. It tells us nothing about world but a lot about me as artist.
So VALIS is part—an integral part—of the vision that began with “Roog” and forms one seamless whole. The whole theological, etc., view in VALIS (and to a lesser extent in DI) is like some vast book within a book, an artistic vision within a greater vision—i.e., my total corpus. It’s like the movie in VALIS: another “book within a book.” Vision within a vision.
&nbs
p; “Christ invading the world” is not a truth or falsehood about Christ or world but a truth about me and my vision, my perception and my unique individual world, hence artistically relevant to and in my total unitary corpus. It is part of me, and I have put me and my vision legitimately into my work. [ . . . ] This personal vision began with Crap Artist and Counter-Clock World. The rest is artificial, but due to 1964 I passed over from artifact to art. Where it truly blooms is in everything from and including Tears on—great art, and it all began as objective pulp objects, which have turned into human documents, as Gregg Rickman is the first to perceive.
Joint (e.g.) is mind, android, cold.
VALIS (e.g.) is heart, human, life.
I passed through progressive humanization and humanized stages in my writing as I did so in my actual life.
[77:G-11]
There is no truth in this, only artistic vision: but for me, in terms of my own vision, “truth” (objectively) has no meaning; to state that X is “truth” would violate the premise of my own vision. Thus VALIS was inexorably dictated/generated by my total corpus.
Folder 7815
May 1981
[78:H-1] Bishop Tim Archer.
I’m going to assign to him as his major view my Commedia 3-coaxial realms view (as expressed in my Metz speech and which were going to be the basis for the 3rd novel in the VALIS trilogy*). He has been studying the Commedia and Sufi teachings, also quantum mechanics (which he does not understand but nonetheless prattles on about). He is convinced that Dante’s 3 realms (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) are available in this life; and here he gets into Heidegger and Dasein. (This makes historical sense, since Heidegger very much influenced Tillich, etc., contemporary Protestant theory.)
Now, how does this relate to his later involvement with the Zadokite Document and the Anokhi mushroom? The Zadokite sect knew how to get into the Paradiso realm (alternate reality) in which Christ is here. (This clearly relates to Allegro’s “hallucination” theory; likewise Hofmann’s Road to Eleusis.) It is quite simply the restored realm, and is potentially always available. What I want to stress is that none of these ideas is original with Bishop Archer. So I must invent a writer-scholar-philosopher-theoretician who advances this theory about the Commedia in his book(s), his published writing—something connected with California outré theorizing.
In other words from the beginning Bishop Archer is searching for Christ. The “Dante” formulation initially provides him with a theoretical framework as to how it can be done (or he thinks this is how it can be done). Now, he drops all this—and the California writer who is based on Alan Watts—in favor of the Zadokite scrolls and the Anokhi mushroom; this is typical of him. I would have built on the first, constructed a synthesis, but this is not how Jim worked; he rushed from one thing to the next. Okay; this California writer is a Sufi. Edgar Barefoot is his name. This is set in the Bay Area. Bishop Archer meets Barefoot; they become colleagues: an Episcopal Bishop and a Sufi guru living on a house boat at Pier 5 in Sausalito. The name of all this is: making God (or, as with Archer, Christ) immediately available to you as a living experience.
There is a certain quality of Jack Isidore in Bishop Archer: the capacity to believe anything, any pseudoscience or theosophy. The “fool in Christ,” naive and gullible and rushing from one fad to another, typical of California.
The Zadokite Document (scrolls) convinces Bishop Archer—who had devoted his life to “reaching across to the living Christ” (which makes sense given the fact that he is after all a Bishop)—that Christ was “irrelevant.” There is something more important: the expositor of the 200 B.C.E. Zadokite sect.
Archer’s involvement with Barefoot is “ecumenical,” but with the Zadokite and Anokhi mushroom stuff he has ecumenicalled himself out of Christianity entirely. Barefoot is crushed, heartbroken—an example of the casualties Archer leaves along the road behind him in his speed-rush Faustian quest, always exceeding itself, surpassing itself (it is really Dionysus that has hold of him). Barefoot, Calif. guru that he is, acts as a rational stable counterpoint to Archer’s frenzy. Barefoot is authentically what he seems to be, claims to be: a spiritual person and teacher; he is not a fraud. He is always being demolished in discussions by other more formal thinkers, e.g., those at UC Berkeley, e.g., on KPFA. But—like Watts—he has his followers. He is really quite systematic and rigorous in his thinking. He does not foresee Archer suddenly abandoning him and flying off to Europe vis-à-vis the Zadokite scrolls—he, the Sufi, the non-Christian, is horrified when Archer turns his back on Christ. Archer declares that now he has found the true religion (at last). This very concept (“the true religion”) is foreign to Barefoot, in fact that is one of his fundamental views: that all religions are equally valuable.
Ah. Archer has expropriated Barefoot’s views and peddled them as his own. Barefoot does not mind; he just wants the views per se to be promulgated. [ . . . ]
So when we meet Bishop Archer he is already involved in a fusion of Heidegger and Sufism—this means that the book will deal with California grotesques, which is okay. This is how we encounter him, like the grown-ups in The Cherry Orchard.
Barefoot claims actually to have experienced the 3 Realms. I will assign to him my “evasion equals time; Dasein equals space” view. Archer can’t get the hang of it and wearies of trying; it takes too long. He wants instant solutions. The Anokhi mushroom will do.
[ . . . ]
The basic story: Zagreus has seized control of Bishop Archer and drives him to his ruin. Whereupon Zagreus leaves the Bishop and enters Bill Lundborg. But in exchange for madness and death—the dues that Zagreus exacts—he confers a vision of Perfect Beauty (Pythagoras’ Kosmos).
So I have the Bay Area gay community, the Bay Area “Alan Watts KPFA” community, poetry and religion (non-Christian) and music and some dope, but this is not the doper subculture! They are all intellectuals, except Connie.
How about a Trot too, to bring in radical politics?
Folder 79
May 1981
[79:I-2] 16 Art, like theology one giant fraud. Downstairs the people are fighting while I look for God in a reference book: God, ontological arguments for. Better yet: practical arguments against. There is no such listing, it would have helped a lot if it had come in time: arguments against being foolish, ontological and empirical, ancient and modern (see common sense). The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking. I wonder if bankers ask such questions. They ask what the prime rate is up to today. If a banker goes out on the Dead Sea Desert he probably takes a flare pistol and canteens and C-rations and a knife. Not a crucifix: Displaying a previous idiocy that was intended to remind him. Destroyer of the people on the Eastshore Freeway and my hopes besides; Sri Krishna, you got us all. Good luck in your other endeavors. Insofar as they are equally commendable in the eyes of other Gods.
I am faking it, she thought. These passions are bilge. I have become inbred, from hanging around the Bay Area intellectual community; I think as I talk: pompously and in riddles. Worse I talk as I hear. Garbage in (as the computer science majors say); garbage out.
[79:I-9] These things are obvious to me:
(1) I am on a stupendous spiritual quest. It involves my total life.
(2) It involves—but is not limited to—my writing.