Philip K. Dick, Valis

Author: Philip K. Dick Title: Valis Place: New York Publisher: Vintage Books Date: 1991 Description: 241p, 20cm, paperback ISBN: 0679734465

Why did I read this book?

I was determined not to turn up at the CUSFS discussion on Philip K. Dick without having read such a major work in his corpus. I didn't actually finish Valis before the discussion; but I'd still read more PKD novels than anybody else there, which was faintly embarrassing.

Where's the bookmark at?

36. In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements--change--in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it--i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

37. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But omething has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word "idiot" is the word "private". Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

(p. 234)

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