Sons of Loki

I hadn’t quite realised how many vegetarians and vegans I actually know, but they all seem rather pleased that I’ve joined their ranks. Indeed, not a morsel of meat has passed my lips for three days and eighteen hours (I, uh, totally forgot on the evening of my first day and ate a cheeseburger). It’s partly a spur-of-the-moment thing; partly for health; partly moral reasons, partly just because I want to test myself.

I’ve also decided to re-organise my life and catalogue all my material possessions. Since coming back from university and then back from Korea all my stuff is scattered around the house in ill-organised boxes and in cupboards and in bags and it’s all rather too much to keep track of. So for both existential reasons and for practical concerns I have decided to sit down in the kitchen over a couple of days with my laptop and carefully make a record of every t-shirt and USB cable and C7 power cord (which is the official name of those plugs with the small rubber double-barrelled end often used with laptops of which I have three, for some reason) in an Excel spreadsheet (originally I was going to record socks as well, but I realised that was probably going too far), and I’m going to catalogue my book and DVD collection with a nifty bit of software called MediaMan. And then, with everything in one place, I shall start putting everything back where it should be rather than where it was, and maybe flog some stuff for a few bob. Streamline. I have far too much stuff.

So what triggered all this? I was reading Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, a bleak little tale of a city-wide uprising in 70s China, and Khaled Kosseini’s The Kite Runner, a tale of childhood betrayal in 70s Afghanistan and the modern-day repercussions, and both are good books: solid writing, nice ideas. The sort of books which inspire me to write: I read it and think “Oh, this is good writing, I can write like this.”

And then I started reading Philip K Dick’s VALIS.

That’s when Fat began to go nuts. At the time he didn’t know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable psychological game. There was no way out. Gloria Knudson had wrecked him, her friend, along with her own brain. Probably she had wrecked six or seven other people, all friends who loved her, along the way, with similar phone conversations. She had undoubtedly destroyed her mother and father as well. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void. He was not dealing with a person; he had a reflex-arc thing at the other end of the phone line.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

With writing like that, I just want to give up. It’s too good! I can’t match it! But then Dick was a great writer.

VALIS is bizarre, a metaphysical and philosophical tract meandering through the brain of the protaganist, Horselover Fat, a psychotic man in 70s California. And all this crap about God and different planes of existence and new agey hippie shit would normally turn me right off (why I ever bothered reading a quarter of The Illuminatus! Trilogy I’ll never know) except for the fact that it is a genuinely fascinating account of a mind slowly unravelling into insanity, the kind where God fires pink lasers into your head giving you prophetic visions and revealing your past life in 1st century Greece and all of reality is a prison spawned by the imperfect separation of two Hyperuniverses… it goes on and on. Fat worries about the death of two women he was close to and Fat’s friends worry about him and no one really seems to know how to deal with reality.

It is a book written by Fat, who is writing about himself in the third person to gain objectivity, so the writing meanders between talking about himself as “I” and talking about himself as this strange, broken human being called Horselover Fat. The narrator writes about how he wanted to help Fat, how misguided some of his delusions were, all the time talking about himself. It is quite a strange read. And it gets even weirder when you realise that “Horselover Fat” is not quite such a strange name when you consider a literal translation from the original Greek and German of … yes, Philip(pos) Dick.

VALIS, ultimately, is about the mental decline of one of the greatest science fiction writers, from his own viewpoint. And because of this, it’s a terribly sad work. And yet: I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner), written in 1968, and A Scanner Darkly (the inspiration for, uh, A Scanner Darkly) from 1977, and A Scanner Darkly – written after the end of his drug abuse and eventual mental decline – is by far the better book. As Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say: some people never go insane. What terribly dull lives they must lead.