The Owl In Daylight

“That final last movement for the 13th quartet Beethoven wrote keeps showing up on KPFA, and Owl is invariably terrified by it— he knows not why. 

Golly: I'd even be parodying VALIS in my absurdist treatment of the Faustian search  for knowledge (salvation through gnosis, which seems to be my own downfall). 

Owl feels superior to all the other "people" in the construct because they can’t see — or aren't interested in — the plasma's autograph. Hence the title: The Owl in Daylight - Owl is a fool, but, like Jack Isidore, a holy fool in Christ.  

Obviously I'll be either going Borges one better or parodying him - either will do.

The trouble with Owl, the plasma points out, is that in a way he's too clever; he's outsmarting his own maze — which after all was built not to trap or punish him but to teach him and help him problem solve; but he does sniff it out that it's a forgery (in which I parody my own 10 volume meta-novel!) and that a vast "God like intelligence" lies concealed behind it.  This is counterproductive — and costing Owl money. 

So here with Owl we have an absurdist Faust story which parodies my Exegesis, Borges and Gnosticism.”

PKD, 1981

[81:K-316] Out Of Sequence

VALIS is the cypher book to the whole ten volume meta-novel.  And will someday be read as such.

 "Valis" is Gnostic/Mani but secretly Holy Mother Church.  As with God's strategy, the sequence is "out of sequence." 

Viz: the key piece - VALIS - came last. Until it the others did not make sense - i.e., they were taken to have been written as fiction and hence hypothetical.  

VALIS retroactively reinterprets them - shows them in a light that could not be anticipated by an analysis of them — until VALIS came out; typical of the pattern strategy of the wise horn in its dialectical combat-game. 

Here is a big realization, and unexpected: VALIS in itself means nothing.

Its only significance is as the code book to the ten volume meta-novel — and no one has noticed this yet.  

1981

One Baktun After Another

 

Surrender