The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
Chapter 8: In which Pore Sherri is Daid
The main external event of this chapter is that Sherri is
dead. The main internal event is angry theodicy. Dick rejects the redemptive
power of suffering; he angrily rejects these words from Wagner’s Parsifal:
Gesegnet
sei dein Leiden,
Das Mitleids hochste Kraft,
Das Mitleids hochste Kraft,
Und reinsten Wissen
Macht
Denn zagen Toren gab!
Pity has no power, Dick says. That is bullshit. But Fat is
silent on the matter. In this chapter they seem very far apart: Fat beetling
away on his exegesis, Dick swapping stories about Sherri and about dead cats
with Kevin and looking on Fat from afar, analysing his search for redemption in
terms of the grail story from Parsifal. The unreliable etymology of Parsifal as
‘pure fool’ is mentioned, directing us again (IMHO) to the fact that looking at
what people’s names mean is key to unlocking the secret Kabbalistic meaning of
VALIS.
This is the last chapter grounded in reality. From here on
out, it will be event that Dick has made up. Who should we meet at this
juncture as we leave reality behind, but that old clown, Schopenhauer? He is
quoted as saying, more or less, that the law of conservation of matter should
make us happy:
“Notwithstanding thousands of years of death and decay,
nothing has been lost; not an atom of the matter, still less anything of the
inner being, that exhibits itself as nature. Therefore every moment we can
cheerfully cry, ‘In spite of time, death and decay, we are still together.”
Deedle deedle queep.
And Dick says that somewhere Schopenhauer says that the cat
you see playing in the yard is the cat which played three hundred years ago.
Deedle deedle queep.
I am with Kevin: every cat is unique. A unique arrangement
of atoms and being in time and space that will never be repeated. What does it
matter if the same atoms and inner being – whatever that means – are rearranged
in different ways to form different cats? They are not the same bloody cat.
Each unique irreplaceable cat is a unique and irreplaceable manifestation of
the divine will and a contingent outcome of billions of years of decisions by
innumerable entities.
In this chapter the exegesis continues to churn, throwing up
model after model, adding lamina to lamina of
Fat/Thomas/Elijah/Dick/Zebra/Uncle Tom Cobbley’s personality, never quite
abandoning previous theories even as a new and almost entirely contradictory
one is cobbled on.
My take home message: it is dangerous to do your own
exegesis. It is safer to be part of a community that can give a frame of
reference to your experience.
