Christmas message from a hapless scribbler
The Many Names of God
I like Philip K. Dick’s term: Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). At least it gives some kind of scale to the forces we are talking about. Divine powers of creation that can birth galactic super-clusters and knit it all together with a physics so neat and concise it can very nearly be reduced to an equation. A few numbers and letters that denote paradigm shifts.
Some religions and belief systems hedge around the naming or depiction of their gods and/or lords of creation. Superstition…or an acute understanding of the power of words? The periodic table, after all, nothing more than rows of nonsensical letters that, when properly arranged, become us.
Lapse (III) (Free ambient music)
Beautiful Desolation 
VALIS is an awesome descriptor. One part animism, one part Gnosticism, and one part Jungian synchronicity. And also just generally out there. Have you had a chance to check out the new edited volume of PKD’s Exegesis? I was drooling over it at a bookstore recently, and it’s on my 2012 list. Unfortunately I have 12,000,000 other things I need to read first…
I, too, crave the (edited) EXEGESIS. I was intrigued by the bits that were excerpted in THE SHIFTING REALITIES OF PHILIP K. DICK (edited by Lawrence Sutin). Hope to see it in the bargain bin some day, right beside David Foster Wallace’s PALE KING. Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?
Great to hear from you, as always…