TLS signed “Love, Phil," who adds a heart with arrow, two pages, 8.5 x 11, February 10, 1981. Letter to science fiction author Patricia Warrick, in part: “I just reread VALIS in its entirety. I now understand. There is another ‘time’ or reality; it does not lie in the future, i.e. in our linear time. Like the dream-time (perhaps because it is the dream-time) it is now and it is here. It is disclosed by sacrament and by God’s grace through revelation—revelation of Christian apocalyptic history, exactly as I saw. In this other time (illo tempore) Christ is present, but in our linear flux time he is not and, perhaps, never will be. This is exactly and precisely what February 1974 to February 18975 consisted of: my revelation of this other time in which he is rather than is not. The two times of realms bear some kind of relation to each other; in some way they interact (or have a common basis), but I can’t say how. This explains why I ‘remembered; in February 1974 when I saw the golden fish sign; it was not the past of this our linear time but, rather, memory of illo tempore, and it is real. Outside of Mircea Eliade there is (it would seem) no theoretical conception of this. VALIS chronicles either (1) a breaking into our time or world or reality of it, or (2) the character’s breaking through into it; in any case they blended, the two ‘times,’ if ‘time’ is the right term.
Illo Tempore deals with what Plato calls eide, with what Malebranche calls ‘intelligible archetypal ideas.’ Christ is not past and not future in illo tempore. Perhaps those terms do not apply to illo tempore. But unless two orders of ‘time’ or reality are presumed, what happened cannot be understood. Christ is real and Christ is now, but not ‘here,’ not in this now: this time…
There is a destruction or abolition of normal ordering categories of time, space and causation; whereupon another world emerges with other things in it, other people doing other things at another place, at another time; and yet that world can be blended into our world; the two worlds seemed to have a common essence or basis. The one we normally experience is available to the unaided human percept-system; the other one (illo tempore) is not, but requires the operation of sacrament and/or deity to bring about participation in it. Pistis—faith—is essential; charis (grace) is essential: faith by the person; grace by God. The illo tempore realm is the true and accurate way of experiencing what perhaps is, in actuality, one single reality.
For this, all religion exists. Dante was aware of this when he wrote the COMMEDIA; he spoke of the three realms as being available to men in this life, not the afterlife. There is some way the soul (to use Plato’s term) can reascend (to use Plato’s and the Orphics’ term). As Plotinus says, this is not a journey through space; it is a journey from a lower realm to a higher one. All this is very strange, but I know it absolutely upon rereading VALIS. I know it but I can’t explicate or propound it; yet what I say is true. The afterlife is not involved. VALIS, then, is an extraordinary and extraordinarily important record of this finding of this other reality, realm, world or time. I repeat: beyond doubt, what was found is absolutely real.” In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
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