Beethoven and VALIS (?)

We respond [like so many parts mounted on a circuit board] according to instructions fired at us [from VALIS ?] . . . The "signals" or events are incorporated into each of us as learning--learning by experience--and they permanently modify our brain tissue, leaving permanent although minute trace-changes in us. This way we store this information combining it and altering it, and we are prepared to transmit it again when instructed, to whoever we're instructed to transmit it to. Each of us is a vast storage drum of taped information which we purposefully modify, each of us differently. Thus, Beethoven produced symphonies which no one else could; the same with Schubert. But the symphonies did not really lie within either of them, rather were fed to each of them . . . in raw bits lacking connectives. What each of those Stations did was to link his selection of bits into gestalts (his idiosyncratic symphonies). He structured them as no other Station could. However, the raw bits were fed to him; in that regard he was receptive or passive. . . . In that he connected them into a new and unique whole he was active and creative. So Beethoven, as your representative station, was a part on a circuit board, linking incoming signals, modifying them, and then transmitting something modified. That everything received by him before (memory) and what he uniquely was (due to experiences throughout his life) went to make up the nature of each output is obvious. Nothing could pass through Beethoven without becoming Beethoven--i.e., colored by him,in a way no one else could. 129-30