I thought about the whole thing later in my jail cell. And about how quite possible things are incredible to today’s people. What is easier than hitting your mother? She is always nearby, and she is never expecting a slap. And yet, to the healthy mind that is incomprehensible. What was Jesus of Nazareth hoping for when he preached the final resurrection of the dead? This healthy mind, since I like to represent things visually, always reminds me of that lieutenant of the guard at the Kremlin who falls asleep every night, sinking into the nothingness, not surprised by it — yet, at the very mention of “resurrection” grabs his Kalashnikov and angrily shoots at the crows on the Kremlin domes where, supposedly, the listening devices of the CIA have been placed, of the famous Lieutenant Morozov, described in the Moscow Memoirs of T. J. James, first secretary of the United States embassy. Indeed, such guys killed hundreds of people at the Gulag, and they never raised their hand against their mother. In such situations, the best thing to do is reach for Hegel; that man could justify anything. “The process of life,” he writes, “is the formation of the character just as much as it is the removal of it.” That dialectic is irrefutable. In spite of everything, we strive just to have our personality formed, which is understandable to an extent, but impossible. That causes a misunderstanding. Life strives to remove us, we struggle and thereby we get further entangled in the contradiction, as if in quicksand. Because of everything mentioned, you should not hold that little slap against me; I was just being a tool of the unconquerable force of destruction.
You see, I thought, each of us has a Lieutenant Morozov deep in our souls. I also do, of course. One morning, for example, I opened the window and bird flew into my room, followed by several more and in the twinkle of an eye the room was full of the flapping of little wings and loud chirping. In my mania for classifying things, I noticed that there were several species: Fringilla coeleba, Tudus merula, Sturnus vulgaris, Hirundo rustica, Ignica pillus… I stood in the middle of the uproar, like Moses on Mt. Sinai, and asked myself: How can this be? Then again, I accepted it as a normal fact that, in the very same way, one hundred thousand people suddenly swarm in through the doors of a football stadium. The birds were all over the room: on the bookshelf, on the lamp, on the wardrobe, on the bed, on the table. Two or three of the littlest ones were squatting on the tilting picture of Joseph Vissarionovich, threatening to knock it over. I stood in the middle of that feathery uproar and crossed my arms, thinking: They will ruin everything; they will bury me and the room in droppings, it will all turn into guano, an excellent phosphate fertilizer. It never even occurred to me that they were harbingers of heaven, symbols of angels, which Providence had only sent me so that I would put aside systematization and classification.
At that time, before I met Kowalsky in prison, I lived in a chamber of hell. In truth, I was waiting to hear God’s voice, but not very energetically, more just to deceive myself. In my brutishness, I was practically waiting for a thundering shout from the heights of heaven, which shows perfectly the enormity of my idiocy, my addiction to anthropomorphism that is not inhibited even when faced with such nonsense as “the legs of a chair” and “the head of state.” Kowalsky was the one who finally explained it to me: God has spoken for ages and he can send messages, through a mediator, to certain lucky souls in their sleep; complete silence is perfect articulation and all speech is a lie, utter nonsense at the very least. This Kowalsky fellow was a member of some sort of sect, the Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. I learned a lot about Bicyclism in those few days I spent with him in the same cell. He was arrested for breaking clocks. The Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, in fact, believe that timepieces are Satanic devices.***** This is how Kowalsky described the event to me. First, early in the morning he broke his alarm clock. Then he went to see a few friends, convinced them of the usefulness of breaking those devices, and together they broke twelve of them, some wristwatches, a few pocket watches, some alarm clocks, right in front of some flabbergasted passersby in the street in the very center of town. However, they did not stop there. In a nearby store they bought two dozen more cheap watches and began to break them, while Kowalsky preached to the curious onlookers that they should leave time behind and look toward eternity. Then, Kowalsky and his friends got on their bicycles and rode off down the street, breaking the town’s clocks until the police stopped them and arrested them. Still, Kowalsky carried out the biggest exploit at the police station. He hypnotized the police officers present and ordered them to break their watches. When they returned from their hypnotic sate, the police vented all their anger on Kowalsky. He was covered with bruises, but satisfied. I have to admit that I was greatly pleased with this idea about breaking clocks.
“The thing about watches,” Kowalsky told me, “especially digital ones, that I don’t like is that they work too fast, they count off hundreds of seconds as well. Generally speaking, a web of great mystification has been woven around time. Above all, the mystification about the ostensible objectivity of time. Utter nonsense. Time is a completely subjective matter, but every person is not a subject, and that is the problem. Timepieces are perhaps exact, but time is not, time is a matter of personality, or even of affinity. So, since no one is without a watch any more, no one has time. A multitude of other mystifications are built onto that one, like the general advancement of technology and medicine that have brought about the extension of human life expectancy. Perhaps human life expectancy has been extended, but it is only pro forma. According to some research, which does not claim to have the right to exactness (far from it), in the 13th century fifty years lasted as long as, approximately, 110 in the 20th century. That is the secret: the general collapse of things includes time as well; it is degenerating, losing intensity. The world is already half as big as it was 1,000 years ago. In order to support this claim, I will use a formula from physics…”
And Kowalsky wrote with his finger on the dusty floor:
“You see,” he said. “Space (S) is a function of Velocity (V) and Time (t). In other words, if we move faster, space grows smaller. There is no great mysticism here, that is how the world is disappearing.”
Now I will return again to the description of that place in hell where I lived for so long. It was a normal student dorm room. There was nothing terrifying in it, no cries of tortured souls, no demonic pitchforks. A rather suitable place with an average temperature of about 63 °F, incomparably lower than those they ascribe to the depths of Hades. And yet, it was hell because, of all the endless places in the world, each is equal with all the others: all of them are the entrance to hell. Of course, if that place is occupied by a human; that is the conditio sine qua non. If I am to be in hell, I must occupy space. I read some authors who say that hell is a space, and that it must have a being inside of it for the horrifying surroundings to make sense. I tend to believe, however, that hell is of internal origins, that it radiates out into space. In any case, a flat projection is unimportant. Those are all descriptions and nonsense. It makes absolutely no difference whether horror comes from the outside or inside. The horror is important.