Vasilisa sometimes does good interpretations of dreams, but that time she said little.
“Each of us travels the preordained . . .”
BUT I KNEW THAT WITHOUT HER. OF COURSE, THE FIRST thing that came into my head was that he would perish at the front. But why that black uniform, those cactuses, those thorns . . . Why was it forbidden to shout? The main point is buried. But the most surprising thing is that ultimately it will all become clear. I am absolutely sure that nothing is shown to us by chance, that nothing is superfluous . . .
But still, lots and lots of things are unclear. For example, in the waking world it’s clear as can be to everyone that life is logically and irreversibly divided into past, present, and future, and all our feelings and all our thoughts are well adapted to this. Even our language and its grammar. At the same time there is a completely amazing unity to each given moment when two people are together, even if just in the same room, and each of them has a different past and—when one of them leaves the room—a different future, too, while for that single instant their present is one and the same. And moments like that occur not all that infrequently. And they leave very strong impressions. And when you remember them, it’s as if they were restored, but in some sort of new grammatical category that doesn’t exist in our language . . . So it’s difficult to explain. I can’t explain . . .
Many things have been shown to me that I can neither understand nor explain. For example, back in Siberia when I was lying in the hospital after my operation, and it wasn’t clear whether I was alive or not, my consciousness just sort of floated somewhere, in some mist, but not in water. Then someone pulled me out of it, and I found myself in a white-painted bed, and PA appeared. And it immediately became apparent that the accumulation of water I had been floating in was the past, and that I had always been acquainted with this man with the round forehead and wide-set eyes. Both in the past and in the future. But he himself belonged to the present. And even now, as I remember back, I sense myself in the present more strongly than ever before. Because PA possesses a special power for residing in the present.
But what variabilities we undergo in the present! A lot slips by without a trace, leaving no impression whatsoever, fleeting by as if it never happened, while other things move slowly, distinctly, meaningfully—as if for a poor student forced to learn everything by rote, without forgetting anything, to the very last letter. Of late, I often feel frightened that I could forget the most important things. And so I’m writing things down, convulsively, understanding well that I’ll forget all the same, but the main thing is that what I write down is only a shadow of what I see and feel . . .
Another experience—or vision?—I had also relates to that realm of the most important which in no way belongs to the present. To what I tentatively call the third realm. “The Great Waters”—I’ll call it that because this condition or event—they’re hardly distinguishable—has to be designated with words of some kind . . . In any event PA wasn’t around then; it happened before him . . . Basically, before he appeared I had been in many places, including the Great Waters . . . But my “I” was somewhat different then than it is now: blurred, small—like a child’s or just undeveloped. And blind, it seems. Because no pictures, no images from those occurrences have been preserved in my memory. There was nothing firm, rigid, or angular, just moisture—encompassing or flowing—and I sensed myself to be more moisture than a hard body. But moisture that doesn’t spread, condensed moisture like a piece of undissolved starch in watery kissel or a jellyfish in the foam along the shoreline. The wealth of impressions I perceived in my blindness was immense, but all of them occurred on the surface of my not entirely delimited body, while my “I” was hidden deep below, in the middle . . . Impressions that were sooner those of food—tasty, not tasty, tender, rough, thick and sticky, sometimes sweet and so sharp they made me shiver and feel feverish, and sometimes simply sweet, or particularly sweet—from which I couldn’t tear myself away, and they seemed to suck in my entire being and lead me off somewhere. I also experienced various kinds of motion, like swimming, but more chaotic and requiring great effort, and while moving I encountered various streams that washed over me sometimes tenderly, and sometimes vigorously, like a massage. They stroked me, made me ticklish, tenderly sucking me in, then letting me go . . .
The main thing was the satisfaction. Of hunger, thirst, the need to be touched, and of the mutual interaction of liquids. Probably this was some primal sexual satisfaction, but not connected with any other particular being. It was a caressing, fertile environment that consisted entirely of turgescence, effusion, and partial dissolution of me in another, and another in me . . .
A blissful state. But long, rare threads of pain would creep into this bliss and induce me to move, and the new movement led to new bliss . . .
That’s it approximately . . .
Then something new and horrible set in. Were it not so absolutely dark, you might say that Gloom had set in. It was greater than any form of consciousness, all-penetrating, like water or air, and uncontrollable, like the elements. And at the core of my tenuous body my little “I” writhed with the anguish of fear.
It was not a human pain, which has its dimensions—beginning, end, rise, fall. The anguish I experienced had no dimensions. It was absolute, like a geometric point. Aimed entirely at me. I experienced something similar in childhood when I wound up in the place once inhabited by my dead grandfather.
I felt a particular kind of nausea. But it wasn’t my stomach or its contents, but my own “I” that was ripping itself from inside my body and, unable to find a way out, shaking me with spasms. My inviolable, secret, and precious core—protected by the mass of my fluid body from external streams of cold, warmth, acidic sourness, and excessive sweetness—trembled harder and harder, more and more agonizingly, while my body with all its jellylike blood vessels, sensitive, tender pores that absorbed thick sour streams, and fingerlike protrusions of various types capable of excreting their own liquid, which had been created anew within my flesh—my entire complexly organized body yearned to contract, to leave, and to hide from the moist horror that like an ocean covered the surfaces of all bodies . . . My body seemed to know that the horror was penetrating it through and through and not just flowing over its surface . . .
These two desires met each other halfway: my core impregnated with horror from within, pushed outward, while my corporeal part, attempting to escape an external horror, pushed inward. At the moment when it all grew entirely unbearable, my whole being contracted, collapsed, and almost ceased to be . . .
Although the spasms and cramps rent me apart, there was a shade of pleasure in this hellish pain.
A slight vibration—which at first I hardly felt and which formed a kind of weak background—intensified, taking the form of a funnel-shaped shell, and began to suck me in, intensifying the gloom—which had seemed to have reached its limits—by yet another degree. At that point my being could no longer withstand, something inside me snapped and shifted, and I turned myself inside out and immediately realized that the whole world was turning inside out together with me . . .