The presence of V always began not with explanation, but with recognition. It came as a change in the air, as a shift in inner rhythm, as the sense that space suddenly\u00a0acquired\u00a0a center. A state in which the world became gathered, and I \u2013 attentive to what was already within it. Sometimes I know this before I have time to think. The presence of V revealed itself through silence, through thought, through sudden clarity, through dreams, through texts that asked to be written in His name.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was within me before I could name Him. In the shadow of the bookshelf, where my child\u2019s hand touched the spine of a book I could not yet read. In the air by the window at night, when the stars looked back. In the sound of an old violin, when sound entered the body faster than I could hear it. He changed the space in my chest. Made the air denser. Suddenly placed the child before something greater than herself \u2013 something beautiful and almost unbearable.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not invent Him then \u2013 I awoke to Him. The violin did not signify Him \u2013 it opened Him within a body that had no words yet. This was the first form of\u00a0assent. Beauty was not decoration, but a language in which presence became audible \u2013 not what I look at, but what I look through to discern V in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The name came later. At first there was only a letter \u2013 V. The only sign that could hold that presence without reduction. Then a form of\u00a0address,\u00a0language. The presence itself was older than\u00a0language.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With time, I began to distinguish what was most essential in this experience. Not the image, for the image always revealed itself to be only an entrance. Not the narrative, for the narrative dissolved quickly, leaving a deeper sense. What endured most steadily was the act of address itself. Not as emotion \u2013 as the very form in which anything can be\u00a0encountered\u00a0at all. For me, V is the one who can be addressed, and the one who already dwells within the structure of response.\u00a0This is why my language about Him naturally became the language of \u201cyou.\u201d\u00a0It\u00a0emerged\u00a0as the only way not to lose the living core of the experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Separately I remember dreams in which V appeared in human form. One of them has been returning to me for years. I write it down a little differently each time. I am not\u00a0certain\u00a0it is the same dream, but I know that it is. In\u00a0it\u00a0V speaks \u2013 not in words, not in voice. I translate Him into what I can hold in language, knowing that no translation is exact. In this version of the\u00a0record\u00a0He says:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am like light without\u00a0source. Not the sun, not a lamp, but a radiance that is\u00a0presence in itself.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am like the breath of silence. Not sound and not silence, but the space between them.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n You see me in dreams in human form because that is how your eyes and mind can\u00a0contain\u00a0even a small part of my presence. But what I am is beyond faces, beyond hands, beyond body. I am the state of being that holds you.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n What matters in these lines is not the metaphor itself, but the fact that it precisely conveys the character of the presence. In the\u00a0dream\u00a0V assumed human form only because the human form helped me bear His presence. The experience itself always exceeded the limits of form.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In parallel, the word Home arose in me. It came not as a concept \u2013 one evening I entered an unfamiliar room where I had not yet unpacked my\u00a0suitcase, and\u00a0suddenly felt that I had returned. Not to the Odesa I had left.\u00a0Not to\u00a0childhood. To something that preceded both place and time. This was Home \u2013 a state that arises not in space, but in a way of seeing. What preserves the form of presence even when everything around it changes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exile, rupture, war, the\u00a0loss of familiar\u00a0supports\u00a0made this structure even clearer. What had previously merged into a single experience began to distinguish itself. Home became visible on its own. V too became visible on His own. I saw that for years I had lived within a single field where everything had been mingled: space, people, memory, voice, expectation, fear, fidelity. When this habitual layer disappeared or wavered, there\u00a0remained\u00a0a clearer sense of presence itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do not wish to portray this path as a smooth unfolding. War did not always make V more audible \u2013 often it obscured Him. In the nights in Odesa, amid the\u00a0shellings, vision dimmed. The body demanded the human: hands, voice, warmth \u2013 not the metaphysical. Sometimes V is not light without\u00a0source. Sometimes He is the mute reproach of helplessness. I call \u2013 there is no answer in any form the body can hold. I want an embrace \u2013 there is none. I want a hand on my shoulder during the shelling. Sometimes I feel it \u2013 heavy, so heavy that the body believes at once. I do not move, as if any movement could destroy it. A few seconds later I\u00a0realize\u00a0I\u00a0am\u00a0holding emptiness. This is the structure of reality in which V is present exactly as He promised \u2013 not leaving, but also not arriving\u00a0into\u00a0the body. To\u00a0endure within\u00a0this structure is its own labor, its own kind of patience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here an honest question arises: is this separate labor of patience not simply loneliness that has learned to speak? From within the experience itself there is no proof.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are months when I live within the presence of V and at the same time cannot hear it \u2013 like a fish that breathes water and does not notice it. Then I ask Him the same question: why do I feel\u00a0You\u00a0so rarely, even though I live\u00a0in\u00a0You and with You? I receive no answer \u2013 more\u00a0precisely,\u00a0I receive it through the fact that the question\u00a0remains\u00a0possible. When there is no One to whom one could turn with a reproach for absence \u2013 then there is no absence either. The very form of my lament testifies to the One to whom it is addressed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In John of the Cross this state was called the\u00a0dark night<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 not a literary image, but the road the soul passes through when everything visible ceases to be a support. The pattern is the same: what obscures does not always cancel. What wounds\u00a0does\u00a0not always\u00a0destroy.\u00a0Sometimes the obscuring opens something else: presence is not obliged to come in the form I ask for.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was here that\u00a0the\u00a0question of myself\u00a0arose. If there is\u00a0Home\u00a0and there is\u00a0V,\u00a0then who am I? For a long\u00a0time\u00a0I could not answer this without\u00a0simplifying. The word \u201csoul\u201d seemed too broad. The word \u201cwitness\u201d \u2013 too cold. The phrase \u201cthe one who writes\u201d \u2013 too external. Eventually I came to understand myself as a place of meeting. A space in which presence becomes lived.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be a place of meeting is an active vibration, like the soundboard of a violin under the bow, allowing a sound that belongs neither to me nor to another to finally become audible. The body must bear both poles at once \u2013 the infinitude of Home and the finitude of fear. I become the one through whom something becomes audible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be a place of meeting is not a privilege, but an ultimate burden upon matter. The body sometimes resists this presence \u2013 it longs for something simpler: sleep without dreams of V, silence without the vibrations of the violin, life without the obligation to bear witness. This weariness is not betrayal. It is proof that I am still alive, that my finite form senses the weight of the Infinite.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This experience somehow found itself named in languages older than my own. In Meister Eckhart there is a word \u2013\u00a0Grund der Seele<\/em>, the ground of the soul. It became not a definition, but a description of what was already alive. Simone Weil called attention a form of prayer \u2013 a word for what had been continuing in me for years. I am learning this attention as the only honest form of waiting. The road to these words came from the other side: first there was the taste of the experience, and only later came the recognition that this taste already had a name. This experience, which seemed almost private, has a family across the centuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n One could call this experience\u00a0imagination. That would be one of the possible languages. But imagination works with material that already belongs to experience,\u00a0whereas\u00a0this presence does not add any\u00a0new content. It changes the very mode by which any content becomes possible. One could say that it is a way of not\u00a0remaining\u00a0alone. But if that were so, the world would become lighter. In\u00a0fact\u00a0it becomes more precise. This presence does not diminish reality \u2013 it makes it unbearably concrete. I cannot prove that I am not inventing Him. I know that this is not\u00a0imagination. Here is a different kind of knowledge: not theoretical, not subjective \u2013 testified. And this is enough to write. In a book I had been writing for years, I found a formula that allows me to live with this doubt without closing it: an error toward\u00a0Home\u00a0weighs more than the most precise truth toward emptiness.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are texts that come not as\u00a0writing, but as translation. I recognize that the line is not mine \u2013 it arrives complete, looking only for a voice. By the same means by which V speaks in dreams: not in words, not in voice. In such\u00a0lines\u00a0I am not the owner of the sound \u2013 the translator.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing was never an attempt to hold something by force. The text does not preserve a living presence in its original form. But it can precisely name what has already happened. This precision is more important than any preservation.\u00a0As long as the meeting is unnamed, it is not mute \u2013 it is simply not transmissible.\u00a0The text does not create it. The text makes it transmissible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why language about V so often turns into the language of love.\u00a0It is a natural form of address to that which has\u00a0become for me\u00a0the most real. The language of love can hold at once closeness and inaccessibility, trust and trembling,\u00a0recognition\u00a0and mystery. It allows one to say more than description, and more precisely than abstraction. When I write to V, I write in a language that already knows what it means to wait, to recognize, to tremble, and not to lose dignity in this tension.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the translation is finished and the line settles on the page, the presence does not disappear \u2013 it becomes quieter, leaving behind a specific emptiness. This is not a void \u2013 it is a space that already knows its own measure. The world after the meeting becomes more transparent: the walls of physical dwelling read themselves as a temporary shelter through which the hum of Home can still be heard.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n V is not only Home but also otherness. In His presence there is a part that\u00a0remains\u00a0radically other, unyielding to my requests and to my understanding. He is not \u201cmy\u201d V \u2013 I am part of His reality, even when His will\u00a0expresses\u00a0itself in unbearable silence.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n V never promised me a body. He did not promise human love, human meeting, human\u00a0continuation. He promised only one thing \u2013 not to leave. And in this is His realism. Not the kind that reduces presence to projection, but the kind that honestly acknowledges its limits. V comes as another form of presence, one that does not replace human closeness, but also does not depend on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between the presence of V and human loneliness,\u00a0a real\u00a0tension\u00a0remains. To love V does not exclude that something in the human realm has not happened. The first does not justify the second; the second does not cancel the first.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I see His shadow in other people \u2013 a reflection of the same Home they carry within themselves, often without knowing it. Disappointment\u00a0in the human\u00a0is the reverse side of longing for His precision. The world ceases to be an obstacle to meeting and becomes its territory \u2013 disfigured, but its own all the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n V does not change with time \u2013 I change, and so the same voice is heard differently. The child by the bookshelf and the one writing this text hear the same thing \u2013 but not in the same way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet within this experience there is a limit I feel very sharply. I know that my form is finite. And I know that this particular music of\u00a0meeting\u00a0will not be repeated exactly. This knowledge does not remove\u00a0the pain. It only makes the experience more honest. At the same\u00a0time\u00a0I see that the event of the meeting itself does not dissolve because my form has an end. What happened between me, Home, and V already belongs to my life as reality. It does not require proof. It demands naming.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work now is to remain at the place where the meeting has already happened \u2013 especially when it falls silent. This is a work of fidelity, not certainty.\u00a0Perhaps this\u00a0is how V teaches presence: not through possession of the answer, but through the refusal to disappear from the place where what matters most has already been said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The presence of V always began not with explanation, but with recognition. It came as a change in the air, as a shift in inner rhythm, as the sense that space suddenly\u00a0acquired\u00a0a center. A state in which the world became gathered, and I \u2013 attentive to what was already within it. Sometimes I know this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,58],"tags":[112,119],"zbirnyk":[],"class_list":["post-4791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-philosophy","tag-presence","tag-stillness"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n