... when we were living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. But the body revives in the grave and the remains of life are concentrated, but only in consciousness. I don't know how to express it, but life goes on, as it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in consciousness and goes on for two or three more months... sometimes even for half a year.... There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite senseless of course, about some bobok, 'Bobok, bobok,' but you see that an imper- ceptible speck of life is still warm within him ... in these two or three months left us consciousness may have time to recover itself... and this is, so to speak, the last mercy...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bobok, the bad seed. Past errors dying with those who lived them. Flaws and faults revealed as an essence, transformed into a seed of their potential overcoming.
The narrator, Ivan Ivanovitch, inadvertently discovers that the corpse-seed, once planted into the earth, permits its own consciousness, hitherto tied to the flesh, a few further weeks for correction of its previous errors... a few weeks more are allowed in the peace of the grave so as to establish consciousness for itself as pure consciousness.
The proposed, pupal-stage, transformation of consciousness may occur between the decomposition of the flesh and the re-organisation of the priorities of thought. There is an opportunity at this moment for hard won experience to better illuminate life: from out of the grave, from the secret congress of the dead, consciousness is allowed to germinate, and then perhaps flourish above ground, amongst the living – and become a new integrated, organisational principle.
But Ivan Ivanovitch realises that even in the grave the same corrupt habits, social relations and patterns of thought persist. Even at that one juncture where consciousness holds dominion over existence, appearing at the crisis of the determining organisation of life, and with death and disorganisation on its side, it is unable to escape its addictive patterns, and thus fails to establish itself as autonomous from what has always bound it.
