Svetislav Basara - The Cyclist Conspiracy

“We pronounce our sentences like a whore makes love,” Kowalsky writes in the preface. “Our conversations are not conversations but promiscuity.” However, the importance of that project is not the project itself, although it is undeniable, as much as the fact that it was the forerunner of an even better Dictionary of Technology which will appear forty long years later. Kowalsky’s Dictionary was to be just the seed from which a powerful tree would sprout. And indeed, in 1981, a new Dictionary of Technology would appear in an edition of Vidici which would arouse considerable excitement. The disconcerted commentators of the daily papers interpreted the Dictionary as “an open invitation to destroy the social system,” although such invitations cannot be found on the pages of the Dictionaries . Soon thereafter, the secretive Analysis began to circulate in Belgrade, an unsigned text (probably from Masonic circles) in which a confused and malicious interpretation is given to the positions of the anonymous compilers of the Dictionary .

In 1943, the commandos of the Traumeinsatz picked up Kowalsky’s trail. Sensing the danger, Kowalsky disappeared from Stalać only an hour or two before the Gestapo knocked on the door of his room. On that foggy night, all trace is lost of him, though the rumors continued to spread. According to some, he showed up in Tibet where he dedicated himself to the study of the Book of the Dead ; according to others, Kowalsky became a monk at the Hilandar monastery, taking on the name of Callistus; according to a third group, he was killed trying to escape. A witness, whom we cannot believe entirely, claimed that Joseph Kowalsky left in the middle of his watch, climbing onto a bicycle, he quickly disappeared into a cloud that enveloped him. Whatever happened, before us is a selection from the work of an interesting person, a selection that, let there be no doubt, should be given our full attention.

S. B.

Belgrade, 1983

Fellow traveler

Pretend no innocence on this train, for

Thousands of years of my travels, no lady has there been.

They cheated you. Fancy fans and dances ride in first

class. Still it is wonderful to die between Budapest and

Stalać on 860 wheels between the beams of light

And the imposing bottom of some gentlewoman who soon

Gets off rhythm at a station with an unclear name and slips

Into the ear of the dispatcher.

Perchance I will love you for fifty, perchance even all one hundred miles

Indescribably heading east together with a gentleman

Who, there you see, brought his daughter along for a vacation

Into death. Fellow traveler, pretend no innocence.

Who knows if we shall reach the coast.

The sea is as large as the sadness in your eyes

And deep within me. The sun will rise between your thighs

For a change while we travel at once in all eleven

directions of the world. Love affairs are unreasonably brief

In the twinkle of an eye — there’s the station where you get off.

Tell him

That I won’t come

(1919)

I think you didn’t come.

You wanted to because it was Sunday.

You put on your skin, pulled on your hands, put on your feet and

Went down the stairs but the Amebas had moved the streets

Crisscrossed them, changed their names, hidden the things

that could have served as azimuths.

You wandered about with a smile on which

the zipper broke

Night had long since fallen and you no longer knew where you were.

You even forgot where you had actually been going and me and the only thing

you wanted was to arrive somewhere from

the omnipresent nowhere.

Around midnight the Amebas grew tired of their game and they once again

put the streets back where they belonged and so you once again found

the entrance to your flat — exhausted and aged…

You lay in bed crying

And just before dawn

Became an Ameba yourself.

(1919)

…

I haven’t slept all night long. I don’t know if she

slept a hundred meters further down in a room from which

the veinal blood of the lampshade ran onto the sidewalk.

To comfort myself, I dreamt that I was dead. And then,

before daybreak, a vague foreboding shook me from my sleep.

It was hard, lonely, like a sweaty stoker

shoveling coal into the furnace of a locomotive from which

the dispatchers turn their gaze, pretending to rub the eye

of the lamp of the rail-switch and pretending that they

saw nothing

(1919)

(Spring version of the poem You Didn’t Come )

Two eyelids swollen from insomnia.

Tears drop into the fine yellow dust, at first

One by one and then in crystal streams

That write hieroglyphs on the ground.

Suddenly, the city begins to fall

On the hunching shoulders and filthy children try

With fistfuls of mud to plug those treacherous

Those scandalous eyes.

The tears want out into the street.

But the other way round: the streets, following the tracks of the tears,

Gently crawl into the tear ducts. Beside the city and here now

The street and the evening plunge down upon the shoulders. Not likely

That they will hold up much longer, but they hold.

Came into being long before this city

These streets

Before themselves.

Only then does it vanish. Becoming smaller and smaller. It disappears,

Leaking through the cellar bars and remaining

Just two eyelids swollen from insomnia…

And then, before dawn, comes an enormous horse.

( 1919)

Tonight my soul is a steppe and on it drunken Cossacks ride at a gallop

Mikhail Sholokhov, this Don is not quiet like you described

Movements from which the sole has been torn and every prefabricated verse

Eyes brimming with dead-end alleys with muddy streets

From which a surgical procedure has

Removed every stride

This deep blue Don that carries me randomly in its inside

Pocket and occasionally takes me out into the light of mud to see what

time, day, month, year it is

This barbaric ice-blue Don

Tonight my soul

Stuck in an elevator between the cold

And the second floor where at the desk

Small like a man, it writes out on signatures of brain matter

With its sharply imagined pain

Mathematical operations of delirium and intricate equations of loneliness

Just so the night doesn’t grow fat or go mad

Mikhail Sholokhov, until they fire a burst of breath into the mouth

Of an Anyusha or a Tanya

Until this Don takes me

To the bottom of the ocean…

(1920)

On a line stretched across the yard

Women hang out

The washed brains

A dead bird without ID

Falls into the wrinkled streets

And everyone wonders

what its name is

The mouths of the dead speak not

On rows of death notices

Your name printed

And year of birth

On my left lung

Likewise your name printed

And year of death

Is that the real reason why

Gutenberg

Invented the technology of printing