Svetislav Basara: The Cyclist Conspiracy

We sat on the stoop of my father’s cobbler shop.

“It’s a complicated story,” the man said. “You have to listen to me carefully; even then, no matter how carefully you listen, you will forget everything when you wake up. I have already been in your dreams and talked to you, and you have forgotten. The point is this: in times past to which no one’s memory reaches, human beings were whole. Then, for reasons that would not be clear to you, they were separated, divided into two sexes, male and female. Perhaps you can guess: two corresponding halves are supposed to find each other so that they can stop wandering about between reality and dreams. But the matter is made more difficult by the fact that the two halves are not born synchronously, I mean — in the same periods. To cut things short: Ana F. has still not been born, and you have already gotten quite mature. In the future in your dreams you must open your eyes wide, because you can only meet there, because dreams stand outside of time, as you know. And above all, above all you must learn to think slowly…”

21.

“Son,” my father said one morning, “you have to be paranoid not to be paranoid. In this world, everyone persecutes everyone, and everyone together persecutes prophets. However, at one moment you have to stop the paranoia: at the moment when you realize that you, though being persecuted, don’t even exist.”

“At that moment you are saved!”

22.

(passages of my father’s letters to people in public life, found in his legacy)

From a letter to the Pope

Holy Father,

I am convinced that, without fail, you must travel by bicycle on your trips. It is indecent for a person of your reputation to ride in armored automobiles, Satanic machines, because the very name automobile contains the principle of self-movement, self-sufficiency, which is Satan’s ideal…

I also propose that you relinquish your Swiss Guard. Christians do not dare to be protected from the evil of this world; follow the example of His Holiness the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church…

You must actually seek feverishly for the cross on which you will be crucified. If no one wants to crucify you in Europe or in America — go to Patagonia, go to Africa, desecrate some native taboos, find a way to become a martyr…

…The donkey is the paradigm of the bicycle, and it is known that the Savior rode a donkey into Jerusalem…

(1920)

W. K.

From a letter to M. Lowry

Dear Mr. Lowry,

Finally a proper book on alcoholism. Congratulations.

…It’s worthwhile to mention the secret of turning wine into Christ’s blood. I am completely convinced of its certainty. Not because I have studied the secret, but because through crazed drunkenness I have recognized my own stupidity…

…I think that they will all be resurrected: all those comic strip heroes, all the Mickey Mouses, Mandrakes, Kirbys…

…In any case, alcohol brought me to faith in God. Tearing me further and further down, humiliating me, it cleared a place for me in the Lord’s Kingdom…

…The doors to that Kingdom are exceptionally low. A man must humble himself, he must lower his head if he intends to enter.

23.

My father wrote another letter to the Pope:

Holy Father,

I understand that you did not accept my humble suggestion about the automobile. You continue to drive about in that contraption; you show off like some sort of bon vivant, a seducer, losing your reputation in the eyes of honest Catholics, forgetting that automobilism is the mortal sin of our time, while bicyclism, after love, is its greatest virtue.

But, what can be done, we are all sinners. This time I would like to recommend an exceptional product of my company W. Kowalsky & Co. — religious shoes. I dare to ask that you publish an encyclical recommending these shoes to the widest range of believers.

This is what makes them exceptional:

They are no different in shape from the normal shoe, which is important because of humility. However, the insides of those shoes are filled with a large number of sharpened tacks. Whoever wears such shoes will most certainly never be able to think of sin and pleasure; all of his thoughts will necessarily be directed to heaven. In addition, excursions into the streets will be reduced to only the most necessary and thus the chaos will be notably reduced.

I believe that you share my opinion that comfort acts detrimentally on our souls.

With respect,

W. K.

24.

The Pope complained to the Cardinals that a certain W. Kowalsky kept bothering him with letters full of blasphemy. Cardinal Panini, the head of the congregation for questions of faith, reported the unfortunate incidents to the papal nuncio in Tübingen. The papal nuncio complained to the chief of police, the chief of police invited my father in for a conversation…

25.

My father never wrote the Pope again.

26.

With my friend, Von Lukitsch, I began breaking clocks. First of all, we ritually smashed our own timepieces. Later, we did what we could. We did not buy watches so that we could break them — that is senseless — while a clock is in the display case it is harmless. We carefully waited (thinking quite slowly) for situations in which a clock simply offered to be broken.

Such situations are not rare. There is always a broken clock somewhere; you can always find someone who is dissatisfied because his watch is fast or slow. It is not difficult to find a clock to smash.

In four years, we smashed 4,268 timepieces of various sorts.

Why were we doing this?

To stop time? No, we were not that stupid. We wanted to prove that a logical system can be built into any sort of nonsense, that all nonsense takes on an enormous burden of karma that ultimately results in liberation.

27.

Von Lukitsch continued to smash clocks, but I went down another path. With his persistence in smashing those bothersome and fatal devices, through the refined art of the disintegration of mechanisms, Von Lukitsch became famous all over Europe. After several years, it became quite chic to send your watch to Von Lukitsch for him to smash it, and the cream of Europe competed to see who would send him the most expensive and beautiful timepiece.

Recently, I read the following news in the paper:

“In the Meinhof Palace near Glassbaden, in the presence of reputable guests and representatives of the press, Mr. Von Lukitsch broke a ‘Schaffhausen’ watch, the property of the Prince of Monaco.”

28.

“The bicycle is a vertical vehicle,” my father wrote in the preface to his treatise Theology and Bicyclism . “If we look at a simplified graphic representation of the bicycle,

we can see that the device has an abundance of religious symbols; two wheels, two circles, symbolizing the two faulty infinities (time and space) connected by the true eternity of the Trinity, represented by the triangle of the frame. At the same time, when represented like this, the bicycle has the shape of metaphysical glasses with which it is possible to correct spiritual myopia. But that is not all. If we take a birds-eye perspective (which is the viewpoint of the Holy Ghost), the bicycle has the shape of a cross: