Svetislav Basara: The Cyclist Conspiracy

** Note: The text of Majordomo Grossman is reproduced from the journal Oblique (3, 1967), dedicated in its entirety to the history of European heresies.

*** In 726, Leo III openly spoke out against the cult of icons for the first time. Bishops from Asia Minor, iconoclasts, certainly had an influence on him as they had visited Istanbul just before that; also, a powerful earthquake also had an influence on him, because he, in the spirit of the times, took that as a sign of God’s wrath, caused by icon worship. First, he held sermons in which he attempted to convince the people that respect of icons was against the Christian faith. (G. Ostrogorsky, The History of the Byzantine State )

**** The dream mentioned by Kowalsky is fairly well-known, and is related to dreams that come just before the alarm clock rings. In such cases, the long and logical flow of dreaming overlaps with the ringing.

***** Here is, among other things, what one of the members of the Order of the Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, Lewis Mumford, says: “The clock is, in addition, such an operational machine whose ‘products’ are seconds and minutes: in its essential nature it separated time from human events and helped to create belief in an independent world of mathematics and measurable sequences: an independent world of science. In everyday human experience there is proportionally little basis for that belief. During the year, days do not last the same amount of time, and the shorter travel from the east to the west changes astronomic time by a certain number of minutes.”

****** Headed straight in a familiar direction, I entered the desert…

******* Not far from that place is the building where the Dictionary of Technology will be authored 40 years later.

******** The later development of events showed that the visions of the Grand Master became a reality. It was no accident that the architect Speer was at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy, just as it was no accident that Tatlin’s project for the monument at the 3rd International was a slightly modified structure of the Tower of Babylon.

******** In the jargon of the camps, the words “charge,” “camp,” “sentence” were never used. Inmates usually used euphemisms in their communication with one another.

******** On his numerous journeys, Kowalsky stayed in Tibet several times and sojourned twice on Mt. Athos. In 1938, he spent two months in the Sinai desert with the monks, feeding on roots and insects. Kowalsky destroyed his notes from those journeys, and his diary as well.

******** Lenin himself had a bad, practically degrading, opinion of the personality of J. Humbert-Droz. In his Letter to Inessa Armand, (editor’s note) Lenin calls him “Tolstoy’s philistine.”

******** Evangelical Bicyclists: an athletic-esoteric association of refined and idle intellectuals, one of many that sprang up like mushrooms between the two World Wars. Some people are of the opinion that the legend of the bicyclists is just the advertising gimmick of one of the bicycle factories. (editor’s note)

******** There are some indications that, in the 1930s, the KGB formed a brigade for action in the dream-world, but that J. V. Stalin did away with it because it was unscientific.

******** If I had not given the superintendent the pen, that gentleman would have given him one, and I would have ended up on the gallows. That’s how things are connected.