Svetislav Basara: The Cyclist Conspiracy

To keep Grossman from accusing me of heresy, I’m thinking in cursive. I closed my eyes and I’m watching him through the slit between my eyelashes, which confuses me because my eyelashes are down there, on my body, on the throne. One way or the other, it is impossible to avoid anthropomorphism. I am watching, as I said, Grossman. Thinking that I am asleep, he’s adding in his disloyal footnotes. From down on the throne, I could (since the connections are never broken) cry out: Guards, arrest Grossman! But what’s the point? Like the professors of whom he is the forerunner, he has simply convinced himself that he can smuggle in the truth, and somehow deserve his place in some sort of musty book. Those are the very historical errors with which I am constantly obsessed. Why do the superficial souls so easily accept the thesis that history is a continuum in which one event causes another, which is complete nonsense? I can see, I swear to God, everything that has happened and everything that will happen, insofar as that is possible for a man. There is no cause-effect relationship. It is all just a whim of mine. The Spirit allowed me to write history. Not because of my abilities. Just as easily it could have given that task to Grossman, and nothing would change. I don’t know how to explain that. If this is all not just a dream, I can see the future of the miserable New Europe with absolute clarity, not because that future is a necessity, but because I want it to be that way. Let me repeat: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Gothic, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, Rationalism, Bacon, Boehme, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Grotius, Hobbes, Cudworth, Pufendorf, Newton, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, Hume, Helvétius, Rousseau, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel, Marx. Then came two of our own: Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, no, first came Joseph Fitzgerald Queensdale, then he. Just names that I dreamed up, but which will usurp those bodies and minds, thinking that they are a necessity and not just a whim. All those learned gentlemen will feel challenged to discuss the past, never guessing that they are just a tile in a mosaic that should be taken apart. All of that is being demolished. Atomized. History is nothing more than the process of the continuous atomization of property. Once long ago, the owner of the Earth was its creator, God. Then the Earth was ruled by kings. Then came feudalism, followed by capitalism, and finally socialism where everyone is the owner, where everyone owns everything, but there is nothing left to own.

From time to time, I’m overcome by doubt. It is not to be excluded that all of this is just a dream. Perhaps those future positivists, with that fellow Meier among them, are correct after all when they claim that I am just an ordinary mystification. I will leave that possibility open, but things will unwind just as I foresaw them and predetermined them, regardless of my ontological status. And not just that. I know the conditions under which all of this will collapse in flames. It is possible to do that even now, I mean in terms of metaphysics; but the technological knowledge of my epoch has not reached the state where it can solve the purely technical problem of the apocalypse. I must leave that to the future generations, to the new sort who will, defying gravity, ride on magical two-wheelers, despised by the world, just like our Lord who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. There you have it, including such hesitations in my reflections, I am once again proving that I have a democratic orientation. Which is one more historical paradox: the democrats of the future will not allow their dreams to be called into doubt. With their heads full of the thoughts of the dead who came before them, doubting nothing whatsoever, they will bravely march forward and become dead men themselves. True enough, we will help them with all our might. Having slipped in among their ranks, clandestinely. We will construct their machines, which Grossman believes to be the contraptions of the Devil. The fool. The Devil was never so obvious. But the machines are a theological problem after all. Just as God created man, and man rebelled against his creator, so will man create machines and the machines will rebel against people. Hegel will write about this in the parable of the master and the slave. One day, machines will be able to think. Huh, if such a thought ever crossed Grossman’s mind, he would tie himself to the stake and set himself on fire. The dogmatic consciousness that sees only here and now , never dreaming that they have already become the past. And not only will machines think, they will think faster and better than people. There you have it, the beginnings of cybernetics! People will stop thinking. They will become stunted. They will grow dull from their laziness and vices. The difference is great between them and, let’s say, me: I have the ability to reflect on all of that, observe Grossman, and at the same time I am holding an audience of tavern owners and passing judgments in the ridiculous court cases of my subjects. Why, even Grossman, in comparison to the future generations, seems to be a genius. All kinds of thoughts are roaming through his head at the same time while he is writing down my soliloquy, but all of that, as Lenin would (and will) say is… petit-bourgeois, petty-minded. Grossman can think of nothing without getting himself involved, without calculating whether something is profitable for him or not. A typical modern man. One night I psychoanalyzed him, just for fun, and he thought I was interrogating him. And this was my conclusion: Grossman is an orthodox Christian just because Christianity is the state religion of our time, not to mention a matter of decorum, a rule of proper manners. However, if he were accidentally born at the beginning of the 20 thcentury, I’ll bet that he would be in the first ranks to charge the Winter Palace. As pedantic as he is, he would create a fine career for himself, but sooner or later Dzhugashvili would get rid of him, just as I will, sooner or later, get rid of him, though in a subtle way so that he thinks he is dying a natural death and has a place waiting for him in heaven. But the means of getting rid of someone are a matter of the tastes of a time. In any case, because of his faithful service, he will be buried in his marvelous mausoleum, embellished with his name including two large Ss.

Grossman! Wake up! I’m sorry, Sire, I fell asleep. I was tricked into dreaming. And what did you dream? Ugh, I dreamt that you were watching me through your half-closed eyelids, saying things that made the hair on my neck stand up. Then I found myself in a crowd rushing at some sort of palace shouting, I remember it well, in some language I don’t know “da zdravstvuet tovarishch Lenin.” And then? Then you woke me up. Yes, Grossman, forget about your meaningless dreams, it’s time for us to get back to work. So, America. Forgetting which direction it is that leads to the real homeland, they will head for the west, longing for the wide-open, hungry for space, tortured by the clench of their hardened souls. Instead of searching along the vertical, they will head off for the horizontal. Do you know what that means? It means that they will keep running in circles. In order to avoid dizziness from the heights, they will submit to the grave dizziness of the soil; they will concoct races and adore blood. Do you know the root of the word “vertical”? No, Sire. It’s from the root vertigo, dizziness. So much for the Latin you learned at Uppsala. Not to mention the Greek. But never mind, I’m not interested in diplomas. Let’s get back to work. Write this: Disoriented by the vertigo, they will call their demise “progress.” Unless they mean the progress of their demise. All of the gnomes, melusines, nymphs, werewolves, and household demons that we so democratically tolerate in our kingdom, allowing them to multiply and perform their rituals, all of those beings about whom Bombastus Paracelsus wrote about, or should write about, so inspirationally, they will all be destroyed and proclaimed to be fictitious. Don’t you frown at me, I know those beings don’t exist, but they must be destroyed first so that something more real can come next. And don’t flatter yourself that you are much more real than a gnome. I can convince you otherwise in an instant. Just a wink of my eye and you’ll find yourself in your mausoleum in body, with your soul beneath, with Von Kurtiz and that whore Margot, where you can all gossip about me to your heart’s content, if you can find anyone to listen to you. Oh, Margot! The eternal struggle of the animus and anima. Perhaps you had a hand in this as well, Grossman; I could swear that you are prepared to do anything just to discredit me in the eyes of the senseless mobs of the future who will, one way or another, hate kings and all other noble things. I’ll bet you are the one who brought Kurtiz to be around the queen. But that’s all right, I’ll leave that up to your conscience which irresistibly reminds me of the Euclidean understanding of spatial perspective: far away things look small so they fill you with the false hope that your sins are forgiven. You’re not alone in such observations. In just a few years, art will head down the path of your conscience. Is it worthwhile for me to mention: every perspective ends up in a dead-end. You are looking at me with your inherent disbelief, with that look that makes me wonder if you are my majordomo or my court jester. Or both. I am explaining things, not for your sake, you won’t understand them; art will destroy Europe. That is why the Jews forbade the presentation of images. Those lousy painters, those producers of illusions, wishing to represent reality, expressing themselves through their ridiculous senses, they will make reality unreal. They will teach generations to observe the world with eyes trained by their pictures. Indeed, the day will come when a house in the distance will look small, quite small. Sire, I really cannot believe that. I know that the world will meet its demise, but that houses where people live can look smaller than a man, I cannot believe that at all. That doesn’t surprise me. You are not here to believe or not believe, but to write. You will gain eternal life for that. But this business with perspective, it will be precisely as I have said. Artists will shrink people. They will shorten distances. They will draw the New Europe. Let me go farther than the time in which my thoughts will be read like artistic fiction, in which all of this will be a chapter in an insignificant novel, let me tell you a secret. In the end of all things, when time nears its end, Europe will turn into an enormous library and an endless gallery of pictures. My poor Grossman, long before that apocalyptic twilight, everyone will have their own picture , down to the last busboy in the tavern. At the moment that is the privilege of the kings and high nobility. In those days, the kings will already be in museums. I won’t be. Did you write the history of the sect of Two-Wheelers? No, Sire, I did not have the time. What do you mean, didn’t have the time? I’m either writing down your words, or I’m down there by the throne. But why don’t you write the history at the same time you are writing down my words. I’m sorry, Sire, but that’s absurd. Never mind, just keep writing, the time will come when that will cause no one to wonder. Now, where was I? Oh, yes! In the year nineteen fifty-th…