I must say straightaway that I didn’t like that in the least, that self-satisfying lolling about on graves, that bourgeois lying about in the imperial sheets. Boundaries should be set: the emperor is the emperor as long as he is alive; when he dies, he is just a corpse. Like everyone else.
We resided at the “Lux Hotel,” which was in no way a luxury: it is full of bedbugs. We had breakfast and lunch together, in the dining hall, and for supper we got a “payok,” a daily portion: heavy black bread, butter so rancid it makes you nauseous, a hard-boiled egg, but half-empty and of a nasty taste, like the moldy straw in which they are kept.
D. H. Grainger, who refers to this letter in one of his texts, casts doubt on its authenticity and claims: either the letter is falsified, or Kowalsky copied it from Jules Humbert-Droz. However, Grainger, whose specialization is esotericism, and not at all the history of the workers’ movement, has forgotten the unity of opinions that reigned in the Comintern at that time. People who think alike write identical letters. Either way, it is known that Kowalsky did not have a high opinion of Jules Humbert-Droz and that he thought of him as a “Platonic” revolutionary.******** On the other hand, it is not to be excluded that Kowalsky, in order to mystify everything possible, wrote the letter at a later date.
Kowalsky remained in Russia for three months. Whether the scenes of poverty, so common at that time in the streets of Moscow, in sharp contrast to the bounty that already reigned in the circle of the developing bureaucracy and artistic elite, caused young Joseph to become disappointed in the idea of the revolution, or perhaps some sort of internal turnabout was in question — this can only be guessed at. Upon his return to Germany, Kowalsky decisively broke all connections with his recent comrades, calling them “a gang of demagogues and scoundrels.” With the financial aid of his father, he opened a bicycle repair shop and established his own racing team with whom he won several important trophies in races all over Europe. At the same time, Kowalsky was writing; in 1925, his first (and only) collection of poems came out, A Description of Nothing. When the Nazis took power, they burned all the available copies of the book, so that today it is a rarity among book collectors. The collection A Description of Nothing was printed in a run totaling 300 copies.
Already the next year, 1926, Kowalsky headed to India, doubtless under the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which he was studying intensively. From the extant documents (letters, journals, notes), we can reliably claim that he was actively practicing meditation. In a letter to his father, dated November 8, 1926, Kowalsky wrote:
Dear Witold,
I am in Dharamsala. This is a city of some 40,000-50,000 inhabitants who do nothing other than sit all day in the shade of the mango groves, repeating the holy mantra
“Om mani padme hum”
till they are exhausted. Of the other points of interest, I should mention the herds of holy cows that are different from regular cows in one single detaiclass="underline" they have haloes. All in all, there is nothing of the atmosphere of spirituality and loathing toward the treasures of this world that I so longed for. But I cannot blame anyone; this world is still this world, therefore the world of fallen beings — hell. Only complete idiots would make the attempt to make heaven out of it. The wish in itself is good; oh, good indeed, no objection can be raised against it, but wishes in themselves — I learned that here — are not good, they are the foundation of evil.
The second thing I’ve learned was from a kind Tibetan, Lama Kazi Swami Dhondup, and is related to wisdom: in order to attain wisdom, the Lama thinks, one does not have to philosophize, but to reduce the amount of food one takes in. And I took his advice. I can’t say that fasting brought any kind of enlightenment, but I did “learn” some things after all, about which I had not even dreamed.
That’s how things get turned backwards. Among our people, eating a lot is considered to be a condition for good health. Drivel. It is much more edifying to drink a lot. Watch out for people who don’t drink. I’m warning you, but I know that you watch out for them already. To poison yourself, that is not in the character of trivial souls. There’s plenty of nihilism in that. Some people burn out slower, some faster, it’s like with wood and coal bricks — a matter of personality — but those who never taste a drop because it is not, supposedly, healthy, those people are the dullest and most naïve.
Ingesting only healthy things, that means to fatten your own corpse. And that is dangerous. “Healthy mind in a healthy body” — that’s lie. I read in a certain mystic’s writings that the soul cannot get away from a well-fed body, so it gets buried with it, experiences the process of rotting and undergoes terrible suffering.
According to some of the assertions of D. H. Grainger, it was actually in Dharamsala that Kowalsky first made contact with the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross.******** In the poet’s legacy, a photograph was found of a group of Evangelical Bicyclists and their friends. There is also Witold Kowalsky, who joined his son at the beginning of 1927. However, it is strange to note the presence of English philosopher Bertrand Russell and two ladies whose identity has not been confirmed.
As early as the middle of that year, Kowalsky departed for Tibet where he remained for several months. He returned visibly changed, both physically and spiritually. He was no longer that impulsive, happy young man. “He looked like Lazarus when he rose from the grave,” D. H. Grainger describes, “like a man who has learned a horrible secret, seen the otherworld and then returned to this world.” What he learned and what happened on the Tibetan plateau, we will never know. Kowalsky burned all his notes and journals, and he never bothered to write about daily events again. But this phase did not last long. That same autumn, we find him in the company of two ladies (perhaps the same two in the photograph), at a reception at the English Consulate. At the end of the year, he returned to Europe and began writing again. He worked in parallel on the novel A Cross above Baghdad (the manuscript of which has been lost) and on the project of a modern bicycle with several speeds. The novel never saw the light of day, but the bicycle did. It was patented and still makes significant income for the constructor.
Joseph Kowalsky celebrated New Year, 1928, in Moscow in the company of Joseph Vissarionovich. Hold up in Stalin’s dacha in Podmoskovie, drinking enormous quantities of vodka, they spent five days in conversation, the content of which is unknown. D. H. Grainger is of the opinion that Kowalsky sojourned in Moscow as an emissary of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, and that he delivered to Stalin a list of people who needed to be liquidated in order to prevent the establishment of the “thousand year empire.” This thesis obviously belongs to the domain of fantasy. To be fair, Kowalsky did publish an essay, “On the Edge,” dedicated to Joseph Vissarionovich, in the Leipzig almanac Vom jüngsten Tag, but that should be taken as irony. His encounter with Freud is much more significant, as is his correspondence with the father of psychoanalysis. In the beginning, Kowalsky was enthralled with psychoanalysis; he intended to invest the money he made from his bicycle to start a journal and library specialized in publishing works from that field. Then a total turnabout came: Kowalsky cut all ties with the psychoanalysts. “They are the sons of Satan,” he confided in a friend. “It’s no wonder that all psychoanalysts are Jewish; constantly driven by Christ’s death, tormented by inexplicable guilt which they do not admit to, they search for the causes of their suffering in harmless myths. Yes, they want to live well and comfortably in this world. But the day is coming when they will be sorry. And everyone else with them.”