BICYCLISM AND THE THEOLOGY OF WITOLD KOWALSKY
1.
I will speak about my father Witold Kowalsky. About his conversion from being an atheist into a true mystic and Cabbalist. He is in the adjoining room. His cheeks are flushed. He is drinking vodka and writing the treatise Theology and Bicyclism dedicated to His Holiness the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Until a few years ago, my father never drank. Then he suddenly grew ill and fell into his deathbed. The doctors gave him two weeks at best to live. After four weeks, my father had not died, and the director of internal medicine, Dr. Wagner, lost patience with him and threw him out of the hospital for being undisciplined, and so that he would not occupy the place of someone who had more respect for medical science, someone ready to die by the determined deadline.
2.
In his Confessions, my father commented on that episode in the following way:
“It is a lie that they threw me out because I didn’t want to die even though, according to all the findings, I was practically dead. They ousted me because, while I was sick, in a coma, I repented and returned to the saving grace of Christianity. It was not the doctors’ fault. They did so unaware. The world order is such that Christians are persecuted and they are persecuted no matter how often the official policies, history and so on, claim that the persecutions of Christians are a thing of the distant past.”
3.
Upon his discharge from the hospital, my father bought an icon of Jesus Christ and a used velocipede. He took down the picture of the Kaiser and hung the icon above the desk that he never ever worked at; at that time, he still had not started corresponding with His Holiness the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. But, a mistake slipped by him: while making the frame, the glass-cutter put the picture-hook to the side of the symmetrical axis and therefore Jesus hung crooked, as opposed to the Kaiser who had hung perfectly, his stance at ease. My father tried, using cobbler’s paste (exceptionally hard) to bring the icon into balance. In vain. The icon hung crooked as if it wanted to let him know that it was supposed to be crooked. One day, my father burst into my room and shouted, “Felix error! I realized what the icon wanted to tell me: Jesus is not hanging crooked, the rest of the world is; the world stands off the vertical axis of the Logos by 13°, no less…”
4.
From that day forward, my father began to be enthralled by mistakes. He said that mistakes are the steps to perfection. I did not understand him; at the time, I was not a mystic, I was a communist.
“Take the train schedule as an example,” he explained to me, “the train schedule is the thing that introduces disorder. Trains always arrive on time, whenever they can and when that meets the goals of Providence. The whim of a transportation engineer, that train number 170 must be every day at 14:03 at a certain station, makes us get an illusion of disorder if the train is late. Yes, that’s the way it is: in countries where the trains arrive exactly according to the schedule, lawlessness is greatest. In a similar, mystical way, to the way the schedule creates lateness, so does the law create crime. Listen, if you have ears…”
5.
“Thanks to the carelessness of a glasscutter,” my father wrote in the Confessions, “I understood the mystery of the Original Sin. We are guilty even when we do nothing, we are also guilty as babies precisely because we are tiny parts of a world that has lost its balance, a world that is crooked and is rushing toward destruction. Therefore, everyone who adapts himself to the rules of this world is breaking God’s laws, taking the guilt on himself, choosing it by his own free will and therefore distancing himself from God. But since God is everywhere, it is impossible to distance oneself completely from him. Origen is right. In the end, we shall all be saved. All will be one in the one.”
6.
At that time, I met the future love of my life, Ana F. It happened in a dream. I was standing with my friends on the corner where we met every evening, at that time only in our dreams, because in reality some of us were already dead, others were thousands of miles away in Canada and America where they were making dollars in the cruel world of capitalism and slowly forgetting one another. Because of that, the atmosphere on the corner was unpleasant, the conversations forced. That night, in the middle of an argument about a football match, Ernest pointed at a girl coming down the street and said, “That’s Ana.”
7.
My father had a coat of arms made according to his sketch: an old-fashioned velocipede with a rose cross rising from the handle-bar stem:
8.
(a passage from a letter of my father, Witold Kowalsky)
“Joseph, Joseph, when you were born I was beyond myself with happiness. I immediately departed for London. I checked in at a rather ordinary hotel and the next day I bought a bicycle. That evening I went riding through the streets. I rode like a madman and occasionally shot my pistol at the windows of watchmakers’ shops. You’re wondering why I went all the way to London. You yourself know that the English are cold-blooded. All of that shooting would never have been allowed in Tübingen. Even so, even there in London my celebration was met with quite a lot of publicity. As far as I could tell from the newspaper, none other than the great Sherlock Holmes was interested in my case…”
9.
(part of the record of the investigation against my father)
INTERROGATOR: This coat of arms, this stylized velocipede with a rose cross rising above the handle-bar stem, what kind of organization does it represent?
WK: That is the coat of arms of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross.
INTERROGATOR: What are the goals of this organization?
WK: The goals of the organization are summarized in its name. So, spreading the Evangelical truth, missionary work. We are supposed to travel around on bicycles and preach repentance and the imminent destruction of the world.
INTERROGATOR: Did members of the organization participate in any way in the conspiracy against and assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?
WK: To my knowledge — no. I repeat, the goals of our organization are spiritual.
INTERROGATOR: Who are the members of your organization?
WK: To that question, I cannot give an answer.
10.
The next Easter, my father caused his first metaphysical scandal. Right before the eyes of some amazed people, he suddenly became invisible, and then reappeared in another place. Then he showed up in several places simultaneously; he started talking with his acquaintances, laughing and pointing his finger at his doubles, “Look, Helmut,” he said, “there’s another Witold, another one of me.”
11.
“Father, how did you do that? How is that possible?” I insisted that he tell me the secret.
“Simple,” my father said, “it’s Tibetan wisdom. ‘If you want to be invisible,’ says Lama Lobsang Rampa, ‘you must become perfectly still and stop all your brainwaves.’ So, there, I sat perfectly still and stopped all my brainwaves.”
12.
Several months later, my father caused another metaphysical scandal. Using the Cabbalah, he created a Golem, taught him the cobbler’s craft, and the Golem worked night and day instead of my father. My father dedicated himself entirely to drinking, poetry and mysticism. Who knows how it would have all ended — perhaps in delirium, perhaps in a brilliant collection of poems — if the Labor Union had not found out about it. One day, representatives of the Syndicate visited my father and accused him of hiring an unregistered worker. My father grew angry and shouted “METH!” and the Golem dissipated into a pile of dust. At the very same moment, all the shoes that the Golem had made over the preceding two years also dissipated into dust and the gentlefolk in the streets stared dully at their bare feet, not realizing that a miracle had happened.