Bringing my work to an end in collecting the legacy of J. Kowalsky, I was once again touched (and surprised) by the kindness of Mr. Branko Kukić, who sent me a facsimile of Joseph Kowalsky’s letter, but which reached the addressee fourteen whole months after the newspapers announced the death of our hero. Not doubting its authenticity, and convinced that it might shed more light on the topic that we have been dealing with (e.g. the unambiguous fact that Kowalsky was a Serb by nationality, etc.), I decided to include it in this anthology.
S. B.
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The Grand Insane Asylum
PROCLAMATION OF THE EVANGELICAL BICYCLISTS OF THE ROSE CROSS. URBI ET ORBI
Over the last few decades, an exhaustive campaign has constantly been led concerning so-called freedom. The Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross consider it to be their duty to announce that the struggle for freedom is a commonplace lie; there is plenty of freedom, in fact too much, in the world, and it is properly distributed. It is impossible for a man to not be free, unless he wishes it to be otherwise. The research carried out by scholars, with the blessing of the Grand Master, indicates that something else is in question: the warriors for human rights are not seeking freedom but rather the freedom of self-will, the freedom for everyone to do whatever they want. Although in practice that ideal has practically been achieved, certain formal barriers — the rudimentary remains of morals, justice, humaneness — stand in the way to the completion of the old dream of humankind, the dream of complete freedom in life without any kind of limitations. Since the Little Brothers, in obedience to the message of the Savior, do not flee from evil nor do they fear it, the decision has been made to systematize evil, to plan the perfect Earthly City, in the streets of which the final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness can take place. And though objections will be heard that, by planning such a City, we are playing into the hands of evil, we, the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists, are convinced that we are acting in accordance with Providence. Because, in order for the Tower of Babylon to finally be destroyed, it first had to be built.
After hundreds of years of silence, after long years of the patient work of the architects, philosophers and theologians, the time has come to break the seals of silence, to make the project public and to complete it in the very near future.
THE METAPHYSICS OF THE CITY (A SPEECH OF THE GRAND MASTER TO THE PLANNERS)
One way or another — man is an absurd being in the world. Whether he believes in the resurrection, or if he believes in the finality of death, he does not avoid the absurd: both choices are equally absurd. But, if he chooses the first absurd, can he lose anything except his reputation in the circles of the “enlightened”; can he more finally and irrevocably become nothing if he starts believing in the resurrection?
From the Renaissance onward, belief in one’s own mortality and in chance has become ever more a question of honor and today it almost impossible to find a self-respecting man who does not make a ridiculing face at the very mention of the immortality of the soul. To be fair, nothing can prove immortality — in a formal sense — but, likewise, nothing can prove the finality of death either. Both hypotheses are equally unprovable. To choose one or the other is not a matter of reasonable reflection, but of faith, in other words, it is a matter of making a decision.
It is difficult to briefly give an acceptable answer to the question of why we have chosen, between two equally unproven hypotheses, the one that has worse consequences for us: Why have we chosen death? One of the countless answers would be the following: we have chosen death because we have become civilized, but not civilized in the sense which that word aspires to — in that sense we have regressed with time — but in the sense that we have become inhabitants of the city. Civitas terrena is a symbol of man’s affinity for an independent life, for life without God and without eschatological responsibility. History begins as a violation, as the usurping of freedom, of goods, of authority over others; in order for human memory to be possible at all, God had to be forgotten. The city is the ideal place for that kind of forgetting. For example, the Indo-European root grˇd, from which the Slavic words “grad,” “hrad,” “gorod” (“city”) are derived, actually means “to make ugly,” “to disfigure.” Plotinus called this world a “beautified corpse,” and was completely right. The city introduces disorder in the hierarchy of the universe, in the first place by blocking the horizon with its walls, and then blocking the heavens with the fictitious grandiosity of its towers. But what does big mean? Seen from Mars, our planet seems to be this size — ; observed from the outreaches of the solar system, it looks this big — ·; observed from the center of the galaxy it cannot be seen at all and seen sub speciae aeternitatis it does not exist. Large, small — those are all prejudices of a subject that has become a solipsism. Because erecting a city is preceded by shutting oneself up in the limitations of one’s own being, the unnatural desire for self-sufficiency, Satan’s sin — solipsism. The serpent’s promise — eritis sicut Dei — was seemingly kept; a statue of Baal or Stalin, it makes no difference, can always be placed in the city square; it is impossible to be without some kind of “god,” but Baal and Satan are cruel “gods”; to serve them means to distrust and hate. In spite of that, it would be worthwhile in a way to rehabilitate Stalin. Appointed by the synod of the Grand Masters to the task of stopping the construction of the Earthly City, he betrayed them and became convinced that such a city could be built. And yet, to tell the truth, he was not the one who caused the terror of the denunciations, the rigged trial proceedings or the GULAG. No, the need of the masses to denounce, to destroy and kill, put Stalin at the top of the hierarchy — we counted on that — but the masses thereby took on a legitimacy that even Joseph Vissarionovich began to believe in, and we did not count on that.
One does not believe in Baal or Stalin out of conviction, it was always known that the Golden Calves were bronze contrivances, but out of interest — everyday, small, trivial interests. The worst of all disgraces is the worship of dead idols for the sake of a crust of bread, a glass of wine, a soiled bed. But idols have a powerful weapon at hand — flattery. And, as the Romans said, vulgus vult decipi. It is almost ridiculous, if it were not so tragic, this human affinity for self-deception. And so the world is becoming an ever more beautified corpse; however, it is no longer enough for the streets to be clean; from the façades of buildings, enormous billboards authoritatively claim that everyone is happy, that everything is in order, and that it will stay that way forever. Ultimately, practicality has proven itself to be childish idealism; whoever longs for reality is becoming unreal, whoever longs for the surreal is becoming real. That is the way the world order works.