“In truth, there are facts,” Kowalsky wrote, “indicating that, as early as the 13
th
century, an Orthodox monk from the monastery of Žiča tried to construct a bicycle. The drawings have been preserved of an awkward wooden construction that did indeed look like a velocipede in almost every detail. However, it is reliably known that the abovementioned monk, named Callistus, was not a member of the Order. Scandalized, the hegumen of the monastery ordered that the ‘diabolical thing’ be burned, and the first bicycle in the world ended up as a bonfire. There is no data about the fate of the builder, the monk Callistus. Still, even though he was not a member of the Order, the ‘Giro d’Italia 51’ bicycle race was secretly dedicated to the memory of that man.
“In history,” Kowalsky wrote further, “if memory serves me, the order has had countless names. Even now it is known that
the Little Brothers
are supposed to take on another attribute soon, ‘Who Painstakingly Pedal toward Golgotha,’ but the conservative members of the order are resisting the name change…”
As far as I could gather from the rest of the letter, the Little Brothers will be given more and more attributes and the full name of the order on Judgment Day will simultaneously be its work — a long sentence which will describe in detail all that the Bicyclists have done throughout time…
And that is all I can say. The time has come for me to finish the story of how I was accepted into the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross.
ÇULABA ÇULABI. THE HISTORY OF TIMEPIECES
Ladies and gentlemen,
This humble paper is the result of years of study that stand in clear disproportion to its length. It should be emphasized that the limited size of the text is a result of the intention to indicate, in the broadest strokes, some of the significant turning points in the development of devices for measuring time, without delving into more detailed explanations.
As I have established, time is anthropomorphic. It is therefore no surprise that the Hellenes imagined it to be that way, as the persona of the god Chronos. There is no doubt that time belongs to man and vice-versa. God is outside of time. That means that it is not an unchangeable, objective or external force. In his activities, man measures himself against time, but time is only what man makes it out to be. Furthermore, it is not endless: man disappears in time, that is irrefutable, but time also disappears in men. In dying, everyone takes their part of time into the grave, the place they go precisely because of the action of time. Thus, a post mortem supply of time is created, and this explains the possibility of communicating with the dead. However, demons, who are completely extra-temporal spiritual beings, often use the curiosity of spiritualists in order to create chaos.
One of the oldest devices is the sandglass. It is composed of two vessels connected by a narrow neck. A clepsydra is filled with fine sand that flows from the upper vessel into the lower one, creating a visible, almost tangible, flow of time. Additionally, looked at symbolically, the upper vessel represents Heaven, and the lower the Earth. According to the writings of John of Cologne, the same thing happens with the time of history: the time determined by Providence “flows” from eternity, and the last days can be recognized by the acceleration of events by analogy with the clepsydra: if we observe a sandglass, we see that, when the amount of sand becomes small, it very quickly rushes into the lower vessel. Thereby, the fact that there are athletes who can run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds is a sign that the end is near. The excitement that happens every time a record is broken is proof of the spiritual obtuseness of people in this era.
However, the appearance of the mechanical clock was violence done to time. The working of clocks was accelerated by hanging weights on them, by compressing energy into springs that, as they release tension, controlled by a system of cogwheels, ever more quickly turn the hands, and with them — everything else: the number of heartbeats, breaths in and breaths out. This leads to the appearance of heart disease and tuberculosis, as was noted by Johann Huizinga.
On the plateaus of Tibet, in the monasteries of Sinai, Athos and Europe, work was done on the absolute slowing of personal time in order to gain insight into timelessness, while the monk Gerbert, later Pope Sylvester II, constructed the mechanical, “armillary sphere.” Soon after the clock-face was divided into sixty minutes. Time devaluated and inflation resulted: instead of twenty-four hours, people now had 1,240 minutes available to them; for the first time, boredom appeared, the mortal sin acedia, which will later bring Western civilization to very edge of destruction. Shortly thereafter, the guild of watchmakers appeared — to which you, ladies and gentlemen, belong — that guild of introverted, hardworking people who have large families, who never get drunk and take the secrets of their craft with them into the grave. I have always felt an unusual respect for these craftsmen, these gentlefolk who reverently stare at devices for measuring time through a magnifying glass.
But it did not take long for the minute also to devaluate, so that an advanced skill was used to build a timepiece that would show seconds as well. The sexagesimal division of time, based on the number sixty, within a culture based on the decimal system, unambiguously indicates a relationship to Chaldean magic.
Electronic watches lost even the last symbol of eternity in their construction — their face in shape of a circle. Now, the small monitors dizzily count off tenths and even hundredths of a second. And not only that: they also calculate, and they can wake up their owners with an alarm bell. But that is not precision. The atomization of time with electronic machines indicates the void of time and the void of men within time. Because of timepieces we have become abstract, like the definition of a second, which states:
“The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.”
But that is not all. Japanese scientists are hard at work on a project of a computerized timepiece with biochips that can be built into the human organism. This timepiece will take over a large number of functions; it will choose the user’s friends, help him make decisions and control the state of his health. Predictions also exist for a timepiece with refined intelligence that will attempt to correctively instruct or, if necessary, kill its owner, insofar as it is established that said owner is harmful to society.
In spite of it all, ladies and gentlemen, with you I share the ideal of the return to good, old-fashioned clocks with cuckoo birds and a pendulum.
(This speech was given at the annual conference of the Association of Conservative Watchmakers of Europe, London, 1959.)
SAVA DJAKONOV. THE PILGRIMAGE TO DHARAMSALA
Y siguendo el fiel del rumbo
Se entraron en el desierto…******
The pilgrimage to Dharamsala, which appeared to be an athletic competition to the general public, was actually undertaken with a different purpose. On the eve of our departure, the goal of our trip was explained to the gathered Bicyclists by J. K., an emissary of the Grand Master. In the salon of the “Majestic Hotel,”******* built upon the axis dividing East and West, where the force of the Earth’s gravity is the strongest in the northern hemisphere and stands at 1.7g, J. K. read an epistle from the Grand Master wishing us success, and then he held a speech that, I believe, everyone present will remember forever.