Briefly, the speech went like this: Dark clouds are looming over Europe; the architects’ conspiracy, begun at Babylon for the purpose of establishing an Earthly Empire, is threatening again.******** The task of the Evangelical Bicyclists is aimed at disrupting the plans of the architects, at changing the flow of history through unnoticed acts of intervention in a direction opposite to that which human pride has planned. For that reason, the route of our supposed marathon went in the opposite direction to that in which history moved forward: from west to east. The big picture of all our tasks, J. K. said, cannot be seen by an individual; that was not even necessary because only the entirety of our accomplishments made sense. So, the seeming insignificance, triviality, and even weirdness of our individual tasks ought not deceive the pilgrims.
That same evening, all the participants got envelopes with a demarcated route, a detailed description of the dreams they were supposed to have at individual stages of the journey, and individual tasks. Immediately it became obvious that the warnings of the Grand Master’s emissary were not just empty phrases. Without those warnings, the tasks would have made everyone wonder. I will cite just a few: One Bicyclist, for example, was to buy ten grams of hashish in a certain street from a certain man in Istanbul, and then to smoke it during the month of September in room 213 of the “Paris Hotel”; another, on the other hand, was ordered to buy an old house in Smyrna (with the help of a certain D. Çulabi), to renovate it, furnish it and then give it to a third Bicyclist who was to arrive in Smyrna on August 15 in order to set that same house on fire during the night of the 16th and 17th; one was actually supposed to open a fabric store in Athens, and another to become a chef at the residence of the British ambassador in Ankara. I had, among other things, the slightly silly task of sending a postcard from Thessalonica to the address of a man I did not know in Chicago, with the following text: “It is spring in Greece. I’m waiting for you to come back. Ana.”
I have given just a few of the tasks, though not the most bizarre ones because I still hold to believability, at least a little. I knew many of the tasks, in no way were they secret. But even if I had known them all, I never would have been able to find a logical connection between them. That became clear to me after many years wasted in searching for a hidden meaning. Years and years had to pass for me to realize that I could not find any sense in them, not because there was none or because it was hidden, but because, like most other people, I am nonsensical and the best I can do to defend myself from nonsense is to do what I am told without making sense of it. Indeed, at that time the obsessive search for meaning had still not become fashionable, but doubt tormented many of the bicyclists (including me), the doubt that was worst of all — that our campaign was futile. That is why, from this distance in time, the exploit of one of the brothers (who wished to remain anonymous) who hovered above a pebble of three grams for eight years and made sure it did not move from a certain spot (not far from one of the fountains at Beyazit Meydani), seems to be a magnificent example of spirituality. I must admit, not without bitterness, that all of those who were given the dirtiest and stupidest tasks were, in fact, the elite of the Evangelical Bicyclists, the elect for whom that was a chance to carry out an exploit. The abovementioned brother, whom the merchants, hash smokers and pimps at the Grand Bazaar called Crazy Aziz, guarded that pebble for eight years (sleeping and eating nearby) so that the balance of the Earth’s mass would be thrown off, in order to cause a powerful earthquake in Japan. That earthquake caused disturbances in the flow of things whose far-reaching consequences we cannot even guess at. And yet, every detail was carefully planned. In the eyes of the Turks, in anybody’s eyes for that matter, a man who spends years making sure a pebble does not move is a nutcase. That is why, of the three possible locations for causing the imbalance, Istanbul was chosen because Islam tolerates morons and fruitcakes.
How proud I was, drunken with conceit, that I was given the honor of traveling with Ernest M. — a master dreamer — and with the emissary of the Grand Master, in person. Oh, that they named me the Grand Chronicler of the Holy Pilgrimage to Dharamsala, I know that now, was just a mystification; they must have joked a lot on my account. Therefore, this chronicle, too, should be accepted by the reader as a mystification, because the reason for the existence of our Order is indeed the spreading of mystifications and the causing of disturbances. But I will speak of that later. For the sake of the truth, I should note that I did not travel with such reputable Bicyclists because I was among the chosen, as my vanity flattered me, but because my texts would be used in another time as part of the material for a completely fictional novel. Additionally, if I had set off in the company of less experienced men, I certainly would have gotten lost somewhere in Asia Minor, in the labyrinths whose paths are made of reality, but whose walls are made of dreams.
No doubt, as time passed I became more accomplished under the supervision of the older Bicyclists. I learned the most important thing: be patient, and also — do not believe yourself. The use of that is salutary in two ways. By rejecting faith in yourself, you find faith in God; the one who rejects his own thoughts, wishes, and ideas is headed down the path of Providence; one who follows himself is headed straight for himself, and that is hell. Second to that, patience and insecurity in one’s own strength both slow down one’s thoughts (which is remarkably important) and so the slowed perception of historical events shows them to be what they are: accelerated to madness, random, chaotic. We are too obsessed with explosions, mass movements and great misfortunes, and in that obsession we overlook the little things, the completely insignificant things that, far out of sight and unobserved, actually cause the cataclysms, like that pebble near the fountain at Beyazit Meydani.
But way back then, I was impatient and full of faith in myself. To some extent it is reasonable that I, as a newfound member of the Order of Evangelical Bicyclists, wanted to find out as much as possible about their internal organization. Already on the first day of the trip, I showered J. K. with questions. He liked to talk, he talked unceasingly, but for my taste at the time he was rude. As if he were in a hostile mood.
Discussion about Perspective
“You’ve got a lot of preconceptions about our Order,” J. K. told me. “You think that we’re going to Dharamsala so that we can do something to save the world. That’s just nonsense. We’re going on an extended picnic. We’re supposed to have a good time, starting tonight if possible. We’ll party all the time, get drunk, clown around, and we will still save the world. Those grand words I spoke last night, those are just a part of the mystification. You’re mature enough to understand that, I’m surprised you fell for it. It was just a ceremony. The masons and the Order of the Rose Cross have similar ones, based on the fiction of Johannes Valentinus Andreae. I’m almost certain that one of the readers of your forthcoming chronicles will actually found the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. That’s good, too.
“However,” he added after a pause, “I can’t help you get rid of your prejudices because even what I know belongs to the sphere of prejudice. Actually, they are at a higher level, but that doesn’t change anything; if you’re climbing the stairs leading to eternity, it is absolutely the same if you are at n + 1 or at n + 25. No one knows the real purpose of our Order. No one can tell you whether we are doing good or evil. We’re simply doing what we have to. You should know that the Order is more of an interesting hypothesis than an organized institution or a power. That’s good, too. That is the power of our community that has been maintained for a thousand years, due to the fact that it has never been constituted and, let’s say, it hardly exists at all; it was created to not exist, but not to disappear. A rigid organization only offers the illusion of strength, but it is not strength.”