The cyclist conspiracy

There is something inherently heretical about bicycles. A mode of transport that's powered by man alone, which looks impossible but that anyone can master, whose adherents buzz back and forth through cities with little care for rules since the big cities of Europe are built either for cars or mass transportation. The illusion of freedom and free will (free wheel?) that can end under the wheels of a bus at any second.

Anno Domini 1347, Monsignor Robert de Prevois, the Inquisitor of Paris, received news from the mouths of honorable citizens that master Enguerrand de Auxbris-Malvoisin, obsessed by the Unclean One, had left the saving grace of the Christian faith, turned to incantations and magic, and built a demonic device that he rode through the streets terrifying people.

The Cyclist Conspiracy is, in a lot of ways, a complete (or rather incomplete) mess; presented as fragments of writings about the sect The Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, who supposedly have been lurking in the shadows of European thought (worldly or religious? Is there a difference when it comes to power?) since mediaeval times. They assign all sorts of symbolic meanings to the bicycles; the two wheels, the triangle in the middle, the crossbar that only men's bikes have, the fact that it looks like a cross from the POV of God... The Bicyclists pop up in Freud, they pop up in Sherlock Holmes, their members (including both Stalin, Milosevic, Bohumil Hrabal and Homer Simpson) have been seen in post-revolution St Petersburg and in monasteries. Their mission is to overtake time itself, to overthrow rationality, to build something, a new and final Tower of Babel, in the realm of dreams (which, again, is the traditional domain of both church and state - hence the need to get Freud on board). At least I think that's what Basara (the narrator) thinks he's found out in this novel.

...your muscles don't turn the pedals, your spirit does. And it would be better to see things like this: it is not you that is moving, but the road and the Earth are turning, and you are standing in place and keeping your balance.

By the 21st century, there are a lot of churches to commit heresy against, a lot of empires piled in palimpsests on top of each other, all "latently present the whole time" in the psychogeography of central Europe; Stalin and Kohl sitting next to Freud and Aquinas. (See also: Codrescu's Tzara and Lenin Play Chess.) Every act can be condoned by any and sometimes all of them, so every act is already done long before it happens. Any organisation against it - against order itself - will contain both dictators and artists, murderers and clowns, and at times it feels a bit like Basara is trying to have his cake and eat it too, especially during the more heavy-duty philosophical parts that make up the latter half of the novel (or "novel"). When one of the characters remarks "...he talked to me for a long time about Byzantium, bicycles, real and false eternity, and I remember that I was horribly bored..." I underline it. But the first half, and much of the second half as well, is just such an exhiliratingly insane and fun ride that I have to remind myself to keep my hands on the handlebars. Because, well, we're balancing on millennia of idea(l)s that can look pretty horriffic up close, and once you remember that it's easy to fall and hurt yourself.

But idols have a powerful weapon at hand - flattery. And as the Romans said, vulgus vult decipi. It is almost ridiculous, 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 facades 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.