Curate, connect, and discover
I believe the English phrase is “odd duck.” Yes. Jan Kargad was an Odd Duck. He was born in 1922, right after Georgia joined the Soviet Union, in a commune outside of Batumi. But this was not a normal commune no. His parents were strange people. A small group of Dutch fuckers, very protestant people, started a winery in the countryside where they could read their bibles. You would think they did not get along with the Marxists, but you would be wrong. They loved work. The bible loved work. There was no problem.
Well, that is not entirely true. Jan was a bit of a problem. He was born with a “weak constitution.” We do not know what that meant exactly, but farmwork would give him seizures and very high fevers. He was not a good child for farm work. So, they taught him arithmetic. Young Jan was in charge of counting grapes and bottles of wine and so on. Maybe the Apparatchik did not mind a child doing all the counting, maybe he was bribed, maybe he did not give a shit. I do not know. But Jan was in charge of all the counting and, what is the fucking word- logistics. Yes. Logistics. And he was very good at logistics.
There are theories as to his upbringing yes. Studying the bible alongside Marx and Lenin and so on. But I do not believe this. In Chechnya in those days many studied the bible and Marx like Jan Kargad, but we did not become like Jan Kargad. I think perhaps it was the fevers. One sees things with a fever when it is bad enough, yes.
Kargad also studied the capitalists. He was very good at this. He read Adam Smith, but also Issac Newton, the South Seas bubble, and most famously the Tulip Panic. They say his journals were filled with pressed tulips. He was a bit of a, what is the fucking English word- pervert. A pervert for organizing things and numbers and so on. Jan Kargad loves logistics like a man loves his wife, and tulips are a symbol of this for him. They became a microcosm for him. You see how the bud unfolds into many petals, its is very similar to how capitalism unfurls into its many aspects in the world. But, I am getting ahead of myself.
One day, after all of his schooling, Kargad has a terrible fever, more terrible than any fever he has ever had. This is in the early 1940s some time. After this fever he becomes strange. Well, stranger than he already was. He speaks of men with golden dog masks, their necks chained to the sun, tulips growing from their eyes, all of that shit. He never goes outside again. He becomes fearful of the sun. He does not let it touch his skin.
He writes intensely for the next three years. I have seen his original notebooks and they are stained with sweat. This man is not well, but he writes. He does not get help, because he is very good at analyzing agricultural output. I believe it grounded him some how, to spend days without sleep, reading spreadsheets about grapes and wheat and so on.
He is no longer christian. He throws out all of the crosses in his home, and replaces them with grape-cutters. They are similar to a sickle, but with a long handle, for reaching up and cutting off high bunches of grapes. He becomes obsessed with this idea of the grape cutter, and he begins to paint. And this is where many first learn of him. He influences a group of artists who become famous in the southern soviet union, though they are occasionally derided as being “mystical.” I personally? I love the drawings. Many figures reaching up to pluck grapes from the sun. It becomes the central theme of his work.
Here people discover his strange writings. But first he is considered a strange mystic. His early writings are still very christian yes, and this influences how he is read in the west. Many think he is speaking of hyper-economics or whatever fetishistic bull shit the americans are calling it. But I do not think so. His work is very soviet. There are stories yes, of good soviet men drinking coffee and loving spreadsheets like a man loves his wife, and in this they become a little bit like Jan Kargad. They are –you do not have an English term for this– cutting grapes from the sun. But this is not a serious phrase you understand. These men are perverts.