Aleksej Parschikov dedicated 1954-2014

Parschikov’s Expanse

To my best friend…

1. Going off the charts

I want to write about a man who lived among us and who is now in us, and who we might say was distinguished by a certain nexus of traits that ran beyond our capacity to chart, in a word – a genius.

I think I knew him well enough. Well, at least for the last ten years we lived nearby each other and grew close. But I must admit that I still find much of his inner world undecipherable. That’s why I think I must try to write about all of ’Lyosha’s facets as a whole, even if only to make sense of the way he comported himself differently with each person. With his friends he was one way, with his family another, and with his parents yet another. He opened up in different surroundings in different ways, sometimes by mystifications, sometimes playing the fool, sometimes by being the provocateur… He was able to blithely set his anchor at will, not acting from the mastery that comes with neurological linguistic programming, but being more like the transformer toy, he simply morphed into an artist, a photographer, a technical expert, a physicist… And that’s why he proved interesting to all sorts of people, and especially so since people are generally most concerned with their own interests, and he gave them that. Chemistry has given us the concept of affinity, a measure of the capacity for elements to enter into a reaction with other dissimilar elements. Alyosha had a highly developed tendency towards affinity. Just now, a lot of people are talking about his mediation skills, his communication skills, and surely, for many years he played the role of a railway junction through which postmen, passengers, and merchants would scurry back and forth. It so happened that most of the time I found out what other people were doing through Alyosha. With many of these people I wasn’t even personally acquainted, and others I had known sometime in the past. And now this junction is closed and many of its trains are shut up in their depot, at their home station, and this is a loss for us all.

If we were to compare him with people from our generation or with those people in generations that touch on ours, we would find that many of these people have turned into corpses, even though we see them and they walk among the living. Well, maybe to be fair, we could assign them a maximum 30 or 50 percent quotient of life. These people became, or were made by others, into wind-up toys; they normalized and took on cyborg characteristics. Against this background, Alyosha seemed surprisingly alive, and for this reason, it is hard for us to reconcile his departing with his image. That is why it is so hard for us to understand, and more importantly to accept, his death. It was monstrous for us, and it was monstrous for him. I remember how everything was before his first operation, when he underwent a battery of tests. I remember what he was like at that time, and how I would never again see him like this. He would repeat the same phrases over and over, and then immediately forget… This was the way his consciousness worked then – running like a half-wit in circles in a cage made just for it. Just as a little animal paces and writhes up and down the cage sides, trying somehow to find the way out at last… After this, he drew himself up as a lively entity to  engage the disease in battle. The first panic had passed and was replaced by brave comportment, yet in face of intense pain and suffering. And he fought it to the last. It is enough to remember how two weeks before the end he had suggested to Katya that they travel together to Venice. He said, “I’ll make it a week.” But two days before it all unraveled, he wrote to myself and Timofei, in a notebook, that he was surprised that his recovery was taking so long this time. No doubt he sensed the reality that he could not accept. Afterwards the doctors confirmed that he had lived longer than expected given his diagnosis. It was not easy for him to part with life.

A person’s life is nourished by information, and as it is written in the Torah, in the place where the heavenly manna is mentioned, in 16:16-22: “… and some gathered much, and some gathered little. And they measured it by the omer. And whoever gathered much had none left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack – each gathered what he could eat.” In this regard, Alyosha had an enviable appetite. Each day he shoveled through mounds of reading. And people would send him materials to read from all over the place. This information-lifeline was of such quantity that he would have to share it. Everyone remembers how the ritual went. You would barely cross the threshold of his house and he would show you the new book he had read or he would open the computer with texts and pictures. This was a childlike trait, of which he had many – the impulse to share his toys as soon as he saw you. He son Matthew does the same now with his toy chest, which is bigger than he himself: “Iga, come and play with me.”

One of his off-the-charts traits was his love of the visual arts. He had a lot of friends who were painters. He read a mass of literature on art… he read the famous art critics, many of them in English. He was constantly perusing Erwin Panofsky or Clement Greenberg… about whom many painters had never even heard. Art News, Flash Art, and Parkette, which was his favorite journal. He frequented exhibits and fairs, and was submerged in that world. Well, this surprising focus on the visual was rather strange for a literary figure. He loved cinema and photography, of course. But even though he had such active interest in these areas, I couldn’t say he had a great understanding of painting, color, sculpture or modern art. He did however have a much better grasp of photography. True, all of us, on our first attempts to deeply penetrate the world of the other arts do so via “the literature,” by means of plot, in order to somehow feel some earth under our feet.

Alyosha’s fascination with photos, which occupied his whole life, was at the intersection of two of his greatest passions, fine arts and technology. That is why he valued it so highly. He felt a kind of euphoria while shooting a photo, then developing it, and then scanning it and modifying it in Photoshop.

I think one particular event will neatly elucidate the balance between art and technology in ‘Lyosha’s process of cognition. It was about three or four years ago. My desktop computer had hung and then crashed. I had broken this old computer into its constituent parts and had strewn them over the floor of my studio. ‘Lyosha was coming over to my place so we could go out together and hunt for a new one – of course, a MacIntosh, he didn’t recognize any other brand. When he came in, he said: “Brilliant!” I honestly thought that he was referring to my painting, which was standing just next to the disassembled computer. But no, he was looking at the circuit boards. There was some kind of logic in that, of course, And afterwards, he did notice my painting, too. I had observed this mad love of knobs, levers, equalizers, assembly and disassembly, and erector sets over the course of his whole life.

The people who visited Alyosha when he was taking apart his top brand bicycle for reasons no one knew, or putting it back together, well, at least we knew why he did that; or those finding him cleaning his computer, always a MacIntosh, or tinkering with his cameras, his lenses, and tripods, which were always of the highest quality, -- these people probably felt how much he loved this world. And if I, like most everyone else, treats technology like some kind of supportive, dependent function of iron, then for ‘Lyosha, this world had a life of its own. And the tenderness he bestowed upon it surpassed that he gave to other facets of life. It is crucial to understand this, because this type of perception of his life-bestowing paradigms helps to uncover his poetry. He was born this way; he was above all organic. In life he loved muted colors. You won’t find any other kind in his work. All of his poems are embroidered with technology, as well as with the events of his personal life, true. But this weaving of the self into one’s images is fitting for a great master who has himself been converted to a sign. It is just like in the drawings of children we see nothing more than their scrawls and scribbles, but beneath the surface there is some lived reality. “They come to me, an infant, and say, ‘Show us your drawings.’”  This is a line from one of his last poems.

2. Parschikov’s Expanse

There was a certain moment when I began to write texts, and of course Alyosha’s influence was an integral part of this process. My way through text was about as deft as a paralytic palming his wheelchair, while at my side there was Alyosha, the champion sprinter, glorying in his run. But we were friends, and so he was patient. Sometime about five years ago, I sent him my text, “Man – the Antivirus Program,” followed by other texts. Then, literally on the eve of his death, he received my missive which appeared as an icon on his computer desktop, but we didn’t get a chance to discuss it. I bring this up because Alyosha’s poetic expanse takes on a very different character when seen through the perspective of these texts. You can accept this perspective or reject it, but you can’t overturn it. These ideas were discussed later with friends: with Ilya Kutik, Volodya Aristov, Leva Berinskii, Darlene Reddaway… and as happens, the completely true discussions of the image were but a broken tablet; thoughts on the metaphor could manifest only subsequently as a follow-on, and not appear as a proximate cause. I was glad to hear similar words uttered by Julia Kisina with regard to Alyosha: “He proclaimed the world as an all-encompassing biological machine…” But this was not exactly so, the predicate was imprecise. You can certainly call a person a biological machine, as you can an animal, and other creatures. But reason can exist in other entities than these; for example, reason can inform the computer. Parschikov’s expanse is an articulation of this concept.

If we don’t consider man the crown of creation, but rather take his rational capacity as its crowning moment, and if we don’t take our world as the model of all worlds, then you can propose another being will come along to replace man. We will call this being Meta-Man, and with him Meta-Humanity. Of course, humanity is that medium which will give birth to the Meta-Man. For, from ancient times, he is in us and we in him. It is most probably this Meta-Man, or transformed Man, who can take hold on a more powerful and perfect form of reason in the future, a form of reason that exists on a different level, that is, that will become God for us. We can’t even conceive of this at the moment. He is beyond the limits of our reason. So that, in this new expanse-world, Humanity or Meta-Man and God will be one in the same Personage. In this formula, Humanity stands side by side with God, and Reason is identical to Faith. Maybe that is the sense of the name of God in the Torah; I am He Who Shall Be – this is what He called himself when He first met with Moses. The translation in the Bible is not quite accurate. It says: “I Am That I Am.” No this is not the sense: the One Who will Be will be revealed in the future.

Of course, this idea, like others, is as old as the world, and the time of man’s transition into the Meta realm is well-known to us as the Omega Point, the Apocalypse, the coming of the Mashiach, Messiah, the Hidden Imam… But if we want to retain this picture and try to look at the world through the eyes, not of man, but of man-Meta-Man, then we will be open to completely different perspectives and a new vision. I am deeply persuaded that ‘Lyosha possessed the rudiments of this sight.  After all, the problem of our consciousness consists in its being too determined. It is not able to see antinomies in a unity; human reason doesn’t work that way. It “sees” like this:  here is the living, and here is iron; the straight is here, and the crooked there; this is up, and this is down; this is left, and this is right…

But Alyosha’s expanse is imbued with very different principles. In his world, animals, sometimes strange ones, coexist with ladles as equivalent objects. And these exist together on equal terms with electronic dates, linear rulers, people, nothingness, screwdrivers, vanishing ships, rock formations very tightly strapped with molecules, scissors, measuring glasses, and the dirigibles that swim. This expanse occurs, but not in the early dawn as it might seem, but rather at dusk, as the light begins to settle. And, at that moment when the objects still retain their integrity, yet have not yet merged or have just barely merged, when the bright colors have dwindled, and the entire homogeneous mass flutters, shifts, moves, revolves, starts up and falls down, tilts and scrapes, showing its sides, one thing turning into another, creating the new and devouring the old, everything being enveloped in a fog… this resembles the day of a new creation. At this moment, you don’t have to conjoin anything with anything else. All is one, as in the realm of Eastern tradition. It looks like the clip of all clips, a holographic television, anamorphoses, bouillon.  And it all very much also resembles a video game, where you can go either left or right, but you can’t leave the game, for you are born in the game, and you will be buried there, physically. Now we can speak about images and metaphors. They are inherent to this kind of space. They don’t create this space, but it creates them in its pale likeness.

It seems to me that Alyosha had developed his vision more fully, having left Russia behind, when he fell out of temporally-bound soirees and began to be just a virtual participant. In the former there was youth, in the latter there was maturity; “The Battle of Poltava” remained in one, and in the other, “Oil.” That is why so many could not understand his latter period… he had wandered far off, had gone off the charts. He was disturbed when the critics would string the end of one text to the beginning of another. For it is truly a myth that curators live for seizing the new, when nothing could be further from the truth. More than anyone else, they are in blinders, for they are fearful of the future and the absence of earnings. And by the way, the accusation for all who jump out from the ranks is amicably identical: “incomprehensible, too artificial, too cold, where is the warmth, the lyricism?...” Humanity has already entered the pole of negative temperatures, and it’s time to take them all to the bathhouse with some beer, especially in our country, where the only thing that can unite everyone is alcohol.

Of course, Parschikov’s expanse was cold, because he made it to accommodate not only people with their warm emotions pinned to them, but screws and bolts too, making it clear that his love for these two images was identical. He didn’t teach anything, he only observed what opened to him and honestly tried to describe it. He was trying to see, since he considered vision to be the main element in poetry. He was especially created to reveal this vision to those who were born with cataracts.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Alyosha was not alone on this path. Taking a step back, we see that classical conceptualism generates the same kind of cold ideas that are integral to the Meta-Man, a transition from hot human emotions to the metal of thought. Everything will merge into Meta as into a new syncretism. Nothing will be lost. Parschikov’s experience is an important contribution. He stood out from the crowd by the strength of his gift. Life itself, and with it art and science of the Meta-Man has entered a time of growth and will declare itself more brightly. This new growth is already visible in politics, the economy, in art, and in endeavors to replace the ruling paradigm. Many don’t accept it, they reject it, but other generations are now on the way. What was sheer horror for us will be ordinary for them. That’s how it has always been. It’s just that now everything happens much more sweepingly than it has in the past. Unperturbed, Alyosha had cleared his sight, had applied eye drops to his eyes, had prepared us, and had zealously sought ways out of this prison where all of us have been stuffed.

Igor Ganikowskij. Odenthal, March 2009.

P. S. Seer takes us back to the origins of vision.

translated by Darlene Reddaway, November 29, 2009