Georgia

In Georgia, a country which I first visited in 1969, there is a place that is now a smoking ruin. That country, ironically enough, was the birthplace of the Man of Steel, that feckless and ruthless figure who piloted Russia into the torturesome modernity of the Atomic Age.

Through the smoking ruin move the tanks, landcrawling fish of the sort that Oswald Bastable would immediately know and loathe with a bitter hatred and a wondering distaste. Georgia has partly its own folly to blame. But a large part of that is trusting the promises of the West. Like all clever Caucasians, the true ones who live in the Caucasus and its environs, they ought to have known better. The Caucasians have always been crushed between hammer and anvil, divided by fire and sword, fixed by stake and noose.

And I think of one great lesson. A country is as great as the dictators it births, and whatever those dictators in turn create will one day return home; if not in body, then in spirit, in some sort of returning doom.

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I think of something else. I shall wear my trousers rolled. Haha. There is shadow under this read Prufrock. Haha. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih.