Sunset Boulevard

There we were, on Sunset Boulevard. I must say that Adobe was an entertaining and gracious host. You could sense the intelligence and the care, the thoughtfulness and restraint, much like the effort that goes into his productions.

It has never been about Stalin, in the long run; it has always been about the rich and beautiful country that he ruled for a while. Despite the ruins and the anti-intellectualism and the unstable cronyism and the misuse of cultural capital, the country is a great one. It has been a sad one, a devastated one, a nation whose sons died by the millions in service of the Motherland. But it is still great, and Stalin was just one episode in its long and colourful life.

And so, we pray for the Rodina and the space and time it occupies. Sometimes, as a wise man noted, we pray for the wrong things. It is no wonder then that we get the 'wrong' answers to our prayers.

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.