Prometheus Slept Here; Kazbegi and Farewell

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Day the Last. It was the portion of the trip where final decisions have been made, and all that's required is to act them out. You also make peace with the things you can't or didn't do. Like that Kutaisi animal fountain.

Or... the half-hour train ride to the Georgian city of Gori, birthplace of Stalin. Russian history has dominated my reading over the last year or so, and the aftermath of Soviet occupation has dominated my travels for the last five years, so at some point it felt like seeing the Stalin Museum seemed like a kind of punctuation.

But he was, you know, without any doubt or discussion, one of history's greatest murderers, a genocidal maniac without parallel who did much to prove how thin the line is between civilization and slaughter. Famous "conquerors" from history, like Tamerlane who trashed this region back in the day, Attila the Hun, Cortez, etc. were at least honest. Like, they just rode in and killed everyone. There was no gaslighting. It was like, "We have better weapons and give no fucks, so you will be either dead or enslaved now, and it's our choice which one."

The WWII dudes used the tools of civilization to get their own people to kill one another. It was much more...psychological. Work will set you free. This group of your neighbors with slightly different qualities is the bad group keeping us down, let's work together to drive them out, this arbitrary substance is illegal and anyone who touches it is now a criminal, let's imprison them. These are the rules now and you've chosen them; I'm just enforcing your will.

I mean, they learned it all from the US, which pulled all that shit with the First Nations people and beyond. The WWII crowd just did a better job of institutionalizing it. They got better at scaling. In any case, there's a Stalin museum in Gori, and it's about his schoolbooks and his desk and his clothes and not about his crimes, which is a testament to how having a good painter on the payroll can make a ton of people think you're a funny grandpa and not a psychopath.

They've tried to close it a few times, but these fierce old ladies have kept it open. They're like the Brides of Dracula haunting his mansion. And at some point it felt like seeing it would be a good lesson in how history forgets or can be twisted. But... I think most of life provides that lesson.

So, I chose to go instead to Kazbegi, a mountain town where Prometheus is chained up!

This was the second of the Big Greek Myths set here. Medea and Prometheus. It's kind of like hunting down Game of Thrones filming locations but many centuries older.

This one goes like this: That old Prom King made man out of clay, and the other gods thought man was annoying, so landlord Zeus cut the power. But Prometheus sneaked around the back and brought fire back. So, he made man and gave him fire. Cool story, Pro!

But the gods were haters, so they chained him up and made an eagle eat his liver every night. The liver grows back, and the eagle stays hungry. Prometheus suffered for our sins!

In any case, I always remember the "brought fire to man" part and forget the "made man," part, but those things are why Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus" (he made a man - out of parts) and Immanuel Kant called Ben Franklin the "Prometheus of recent times," (he gave us fire - in the form of electricity)

So, you know, though he isn't real, it's cool to see the mountain everyone has decided he isn't chained up in. It's also in the Ossetia region, which was one of the flashpoints in the war Russia waged on Georgia in 2008, so it blended in with my reading.

Sara, sensibly, decided to use the last day to relax and enjoy her coffee. To shop a little and to do some stretches to prepare for the very long series of flights we had in the morning. So it was just me on this one. Played Two-Stick Magician with Max Called Mocks, pocketed some hard boiled eggs, and headed out on that very familiar walk.

There was some stress. I had lost the ticket, since I had been using it as a bookmark and kept pulling the book in and out of my back pocket, but when I got to the bus place, the bus lady was like, "Kazbegi!" She remembered me and I never even had to bring it up.

Stopped by the Dunkin' Donuts, since they had iced coffee without iced cream in it (a serious hazard here in The Caucasus), and we were off. Pretty crowded bus and a loud guide of the "this corner has this much rainfall," variety, but I was able to tune him out and finish Bread and Ashes. Really loved it. Dumped it in a box at a rest stop and switched to A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov. Fucking hilarious and full of pithy quotes; I loved that one too. The good reading on this trip was all at the end.

At this point, I was as hard boiled as the lunch in my pocket. I wasn't interested in making any new friends or waiting for the English translation of the annual grain yield from whichever field we were passing. It was all about reading and seeing that mountain, son. Quick photo op at a very clear little lake but not at a gorgeous, decrepit Soviet bus stop. I was dying, trying to figure out a way to get the tour to stop so we could go back. A charging horse made of half-fallen tiles. Real tears. It will live on in my heart. My heart's bus will stop there.

Trudging on up switchbacks and up into rough patches, we made our slow way there. The hours melted away into the pages of Lermontov's randy, racy crowd of soldiers. Eventually, we got to a low little valley town where it became necessary to transfer to a hardy mini-van. The town was full of them with a gulag-guard-type dude running the show. He hollered at all the drivers and collected all the money. I've seen his type all over Europe, the Bullying Expediter.

A few Americans wouldn't take the van they were assigned because a woman with them insisted on having the front seat. She wanted that window view. So, there was a lot of reshuffling and waiting while she got what she desired. Why was she accommodated, catered to? Were they afraid she would leave a bad Yelp review?

Most of the cars were a hardy Mitsubishi model called a Delica. While I waited for Veruca Salt to get her window seat, I was amused to see a line of three of them next to a non-Mitsubishi with a rude bumper sticker. When viewed in a row, it looked like "Delica, Delica, Delica, Fuck Your Delica." Some local salt.

Insanely bumpy ride over some truly wild terrain, though still smoother than the highways of Northern Azerbaijan. Mudrunning and rockcrushing, spinning out and swerving over. Not a ride for anyone with osteoporosis. Made it to the little church that affords the best view of that spectacular mountain with its shy, foggy peak.

I found it very peaceful up there and felt not unlike Julie Andrews. I appreciated the views and the air and hunted a little dog around while he begged for scraps from a Scando couple who wanted to adopt him. The small church building had a stout charm. A fussy priest in one of those square Orthodox hats flapped around in seeming disapproval that the souls he was supposed to be saving were actually there and not abstract.

It was a nice group of people at their leisure, posing and sunning, making the most of their moment in the mountain's shadow. Somewhere, between sessions of being fed upon, Prometheus smiled.

On the un-Delica-te ride back, a couple of Belgians revealed to me they'd been stalking the same dog I had followed. We exchanged pictures. It was nice. Then a long lunch back in valleytown through which I ate my eggs and read. Then a quick stop over to something called The Russian Georgian Friendship Monument. A pretty cool picnic spot with a large, curving mosaic with colorful scenes from Caucasian and Russian history. It was built in the '80s for some reason.

Very fun spot with para-gliders rising suddenly up from unexpected corners on unexpected breezes. A woman on the bus got the Veruca virus and asked if we could wait for her to go para-gliding. For some reason, the driver said yes, and the entire bus had to wait 90 minutes so one person could take this selfish ride. I'm over it now, but my blood turned to a kind of venom at the time.

Would they have pulled over for three minutes for me to photograph the bus stop from earlier? I doubted it, but I didn't ask. In any case, hating the driver for saying yes kept me warm through the mountain passes and propelled me to the completion of the Lermontov novel. So... I gave them a positive Yelp review after all.

And then... view achieved. mountain climbed, I was back in Tbilisi to meet back up with Sara. She had had a marvelous time, luxuriating in a city she now knew fairly well. Catching khachapuri and slow-sipping her coffee. She bought a fabulous dress that made her look like two million lari and 1.75 manat at current exchange rates.

I went ahead and bought that little painting of the stacked-up town. The artist and I gave one another deep and genuine smiles of true appreciation for one another. Thank you for buying this, thank you for making it. No, thank you. No, thank you. Stocked up on magnets and it was home to Mari for the last time.

I went berserk on some salami and cheese leftover from... somewhere, took a final shower in Mari's closet, and packed up for the epic three-flight journey in our future. This was it. It was all over but the customs.

Nice little sleep and we made our dark escape. Mari and Max made one last little meddle. He barked while we were sneaking out, and she insisted on arranging the cab ride to the airport for us. We had just mastered the taxi app!, but she was forceful, and soon a men's underwear model arrived to take us away. Sara decided the driver was a young man Mari had trained in the arts of love as a teenager and that he's repaid her over the years by driving her boarders to the airport. Perhaps it was true.

Then we were in the Middle Realms. Half alive with half citizenship. Everywhere and nowhere in those strange zones airports represent. It was like, in a way, the quasi-Europe, quasi-Asia designation the Caucasus represent. We were dragged heavily through the skies, watched awful comedies, ate bread with seeds, and somehow wound up back home. Forever changed.

It was a very beautiful trip to an amazing part of the world, full of history and full of future. Much will happen here in the coming years, and when it does, we will have what I prize most in the world... a frame of reference.

Thank you for following along, reader. Should your own travels take you to this fertile place of wine and mountains and bread and ashes and oil and sturgeon, I wish you the same peace and knowledge I found.

And down in Tbilisi, just look up a cat named Joe.