By Mikheil Kurdiani
The moments preceding our speech belong to the past, while what occurs after we speak belongs to the future, including the process of speaking itself, where each word immediately becomes part of the past tense once it is spoken. In my view, a nation also operates as a dual-member system—a combination of the living and the deceased. A nation without the deceased is not yet a nation, and a nation without the living is no longer a nation. A nation remains eternal because as long as its language exists, the world and time exist for that nation. With the disappearance of the language, the world built by that language also vanishes, and naturally, time disappears as well. Time is one of the elements of the world, possibly the most significant, yet still only one of them. If time is obliterated, eternity is also destroyed, as eternity is the sum of past and future time.
Therefore, the existence of a nation is eternal. As long as a nation (a collective of monolingual beings) exists, there is time and eternity. When the nation (language) ceases to exist, eternity also ceases to exist (for instance, the Sumerian language vanished, and the world constructed by it disappeared along with its time and eternity). We live in a world built by our language, distinct from that of the Sumerians in terms of time and eternity. If a nation is eternal, then there must be individuals who traverse eternity freely or who reside in eternity simultaneously, or in whom eternity flows like blood in the heart (or a river under a bridge)—diachronic people.
In Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity, eternity is depicted as a series of undivided floors in space, a constructible set of centuries (synchronic slots). Each century contains its own sectors corresponding to smaller units of time, and with a special capsule, one can travel to any point in eternity (diachronic slots). However, not everyone can use the capsule; only the chosen ones, the inheritors of eternity, can do so.
Apart from the fact that Asimov’s characters navigate through time and eternity independently, the author may not have realized how closely he aligned with the Georgian understanding of eternity (diachrony). According to this understanding, eternity is a collection of temporal (synchronous) layers (sections), where each synchronous section of the past continues its already invisible existence in an unchanging cycle of events, eternally repeating and changing, as part of the same eternity passes through us—diachronic people.
Several years ago, a Circassian princess defended her PhD thesis at the Institute of Linguistics. Her supervisor, a professor from Tver, brought two graduate students to Tbilisi, both from the Arctic Ocean coast. I was assigned to guide them. According to tradition, I first took the guests to the Jvari Monastery and informed them of its construction date. One of the graduate students, with genuine surprise, asked, “How do you know this? You weren’t born then.”
To this inquisitive individual, who grew up in a yurt and emerged from reindeer skins, for whom the authority of oral speech (created in her native language and in her own experience) was much higher than the authority of written sources. What could I say? My knowledge about the paleographic features of the monastery’s inscriptions and its bas-reliefs, or the stylistic features of early medieval Georgian Christian architecture, seemed meaningless and irrelevant.
The old professor broke the awkward silence. He explained confidently, “Her father told her, he learned from his father… and then he came to me. You probably have not encountered the memory problem of one generation.”
How many generations of memory do we carry within us?
In 1980, the holy elder of Gudani, Gadua Chincharauli, lamented to Professor Zurab Kiknadze, “I witnessed four kings: Tamar, Irakli, Nikoloz, and the Bolsheviks, but I don’t remember such a difficult time as now.”
In Givi Gegechkor’s poem Sunny Day (1962), there is a line: “I am strong, I was born four or five thousand years ago.” This line, like no other, precisely points to the reasons for our strength. The infancy of our children is illusory; their naive eyes reflect the millennia-old experience of their ancestors.
As a comparativist, I would “correct” “four or five thousand years” to seven or eight thousand years. My eyes would fill with tears of happiness, seeing this at least seven or eight-thousand-year-old baby—smiled upon by fate to be born and set foot on the land where their ancestors lived and where their ancestors lie. This child must build a language on the foundation of their ancestors’ language, whose age they had the honor of being born into.
Historical-comparative study of the languages of the Karts, Zans, and Svans has established that Georgians did not come from nowhere. The comparativist method restores them to their present heritage—the flora, fauna, and geographical environment we live in today, not some other area.
Today’s Georgian child, who knows the literary language, would more easily convey their ideas to a Georgian of the 6th millennium BCE than a modern Italian to Virgil or a modern Greek to Homer. Their dreams will also be hereditary, as another Georgian poet named his book.
In 1978, when I had just started lecturing at the Tbilisi Institute of Foreign Languages, my students, returning from summer vacations, wore necklaces of shells on their sun-baked chests (I don’t remember any boys in that course). These necklaces were similar to those found in the Dzevrula River valley, in the Sagvarjile cave, dating back to 18,000 years before our era. Their immediate ancestor, from whom they inherited their genes, blood, hair, and eye color (and the devils that jump into those eyes), “left” these necklaces. Most importantly, they inherited the desire and even the simplest means (available to all wild inhabitants of all southern seas at all times) of attracting boys of their age. I knew for certain that this 20,000-year-old jewel would exert its magical power again, for the boy would also be a direct descendant of the one who had been gazed upon by the wild maiden with the necklace of shells 20,000 years ago. This love is inevitable because both the girl and the boy were born twenty thousand years old.
Since we are discussing jewelry, I would also like to mention the pendant cross of King Tamar, ingenious in its simplicity. A gold frame separated by a thin partition, four emeralds as cross pillars, and five rubies in the middle and ends of the cross. Pearls adorn the corners of the cross and the stalk. This cross was last seen by mortal eyes in 1213. It was reminded of the deceased Tamar and was kept in the Gelati Monastery, buried in Luskuma, until the 19th century, when Georgia and its church were struck by a calamity, compared to which all other plagues seemed insignificant.
Until the 19th century, this cross was reliably protected. So, who revealed its secret? Pendant crosses made by Tbilisi goldsmiths in the 18th century, the main jewelry of many Tbilisi aristocrats, resemble King Tamar’s cross. Okriba jet beads have been made with unchanged technology and style from the 7th century AD to the present day, which can be explained by a continuous tradition. But if you separate the Tbilisi crosses from those preserved in Gelati by centuries and their connecting links are not found today, how should this similarity be explained, if not by blood and taste, by which technology of Tamar’s pendant was continuously handed down from the master of the cross to the Tbilisi goldsmiths, and not only to them but also to the hereditary taste of those Georgian aristocratic beauties—at least such crosses adorned the chests that could not be touched.
For Svans, there is a holiday called Lifanal, which begins on January 18 and lasts for a week. This is a family holiday in which the living and the deceased of the family (clan) participate together. The living visit the graves of their ancestors and invite everyone whose name they remember or, regrettably, have forgotten. My family’s ancestral names have been remembered continuously since the thirteenth century. Returning souls are met with a specially laid-out table, and during their stay, the whole family, young and old, serves them, invisible to the eyes of strangers, competing with each other in hospitality and pleasure. When the time of separation comes again, sadness settles. The living will “see off” the dead and ask for forgiveness if they did not pay enough respect. After a few days, the sadness of parting is replaced by the hope of a future meeting, and both the dead and the living will wait for next January—the time of the next reunion.
I know that someday I will transition from being a host at Lifanal to becoming a “guest” and will wait with my parents and other ancestors for January 18, so that we, returning to our native home, will be reunited for the appointed time—the time of the living and the dead. The living and the dead—for the uninitiated, otherwise, in fact, the inhabitants of different synchronic slots of eternity—one family, one clan, one tribe, one nation—diachronic people.