Zura Jishkariani

I’ve been asked to translate Joe Sacco’s comic about the Russo-Chechen war and Chechen women into Georgian, and I accepted - not just because the visual form interests me, but mostly because I’ve seen with my own eyes the weight women bear when their men are defeated in war.

At the time I was already in my final year but I had to survive & I hadn't time for uni. For the next 2 decades, it broke my heart. Last year, I managed to re-enroll as a student, & finishing my bachelor's at the end of this year will be a victory over the past and death.🕺🌴🌠

My neighbor - an elderly woman (our windows face each other) - flies to Britain in the winter and returns at the beginning of summer.(A bird) and what she does then? she invites various people over to discuss absolutely ANYTHING, so I end up collecting the most amazing random facts.

Today in the midterm exam for philosophy, I got these topics: the crisis of science & the purpose of philosophy, the unconscious, & questions of language. I think I wrote at an average. The security guard again asked me to show my student ID to make sure I wasn’t an intruder. 😄

Half of my soul is made of the Black Sea, which the ancient Greeks used to call the 'wine-dark sea' (οἶνοψ πόντος, oinops pontos).

Today I passed my sociology of culture exam, now I'm preparing for the introduction to philosophy exam tomorrow while listening to gangsta rap. 🎶🔫

Crazy thing about this genre of Hip Hop is that what happens in their lyrics and in their lives was mostly described 100 years ago by Chicago School of Sociology in books like Park & Burgess - The City (1925), Thrasher - The Gang (1927), Louis Wirth – The Ghetto (1928)...

this is one of many reasons why they don't like Russian tourists here (and elswhere)
On this 3,000year-old Sun temple it is written in Russian: "Russian culture" and the link to telegram channel
This is like if English tourist writes on ancient Indian temple: British culture, check my twitter

The Eternal Return of the Mutual The mutual, in Llansol’s thought, is not a contract. It is not symmetrical. It does not require balance. It is what passes between presences, often unbidden, often without full understanding. A wor…

The Eternal Return of the Mutual:

timesflowstemmed.com/2025/05/01/t...

This recurrence of relational presences resonates with Orthodox mysticism I'm studying right now. Christos Yannaras frames personhood as "not the theatre of the self but a field of presences," inviting us into apophatic participation. Now if we repeat this participation in eternity..

Link below

Listening to Chicago drill as if it's 2014 🎶☠️

"he is defined by things, and is himself a thing, being a distinctly separate individual."
- Bataille, Theory of Religion

On Ana’s birthday, we visited უფლისციხე - 3,000year-old sacred city carved into rock, dedicated to the Sun, with ancient observatories and additions from different centuries. For the first time, I came to the place where my friend’s ashes were scattered.Temporality of stone, temporality of eternity.

Bataille talks a lot about violence as an act that connects us to continuity. It reminded me of post-Soviet childhood, so full of violence that I remember those days in mythical temporality. We used prison lang, entirely rooted in violence, to live. My essay on that:
picklebar.berlin/zura-jishkar...

Just finished re-reading Bataille’s Theory of Religion, and I can’t shake the thought that the intimate precision he points to Continuity with - gives the impression of writer who had a profound psychedelic experience and then went on to translating it throught poetry and French school of sociology.

I discovered that at certain moments, the categorical refusal to forget - and even the activation-remembering - of the experience of bottom, abyss, humiliation, and pain is what grows the spine of my new self, my soul, and even the sentences begin to write themselves differently.

"And then, essays and springs disappear from within us all. An action-driven cry and the wing-sowing. Do not reveal the purpose of the mountains."

Every day in my new life, I start with a quote: "Do it now. The conditions are always impossible." So yesterday I randomly fulfilled one of my old dreams by remixing a song by Viktor Tsoi from KINO with my own lyrics. It's a pity you can't understand the words. <3

That's right, I hope it will never be powerfull enough in this way to unmute itself and say Hello )))

Drop your ego and write freely. Time is an illusion! 🤭

I see it and know through the experience but numbers say too that absolute majority of addicts, prisoners and people with mental problems in Georgia is my generation - born late 80ies and raised in 'Dark 90ies'(as they call it) who now is old enough to rule the country and make lasting decisions...

Suffocation in Tbilisi: northern neighbors are at war,southern neighbors are at war, internal neighbors are hostile, deep inside, sharp political confrontation, deceived workers & population in stress.
Why did I think that in a region where there has never been peace, I would saw it in my lifetime?

To quit using is just a first step and I'm not even fully happy for those who quits today, knowing what will they face: from rebuilding the life in unfamiliar world to endless struggles. That's why I call quitting impossible, and when you practice impossible, that is a miracle.

Every day, a truck comes down this little street, announcing from its speakers: "We buy scrap metal!" It’s like hearing a dinosaur’s voice. In childhood when the state wasn’t functioning, the scrap yard was. We dismantled entire Soviet factories and handed them in for a bit of money.

'Are there moments of eternity that can be fixed like notes of music are set down and fall into place via numbers? - and are these notes separate?'
- Artaud, Heliogabalus: Or, The Crowned Anarchist
☆

the ontology of the places we were raised is that nothing adds up and there are no harmonic circles or concepts binding, it's just things on things in a chaotic order that invite you to object-oriented, 'flat ontology' thought <3

This is like 150 pages of urban anthropology describing post-Soviet bitcoin-sunset architecture in Havlabar: ancient Armenian district, imaginative views of caged windows below the first floor and outdated paybox to buy Alpha-PVP connected to starlink, I can go so far with this..

On this Easter, enjoy this beautiful Georgian Orthodox chant:
'Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.'

💘💘🙏

I've got the All-Seeing Eye of God (უფლის ყოვლისმხედველი თვალი)—an Orthodox icon that reveals the alien inhumanity of holy darkness.