The Ghosts of Mariupol

Last year is spent in Rostov-on-Don, former Cossack County, on the border between Russia and Donbass, Ukraine, where i was born and where i was taking care of my grandmother at sick bed who passed away in Autumn 2021.
Her last months were very traumatic, both because she was in horrible pains and developed gangrenes from lying in bed, but also because when on painkillers she was constantly tormented by sighs of war, as we thought recollections of WW2.
She came from a family of city administration workers of Kursk by last name Bulgakov/Sychev, and when germans were approaching Kursk the family had to retreat. They ended up in a village where nobody knew them when germans entered, and they put all citizens in line and inquired to give out “communists” so local peasants of course pointed at strangers from town. Her parents, not communists, were shot while children (her, 13yo and a year old sister and younger brother) were hiding in woods. They returned when everythng was calm to discover unburried corpses of their parents and had to manually burry them. Then they made a long journey through woods, several days no food so shelter, got miraculously saved from barn they slept in being bombed, by brother needing to pee outside, and finally got picked up by orphanage where they were sent to schooling and to manually dig trenches.
She did not die piecefully tormented by visions of explosions of bombs and human suffering around her, serenity and sainthood showing on her face only after the spirit left.
Now, a year later back in Norway, i suspect she was not reliving WW2 but was tapping into future, in Ukraine war noone, especially her, expected.
Her side of family was ethnically russian while my fathers side were ethnicaly half german from lithuania half ukranian from Pyatihatki, now as i googled up, suburb of Kharkiv famous for Victims of Totalitarianism Cemetry.
I went to same Uni and my parents worked in, Rostov University on border with Ukraine, where Solzhenitsyn had studied.
I was returning to Norway by train as Rostov airport was closed because of military operation.
Before that two months i could not sleep because of military jets flying low during the night but never day, and waking us up. There was no bombing or terror acts in Rostov, luckily, well managed under local Cossack militia having really strong connection with Donbass and Ukraine, both familywise and historcally.
On my way back in train i was listening to released that day Fear of Dawn album by Jack While while watching from train window endless raws of tanks, and other military vehicles on reserve tracks, soldiers busking in early spring sun, and sharing restaurant coach with returning from frontline still not showered properly and swearing a lot yong men.
Which is why my project Ghosts of Mariupol is more of act of breaking the FEAR.
I used two collectable Fear of Dawn lps which i manually loudly broke and melted, the sound of breaking record was alike a gun shot and woke up neighbours dog.
My Act One of breaking the record was performed on St.Mary Magdalene day when a new record by Jack White Entering Heaven Alive was released, which i was listening while painting a dead female ukranian soldier from archival photo, thinking of her as she called from beyond the curtain between the worlds.

Ghosts of Mariupol, Act I

I had been a member of Spiritist Church in Oslo for a while, it is silly, we were chanting Robby Williams Im loving Angels Instead while waving hands, and their channelings are inaccurate. I have had three personal occurences of being contacted by dead, two of which happened 2 weeks after they departed, and one was Mr.Aleister Crowley who i dedicated my short story also in this blog.
The second painting, of dead ukranian female olympic champion wearing medals, i painted on 27.07.22 while listening to Jack White live in Roschilde, Denmark.
Same time an hour or two after i finished it, a footage appeared on twitter of Jack White meeting with olympic champion in Japan, live, where she first makes him hold her three medals, then hangs them on him and he is basically impersonating the person i am painting wearing same three medals.

Ghosts of Mariupol, Act II

To note, me breaking Jack White collectables Fear of Dawn is by no means act of sympathetic black magic trying to harm him inspite of us keeping to opposed political platforms (Hey, he is on Barack Obamas playlist!). I avoid his song If I Die Tomorrow out of superstition and commented on his fb to chear him up that he was never going to die, as the next album implies.
It is an act of getting rid of FEAR, for him through act of sympathetic magic, for me, for soldiers on frontline.

Only The Dead Have Seen The End of War, Plato.

“You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.