by Jana Astanov
To celebrate the last Full Moon of this strange strange year, I decided to bring us all some hope and laugher by sharing a chapter from “The War of Svalbard”, ecological & experimental novel in some circles known as an Arctic eco-porn, where Jana J shape-shifts in her native intensity with unexpected apparitions on the backdrop of the Arctic landscape.
Indivia
From the pitch black dark of the Barings Sea are the silent cries of the dying polar bears. Jana J’s tears glisten in the dark like diamonds , efficient causes for themselves, perfectly rendered refutations of Aquinas’s claim that it’s not possible to go on to infinity. Her tears blocked any threatened vicious regress by placing nothingness as a contradictory object as the foundation of the first tear.
Unknown to Jana J Kali Kahl was making astral travels north, engaged in hybrid investigations into neuro-chemical warfare. Having led a research team at the Caltech zero labs she had gone to the roots of mystical experiences that gave her a sense of yearning for potent harm and destruction. Disturbances in the dream technology she had been perfecting were identified as coming from somewhere in the Barents sea and the precognitive site where death is the pilot – Svalbard. Kali Kahl couldn’t figure out what the cause was.
If you write about death in the North beware of going north. If you dream of white white white then avoid the ice floes and polar bears and the temptations of perfectly white underwear in the ice there. Between the nightmare zombie Sperm Whales swarming across the wild waters there was a kind of fix happening in Kali Kahl’s cranium evoking horrors of unnatural couplings and demon-mountings, an assemblage of anatomical fragments that amounted to no more nor less than the grimoires of a necro-scene sabbath.
‘This is impossible,’ she exclaimed looking at her charts that showed immense strangeness, tapes of pain and suffering wriggling numbers like spook rats depicted in European witch-hunts of the seventeenth century. The data revealed the world was under the influence of some very serious shit. Voices come in from extraterrestrial origins, great noises that resisted the simple good crossing of interpretation. She glances at the print on the wall of her lab room, a print of ‘Woman In A Fox Mask’ from the series ‘On Death and Horses and Other People’ by Marketa Luskacova and the self recognition is too hard to hide under her professional strut.
The bird mask clutched to her stomach indicates the high occult mummery in play here, a ritualized anarchic sketch of lynch morbidities. The lab is full of dead mice, insects, snakes, bird demons and the devil’s head goat cremation remnant. A butterfly dies in mid flight, it just shuts down without warning or cause. Something pure happened. Kali Kahl stands in dark flames and seems old, lame, arthritic, hairy, barebacked, incontinent, and for a moment the potency of the old woman seems in full flood, lurid and demonological as all the old histories show. The light shifts and she’s young again but only at a rare angle.
Cold eyes, below zero according to the tapes, and pallid nails like those of Lucan’s witchy Thessalian Erichtho, Kali Kahl is reaching back into the cursed history of old women. She’s building a seductress, Invidia, using new cancer viral technologies intending to put the beast into circulation once perfected. Invidia can cause storms, fires, natural disasters and raise storms at sea. She’s the cabbalistic Lilith whose hair entwines the mind-roots of men, Eve whose place of divine secrets lured the whole world into Tong Wars, Mexican sadism, technicolour flashes of Bloody Angels, Central park East, jeeps and the strange amalgam of nakedness, sex and execution that comes together as a single delirium in the battle of the Sea Gods of Andrea Mantegna.
To be continued….
Music by ASTRALOOP
About the author
Jana Astanov is a writer, an interdisciplinary artist, a poet and an independent curator living in upstate New York. Born in Poland she studied sociology, political science and anthropology in Poland, philosophy, and linguistics in France, and arts in the UK. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine: www.creatrixmag.com, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. She is the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox.
The War of Svalbard is Jana Astanov’s first novel, it is is being serialized and presented via zoom throughout the Winter, if you would like to join her as one of the characters contact CreatrixMag: CreatrixMagazine88 at gmail com
