Girls Against God Read online

  In Japan it’s different. For the first time I’m able to let go of the hatred, and the first thing I do is seek out religion. I remember several other moments from the trip now. I recall a Bible shop in Tokyo that doesn’t scare me; I even walk in. It looks just like a regular bookshop, except the paper quality, the binding, the forms of the books seem more sacred than their content. I remember, too, how among the unfamiliar temples, gods, spirits and rituals, I feel disconnected from myself as spiritual content, as sin and soul. I can be material, elegantly formed bones, intricately packed intestines, colourful kidneys and ovaries under smooth skin cells. I exist as the parts and the whole of the beautifully wrapped food in the bento boxes. I don’t need to hate all this religion. I reclaim the act of blessing without thinking about it, without knowing it.

  In the side panel of my film document, next to the notes on black metal, I note this: ‘Writing summons the unfamiliar places.’ In this place, the Kyoto I didn’t know I had experienced until now, the blessing and the curse form a richer whole, an act that doesn’t need to be religious. It can be magical instead: simpler, more open, taking a lower aim. I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through a connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you.

  Maybe writing this film has created a place to meet. Do you also recognise the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?

  Let’s see … We’re in a room, I think, a nondescript room. At this point it could be any room. It’s still without depth, width, length or any sense of time … It might have other dimensions, ones we don’t yet know about, dimensions that don’t have names. Perhaps we’re in a room with a closed centre. There, at its core, it reserves space for something else. Everything else. Maybe a room without us has room for the connections between us.

  From a distance we hear voices belonging to a class of teenage girls. The murmur comes from a cold classroom at the end of the hall. We glide between the girls into the classroom, invisible, like a video camera, while they recite their names one by one. They seem to have short and simple names, but we can’t hear them, only an indistinct hum. It sounds as if we’re outside the room, or as if we’ve stopped our ears with cotton and can only hear the drone from our own heads. We have to read their lips to understand what they’re saying. A girl fills the frame and introduces herself in two syllables. We can only see her lips. Maybe her name is Venke. As she says her name, icy mist escapes the corners of her mouth. Threads and bubbles of spit knot her lips together as she opens and closes them around two syllables. A weak shimmer that resembles a muted laptop gleam is coming from deep down in the girl’s throat. The light escapes her mouth, filtered by her tongue and the different constellations of her teeth.

  There are no windows, no bookshelves, no books, no coat racks or chalkboards around the girls. Instead, images are projected onto the spotless white concrete walls as if they were a canvas. Images of windows are projected onto the walls, with trees swaying in the wind, and images of bookshelves full of books on maths, geography, history, chemistry, Norwegian and Christianity. If it weren’t for the concrete’s rough surface, it might look almost real. Their school uniforms look almost real, too. They are wearing black, slightly stiff-looking jackets with shoulder pads, and matching pleated skirts, but with yellow neon stripes on their sleeves and trainers. They look like a futurist marching band.

  A teacher takes attendance from behind a desk at the far end of the room. She is wearing a fitted black suit with stripes that gradually shade from red to purple to blue. She yawns a little. Each time a girl says her name, this teacher taps a screen with her right index finger. As she takes their names she also sticks each finger of her left hand into a small machine that resembles an automatic pencil sharpener. The machine sands her nails neatly and paints them a gorgeous bright pink.

  We continue to watch the girls’ lips move. The murmur of voices and the hum from the air conditioning make it impossible to discern individual words, but the conversation seems academic. Some lips are more energetic, they expel longer words from their mouths, working harder and producing more saliva. Other lips are softer and more questioning. Eyeshadow glitter falls on a shoulder, someone’s chest, a desk; the glitter intermingles with the glare from the overhead lights.

  There’s a girl seated at the back of the classroom who’s not quite paying attention. Everything she’s wearing that isn’t part of her uniform – her socks, undershirt, pants, bra – is black. She looks up from her writing. At first glance she seems to be writing in a notebook, but it’s soon revealed to be a tablet. A small projector shaped like a gaping goat’s head is attached to it. Light spills from the goat’s mouth as if from a fountain and projects a 3D drawing of lines, text, and images onto the surface of the tablet.

  The girl uses a pen to write in her book, then pushes the pen against the projection: the text disappears. She continues to think.

  The girl is me, obviously. She represents my wet dream of writing myself into a story, and that includes you too, reading this. Perhaps she’s me in 2002, hating God at university, spending hours attempting to make Microsoft Word occult by inverting the colours so I can write in white on a black document. I’m seething. How is this so hard? Why do we have to chisel black ink into an empty canvas? Why does white mean innocence, beginnings; why is it the colour of indexes, emptiness and poetry? Why do I have to bang my forehead against white walls and stare glassy-eyed at white forever? The only thing I want is to be able to brainstorm with colours reversed, to write with white hope on black hatred. I want to be able to begin with hate.

  We return to the room. The girl in the classroom isn’t a character; she’s made herself invisible to the others. She’s the camera in this film, a camera that also has her own feelings and thoughts. She introduces herself with her mouth, as Terese, Terese after Theresa Russell, the actor who plays Almost-Marilyn in Insignificance. Terese records negative film, with colours inverted: black is white, white is black. She’s not a subject, she’s the eye, a thing, an object, that sees, feels, zooms, inverts. She could be you. She’s a thing that hates.

  Terese has always made herself invisible in this way. Pretended that she’s a camera. She hasn’t seen black metal videos or hung out with corpse-paint boys, but she’s spent half her childhood squinting at trees and the sun, making treetops and sky swirl and darken. She spent her youth on the internet, sent information bundles of text and image back and forth over mIRC. She felt herself disappear a little more each time, as if her body no longer had a visible surface. She identified with Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club, the black-clad nerd who shakes her hair over her desk to make dandruff drizzle like snow. I always thought of that scene as an adolescent witch ritual, where the witch reconstructs herself and becomes an impenetrable snow globe, surrounded by thick glass walls.

  The glass is a camera lens. Terese lifts one hand and curls her thumb and index finger to make an objective lens. She rests her finger- lens on her right eye and lets the camera glide around the room. The lens fixates on the girl whose name might be Venke and zooms in on her upper body.

  As this takes place, I write a list in my film document’s side panel. I need lists there, lists of what my intentions are with this classroom. The list opens with the phrase science fiction. By that I don’t mean that it’s set in the future or that it’s dealing with dystopian technology. Science fiction here means an impossible place, like an alternate reality. The images look real. I imagine girls together, in a class, or in a cluster. I imagine girls hating in unison. White to black. Mystical communication, community. Ecstatic intimacy, intimate close-ups. Intimacy through the body’s waste an
d secretions. A self-constructed network between bodies.

  (like the internet before the internet)

  ((like the internet during the internet))

  (((or underground internet)))

  ((((deep web))))

  (((((deep tissue)))))

  ((((((deep web and deep tissue))))))

  (((((((ecstatic deep-webian intimacy)))))))

  ((((((((primitive language))))))))

  ((((((((((I want to understand this language)))))))))

  (((((((((((insist that this language signifies)))))))))))

  (((((((((((until it signifies)))))))))))

  ((((((((((((for you too))))))))))))

  This is the kind of room I want to show you. A world surrounded and shaped, no, reshaped, by subcultural layers. Maybe we could turn back time and create a black metal movement where only girls hate?

  The girls in the classroom look up, look at each other, smile.

  An episode:

  Groups of girls from different classes and schools are at a railway station waiting for the next train. They chat enthusiastically, send texts and upload photos online, look at each other, smooth their hair.

  The tracks start to hum, as they do when a train is approaching.

  Abruptly, a girl walks to the edge of the platform. She looks down at the tracks but continues to chat to the friends behind her.

  Her friends join her. Then several more groups do the same. Everyone smiles, giggles, and whispers, as they grip each other’s hands and stare at the tracks. The remaining girls don’t notice the row of people forming along the edge while they wait.

  The train approaches the station.

  The girls on the edge all count down from three and jump off the platform.

  A series of thuds is heard as the train hits each body thrown in its way. The blood splatters from the track and sprays the platform, walls and ceiling and the other girls’ clothes, hair and faces. It gushes so violently, it fills the mouths, eyes and noses of everyone still on the platform. The whole image is dyed red, then black.

  THE END

  The Band

  What happens to hate? Does hate age? Can it be cured? Can you fling it off a subway platform?

  In 2005, just a month after my Japan trip, I’m sitting in a university library in New England, on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe I’ve been cleansed, demolished, blown up, either during the Kyoto trip or in my new existence as an exchange student, and now I feel I can delete, turn off, restart and restore myself. I’ve begun the master’s course and I’ve decided that this, finally, is far enough from the Norwegian South. Now I can be a whole new person, one who isn’t pitiful and primitive, one who doesn’t hate. I can be a person who creates herself, a less primitive and more open being, done cursing church assembly halls and hexing the Christian students, done painting the film screen in the lecture hall black.

  I’m completely consumed by this novelty that’s me. I feel easy and unreal in the reading room, as though I’ve been digitised. I feel indistinguishable from the bookshelves I stand by, from the students I get to know or sit next to, the white laptop I’ve got. No one but me can observe these changes; I’m the only constant in my own life. No one but me knows that just a couple of years ago I was black-clad and dark. Now I’m so malleable, I can chew myself like gum. I can reach right into my body and change its shape, comb myself into another physical existence, as if I were made of the whipped cream on my own birthday cake. I’m white and soft now, and I am God, but who cares, I don’t care about am, about being, I only care about becoming, about distance, about the keyboard shortcuts, about the drive away from something. I scroll down and through myself, finding less and less of the South the further and further down, or away, I get from there. It’s not here. In the new me, I can put it away, finally.

  I’m someone else now, a stranger. Lots of people think I’m Swedish or Danish. I don’t correct them. I only stretch as far away as possible from the Southern hatred, as far away from the original version of myself as I can take myself. I work on white paper that I no longer try to paint. I worship canonised films now, films that I previously would have been sceptical of, and I read novels that I wouldn’t have touched in college. I don’t protest, only smile, while the professor tells me, since I’m Norwegian, that Hamsun, pronounced Ham Sun, ham and sun, is one of the greatest writers in history. I’m far enough from where I came from not to care, and mature enough. I accept and respect the professor’s perspective; maybe Hamsun could be Ham Sun to me too. I’m efficient, productive and positive; it’s as if I shook my head and my hair shed its black pigment.

  In the years that follow, after I’m done with the degree and with New England and I’m back in Oslo, this process continues, flowing from my graduate education into the art I create. My expression slides into the traditional, with a soft appearance and a blurred and beige presence, as if from unknown origins. I work alone – freelance, independently – on my own expression. The only thing I don’t like seeing written about me is that I’m from the South. It feels like a factual error, after five, then ten and, even later, fifteen years of emigration. Calling me a Southern Norwegian reintroduces this set of shadows, a collective and dirty presence that I’ve rinsed from myself. Did I not scrub it from my CV? Is it still there? A few years after earning my masters I go back to the U.S., and at one point in New York, I get a new laptop with an American keyboard, to get rid of æ, ø, and å. When I turn it on for the first time, at a café in Chinatown, I can feel my body tingling, as if I’ve woken up from a plastic surgery that has removed my old features (æ, ø, å) and made my face unrecognisable and impenetrable. Or is it the opposite? Is it the black pigments I feel tingling, and the hatred that has returned?

  At first the absence of those keys on the machine feels reassuring, but then it starts to bother me. Have I used my inadequate keyboard to create my own version of the silent h (silent æ, ø, å)? I add keyboard shortcuts to find the letters again. By pressing several buttons at once I can bring up nonexistent signs, as if I’ve concocted a witch’s brew that summons spirits from the underworld. A lonely Å remains, flickering on my screen in a new document that’s never saved, a red line wriggling underneath it, since the writing program doesn’t have a Norwegian spell check. Å, wrong.

  Let’s see … I’m sitting here with the pitiful Å, the last letter of the alphabet that no one in the café can read, the invisible letter outside the reach of the keyboard, the letter that fell off the edge of civilisation, the muffled sound, the genetic speech impediment. The keyboard combination, the ingredients of it, summon more than just the letter; they evoke the black from the subconscious, the underground and the underworld. We sit here, the Å and I, at the café in Chinatown, as time speeds up around us, new customers come and go and chug from big American coffee cups filled with the countless choices of coffee that American cafés have to offer. It gets dark and light and dark and light; the café closes and opens and closes and opens. Only the laptop screen is lit with its progressively bigger, blinking Å, coming closer and closer, as if it were falling from the sky and ushering in the apocalypse. The three heralds of the apocalypse: Æ, Ø, Å.

  When I get up from my chair and leave the café, I’m in the present, and the premises have moved. The computer is no longer new, and the café is no longer in Chinatown, but in Grønland in Oslo, where the customers drink from small espresso cups and glasses. The laptop screen has gone black, the Å and I have fused completely. I, who spent years creating myself and my artistic identity, I, who attempted to rub out where I came from by emigrating from my own history, have brewed myself together again from the ruins of the keyboard shortcuts.

  Now I’m tired, tired of representing myself. I’m so tired of starting every sentence with ‘I …’ Actually, I’m tired of representing anything at all, alone, and of feeling that I’m competing on my own against everyone else. It’s as if all the travelling and all the art meant nothing. Despite everything I’ve brought with me from t
he South this idea that I’m a sinner, and even though I don’t think about God or Christians anymore, I’ve gone further in that idea than any of them. Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity. I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy. The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty. I walk toward the Munch museum, toward the exhibition opening I’ve been invited to, while I think about how I want to swap some of these negatives in myself for something else, something shared. I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band.

  The word BAND is quite similar to the word BOND. Have you thought about that? A band is a bond between people. A band can emerge unexpectedly, when you talk or suddenly say the same things, or mention the same references. You harmonise in conversation, create rhythm. That’s the beginning. We can dive into that beat; the beat is more alive than we are. Our hearts might stop beating in the end, but the pulse of that heartbeat will continue to symbolise time, breath, life, even after we’re gone. It’s that simple. All we can do to feel alive is to dive into the beat, take part in it. Some might call it dancing, but the beat doesn’t necessarily build up to something regular; it’s changeable, and we let go and follow it, it’s there, a shadow cast both by ourselves and by eternity, continuing to spread.

  In this bond (in Norwegian the word includes the impossible letter Å, which I can now only write with an illogical character combination on my American keyboard), I can be part of something, I can be less myself and feel less trapped and dying and tucked away in my own body. My body can expand, search for others, be a part of them, become something else together, something that can live on after all the I’s are dead. When I die, I want to be part of a bond, get rolled into the bond, as though dying were stage-diving off the ledge and sensing someone there to catch you.