Girls Against God Read online

  Language is transgressive, in both magic and religion. But in my world, when I say fucking hell in 1998, magic is the more appropriate word. The phrase is like a microscopic portal in a network between two worlds, and when I raise my voice I connect myself and the whole classroom to it. When I get told off and am given a written warning, the South reclaims ownership over language, the uncontrolled portal.

  But that moment I say fucking hell, it isn’t just the words but also the voice that Southern piety fears. The voice is uncontrollable. You can’t even close your ears. Even though it’s the word, hell, the name, that’s supposed to conjure the devil into the material world, it’s really the voice that calls and lures him. It’s the voice that materialises and reproduces. It’s the voice that acts, that shapes, that performs and expresses. It’s the voice that makes the language specific, so that a word is no longer just a word, but an exact moment. Like music, Southern witchcraft is more powerful than both God and Jesus combined.

  So, I was too young to be part of black metal, and Venke and Terese weren’t in on it, either. Maybe you missed it, too. But now we’re a band, and the band has to play gigs. This gig has already started; we’re on our way; this time what’s oozing down and out onto the streets is us, through the parks and the squares. The audience has no idea we’re performing, but you’ll all hear it if you plug your ears and listen to your brain buzzing away. It’s still not very distinct, but it’s as though the brain sound has an additional echo. A slow feed is building in there, Scream backward, corpse paint in your ear.

  We glide through town alongside the dragging drone of the trams, creaking and flowing onward like slow Viking ships, disappearing down Oslo’s slippery throat. No one can see us: we’ve smeared hands and face with black henbane, rosemary and boiled plums, and now we blend into the shadows with the spirits and the 4G network.

  Dusk falls while the tram slinks towards central Oslo. In the carriage, small patches begin to darken on empty seats, like grey dew; the stains grow steadily darker, as if daylight disappears faster there than the other spots, as if the streetlights don’t work on them. It’s us. The other, ordinary people don’t see us; they just know that the seats we’re sitting on are taken. We’re the only ones who are able to make each other out, gradually, each other’s shadows.

  Two shadows recognise each other and high five. Random passers-by give a start; they hear the sound but don’t see the hands.

  As we get off the tram the trash-stench is under our noses, and under our feet, like glassy ideological ice. Inside the gate to the little townhouse flat where we’re headed, the roots hiss under the lawn. We hear them, and we hear a faint rumble from the sound system inside the club: the sound of black. The windows are boarded up and painted shut, and the music emerges from deep in the middle of the building, frequencies oozing from every crack, a blurred unyielding mass, as if dough were rising in there.

  Inside, the gig has already started; just like outside, it has always been under way. I hum along to the frequencies leaking out of the building into the backyard as we draw closer to the venue, through door after door, down hallways and into rooms. My voice changes as the sound gets louder and fills my ears more and more, changes to balance mouth and ears, impression and expression. After so much childhood biblical sick, my mouth is empty and dry, so much more room for and?

  Now we’re in the room where the gig is happening; some are on stage and some down on the floor. Everyone is dancing around slowly. We join, become part of the mass, on the floor at first and then the floor is elevated: we’re on the stage. The music is slow, like the sound of a spinning ouroboros, a tail-eating drone that never started and never stops. We pick up instruments; perhaps we take them from someone else or swap a guitar for a synth, because it’s important that the music changes, that there aren’t too many lonely solos or riffs. We pick up microphones.

  We try to summon a different kind of song, one that doesn’t have God in the mouth or in the content either. All noises from our bodies are helpless and awkward, but through microphones and the strained sound system we don’t sound real anyway. Our voices are coming from a synthetic body, from wires and metal threads and magnet capsules, but also from our bodies which have understood how veins can be wires that tear loose and rewire, bodies where the sound’s new connections have already happened.

  At times there are intervals in the concert and you can hear voices chatting quietly and familiarly. No one chews gum. Sometimes we nudge one another. Our lips move. Occasionally we burst out laughing. Then the playing begins again and the dancing continues; the faces and the bodies get redder and the expressions more intimate.

  Some are making love to their own hand, or to someone else’s hand. The clit is in the throats, in the hands, in the spit particles, on the lips and in the skin cells.

  Who’s who, no one knows. Someone has switched off significance and blacked out the dichotomies. Intimacy doesn’t require hierarchies and formalities. Tonight we’re both acquaintances and strangers. We can stand next to each other and feel the heat from each other’s bodies; we can rub our hands against instruments or vocal chords against vocal chords; we can play, with or without instruments. Clothing fibres, skin, steel, plastic, rubber, bronze and tin from wires, instruments, and even us, all rubbing together, creating heat waves in the room. We dance on stage. We take each other’s hands for brief moments, then let go again to continue to shake the instruments. The microphones are plugged into the underground electricity network and shock our skeletons. Our bones rattle inside us and next to us. There are more and more of us, and our shadows are just as big and real as we are. They are also strangers, they are also shadows and silhouettes, just like the round lamps on the walls and the stage light and the pegs and the dark stains in the woodwork on the walls, and the walls in the next room outside, and the next one after that, and the holes in the brick walls all the way out to the apartment building, and the hissing roots down there under the grass lawn. Everything comes together in moving lumps of dancing drone people and floating constituent parts, a cross-section of the constituent parts of the universe, a bubbling witch’s cauldron.

  Here we’re strangers together, and we can replenish ourselves. It’s important that we can be strangers together here, because outside we are the strangers. I was always strange, to the Christian girls and to the metal boys; strangers are those who ask where God is, or if what you just said about Satanism isn’t actually similar to something in the Bible, or Doesn’t your makeup look a bit like the ISIS flag, because black and white is always reminiscent of black and white, and text is always reminiscent of text, just as you can look yourself in the mirror and discover that your eyes look like the eyes of someone you don’t like, someone you hate, someone who murdered someone, and whose picture you saw in the paper. Likeness is evil, too, even when we think it doesn’t belong to us, and evil is loneliness. Or is it community? Do we just not go there?

  We’re what always gets between you and what really matters; we, and our objections. We separate you from the world in its perfection with our little paths awash in black bile. Like a diagnosed illness, we keep that world, that paradise you’re trying to talk about, at bay; we catch you at a terminal between language and the world. If God is in the mouth, we can teach you to spit, or to retch, to stretch out of yourself. We’ve been practicing our whole lives.

  I take the girl from Puberty along to the gig, paint ear plugs in her ears so she won’t be afraid. She’s here, with Munch, the original corpse paint.

  We dance our way back to fucking hell in 1998, to primary school’s Our Father who art in Hell, to witch’s dorms and obscene scribblings in Good News and Pan. Those moments are so intimate for us, our pleasure domes, that we bring that energy along, to the domain of the metal boys, to the evangelical pietistic kingdom of heaven, to the parish centres, to Filadelfia and The Word of Life, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to Old Town Oslo in 1993, to the suburban knights in Switzerland in 1981. Inside the most sacre
d spaces, we tear down merch tables, altars and baptismal fonts; we defile Pentecostal tambourines, spike belts, spit and lick and get pissed on holy water. We unplug the jacks from guitars and synthesizers and shove them into every orifice, theirs and ours, connect us to them, into them, out of us. We’re jacked up, we’re plugged in, we’re online, and we raise the gospel and rock microphones and start singing, maybe we sing the lyric I hate God, in piercing, electrified girl-choir voices, using all different melodies, intentionally or unintentionally. This, it seems, is just as ugly to the Christians as it is to the metallers.

  The sound of the song is atonal, as if the bodies it surges through were analogue synthesizers that oscillate and vibrate, as if the sound were a pattern or web, as if our mouths were plugged into pipes and chords that rub and hiss at each other.

  We’re made of flesh and varying tempos: one for the muscles in our jaws when they gasp, one for impulses from the nerves that cause laughter, one for blood and one for the digestion of every individual substance that we have consumed. There’s a tempo for cell division and the body’s disintegration, because all this is happening inside the bodies, everything has always already begun, the gig is also life, the gig is death too. We stretch the web in different directions, we feel the PH value sway between alkaline and acidic. Between us and outside us, outside of cells and muscles and skin and everything we’ve been taught is our own form, is the room, or the beginning of it. The room begins at the point where we no longer recognise our own matter, where we begin to doubt ourselves. The room begins where only voices and menstrual blood and icy breath stretch out of us, and just where they stretch out of us and sort of look back at us, we start to doubt if we can actually claim that we are all the matter that exists within what we’ve been taught is our own form. Then the sweat follows; it, too, stretches out of us and into the room, and perhaps we sneeze, perhaps we cry, as more and more of our own bodily matter transforms itself from subject to world-tissue. We stretch out of our own shapes and become space, with the breath, with the blood and the voice. Now we’re in our own atmospheres, in our own cosmos, in the smallest big spaces, our own metaphysical matter.

  The Pact

  In an early version of the film I’m writing, the girl from Puberty is the main character in the story. She’s travelling in a time machine from the 1890s, her own time, to our time. There she’s going to look for Edvard Munch, to crush him, as revenge for painting her. In the story’s opening we’re told that Munch has already travelled through that same time machine, to pursue his dream of playing in a popular black metal band.

  The plot wasn’t my idea, but came from a conversation I had with Venke and Terese before a band practice. Maybe that’s why I like it. It’s a communal document, detached from the lonely writing process. The story, and the way we throw together ideas, reminds me of Jubilee, that punk film where Queen Elizabeth I is transported to an anarchist violent version of 1970s Britain, with punk icons playing the leads. Elizabeth surveys her ravaged kingdom before returning to her own time, and the film might just be implying that she should have taken Elizabeth II and the whole British Empire with her, the empire that created this imperialist pigsty of a modern society.

  As the conversation about our film takes place, I enjoy daydreaming about how the end of the finished picture should play out. I see the Puberty girl killing Munch off in two steps. First off, she’ll video one of his band’s gigs, and then she’ll play the recording as she paints on the film. She’ll mess up Munch’s face by drawing cartoon sketches, doodles and cryptic speech bubbles on it, and then she’ll draw infantile cocks hanging out of the mouths of the entire band. Finally she paints the whole image black. THE END.

  That plot doesn’t pan out. I’m not able to write anything more than quick summaries of our conversation, and I ram my head against the scenes in which the actual story is being told, this story that’s supposed to go from A to B, from past to present, from character A to character B. The rules of realism in my head are far too strict, dictating how a 1890s character should react to being moved 130 years into the future, and when I sit down to write the scenes, my imagination halts. I can describe exactly, down to the most minute points, the moments when I stop and feel lonely, when the band and the bonds disappear and are replaced with writing rules from the university in New England, where my professor looms over me and tells the class that my submitted short story isn’t credible, that it’s just angry and messy, incoherent. Instead of raising my hand to say that Hemingway and Raymond Carver, and why not throw in Foster Wallace, are an insult to the brain, and ask where the women writers on the curriculum went, I write my next assignment as a satire of a Carver short story, the scene set in Norway and with a female protagonist, to make it as believable as possible. The teacher is impressed; he says I write as if it were me, but in a way that’s universal, from the outside, with insight. From the outside, with insight: that’s what the art of writing is, maybe all art, after the subjective structures and the subjective untethered imagination have been tamed, and when it isn’t the canvas, the screen, the compendium sheets, or Edvard Munch’s black metal band being painted black, but just my own seething hatred of the structures that are being erased by white.

  Isn’t that why the underground, the avant-garde, the B movies and comics and fanzines and black metal originally emerged: to be free of the consequences and this relentless comparison to reality, and to open up to other structures? To the crawling and creeping and hissing and noisy structures? They were able to create space for a different kind of art, a different kind of writing. Or maybe they just created a new set of rules, new hierarchies? Am I stretched between spaces I can’t reach, that I don’t feel entitled to step into? I have to keep looking for that place that I could call writing, that I could call the film.

  Some scenes I can manage. I have no issue with scenes where characters die or disappear, scenes where shapes disappear or dissolve. I’m better at killing people off than I am at giving them life through character descriptions and realistic scenes in which people interact. Something seems to be getting in the way of the exposition, the description, this world that looks like reality.

  Perhaps it’s my thirst for revenge. Maybe I’m too vindictive to write anything from inside the structures, from the beginning, from the outside, with insight. Perhaps hatred does hamper writing, just as I’ve been told my whole life. Hatred isn’t plot or continuity, says my creative writing teacher in my head, and hatred isn’t a good motivation or intention, it’s a tale too short and primitive to be told, it can’t be the focus.

  But that’s the short version of the film: the only version. I just want to take revenge on film history, literary history, art history, paint the whole picture black, paint the whole screen black, force Microsoft Word to let me write in white on a black background. I just want to be allowed to hate, unrestrained. THE END.

  I wasn’t allowed to write that text at university in New England. The university, along with the whole art industry in that place, looked less like imagination and more like the South. In the South I never got to transcend genre and form, not in my essay assignments, and not in the classroom. I wasn’t allowed to hate.

  Hate is the only word that Christian and heathen Southerners react to equally powerfully. Hatred belongs to the devil and to the Second World War. Only Hitler and the German soldiers hated, and we’re taught they’re the only ones we can hate back. That’s the one thing we’ve decided everyone here agrees on. And we never talk about it, sitting at our desks in the ’90s, primary school, secondary school, college. First it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, then the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day. We make fried turnips as they did during the war, and we’re taught about concentration camps, we’re taught about mass suggestion, about manipulation, but we don’t talk about hatred. Maybe hatred is magical, maybe the war will return if we begin to define it, differentiate it, dig out its significance, and find the sound.

  Have you thou
ght about how similar those words are: HATE and HOPE? Four letters, a voiced h, a quick, full vowel between two consonants. Maybe both words depend on those consonants to contain the energy, the rebellion, the reckoning, the infinity. Have you thought about how good it feels to say that you hate? That deep a-sound: in Norwegian it’s the mouth’s most open vowel, the one that’s pronounced entirely by a slack jaw, the tone the doctor asks for before instruments are stuck down your throat, or the last tone from the dying and the dead. The A emerges from the underground and the downfall.

  Southerners say hadår or hadær, depending on how far south or west they are. It’s even more magical than the English hate, softer, saltier, more sheltered and concealed, closer to the kingdom of the dead, Hades. This softer language stretches further down into the deep, into the sea, the underground; the magical dimensions.

  In the draft of the film that’s never written, the Puberty girl meets other subjects from other paintings. Together, after an eternity in stiffened oil paint, alone and objectified, the subjects plot art-terrorism. As I force myself to think through the narrative trajectory, the ordinary scenes, the girl’s shock at the present day’s violent expressions and technological development, the sequences where she searches for Munch, the scenes that are normal and real, the writing grinds to a halt. I sit hunched over my laptop screen and the empty text document, thinking about how broken objects can bond, and what kind of band could emerge among them. Sometimes I type in a lonely Å, to have something to look at, to talk to someone.

  There are several reasons for my writer’s block. The girl’s anger at Munch reflects my own hatred of God and the world, of course. Puberty is me, the broken object–subject. If I keep writing this story, the writing won’t be a different magical place, but a repetition, a well-behaved reproduction of a pre-existing narrative, set in Norway with a female main character, as if I’d once more just traced a pattern for good art. The film version only works as an idea, before it’s fitted into the pattern. It’s better as a smouldering flame, distilled to one sentence: Girls hating through centuries. THE END.