Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

  Let’s rewind a little and zoom in again, on exactly that moment when the ritual ends and we’re back in the ordinary chronology with the students from the canteen. Something has changed, as if systematic reality has been disrupted by the ritual. Look at all the mess in there. There’s ketchup on the floor, on the walls and the ceiling, and no one seems to be wiping it up. But have a look, too, at the girls who fought, and the girl who squirted them with the ketchup bottle. The two warriors haven’t left the room, and no adult has yet removed the third girl. They’ve just wiped their faces and hands, and now they’re sitting together around a table, all three, drawing inside a square on the tabletop, laughing. The teachers are nowhere to be seen. Next to the drawing square, in the margins of the Sabbath, I write in three coke bottles and a tray of almost-finished cheesy ground-beef subs.

  This is their world, but also ours. And yours too.

  Total misanthropic black metal, I write within the drawing square, for the girls, or in the film document’s side panel. They are all sheets in the same document, all this fabric in the same textual weave, with Venke, Terese, me and you.

  I cross out black metal and think about the cruisers, not giving a fuck about colour, wearing distressed jeans and bleaching their hair in football patterns. They fill up their tanks with total misanthropy and its Southern twin, blasphemy. Perhaps they’re still the most blasphemous of us all. They are the only ones who want to disrupt, not by setting fire to the same tame state church or singing about upside-down crosses, but by blaring the Pentecostal prayer meetings into pieces, right in the middle of the glossolalia. Through the high streets and parking lots the cruisers write, like witches, outlining another world. Misanthropy, blasphemy, cruiser magic.

  Aside from the obvious reasons, I don’t know why I feel I have to be able to justify my actions, or the cruisers’ actions, through analysis. Maybe it’s because it’s important to me that what we do should mean something, that language should be able to find different strategies and be something other than a machine for shame and denial. Maybe it’s because I can’t let go of the idea that we have to find society’s boundaries and transgress them in as many ways as possible, that we must highlight, study, analyse them, all the way down to even the most low-minded crap.

  Are you also compelled to go down there?

  I want to write about people and characters and places disappearing until they actually disappear, maybe becoming art, so that I’m able to believe the opposite: that art can be real. That there is a magical potential.

  The Cosmic Internet

  Something’s out there. We become aware of it soon after the stench takes hold. It’s as if the curse we cast dragged something else up with it; something that’s trying to communicate with us. We sense it in the draughty windowsills, the sockets and routers in the witches’ den. We have no word for it, we don’t exactly know what we’re talking about yet, and we end up glancing, sniffing and looking at each other without a word. We only get a whiff of it. Sometimes I feel it in the light wind created by my own fingers across the touchpad as I scroll down a website and finally ram against the bottom of the page, fingers still dragging the image down.

  Venke, Terese and I take a break from gigs, rituals and film writing and start hunting in the places where we sense the whiff. We sink deep into the dark web, crypto blogs, old witch forums. We trawl through the garbage dump of the internet, through abandoned social platforms, obsolete blogs, and online news articles with formatting errors. We trawl through art archives, file registries, disks and minidisks. We play songs and videos that have never been played before. As yet we’re not getting any closer to it, but searching, being on a hunt, on our way, noses to the ground, has its own value.

  I consider writing Online Witch Rituals into the browser’s Google search banner, and pressing I’m Feeling Lucky instead of Search. It’s obviously a joke, and I don’t do it, but I could have, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I realise that Google knows more about me than God.

  I hate Google.

  But I like scrolling. It’s an easy movement, like rolling or gliding or falling, but without gravity. The action of my fingers pulls me down different websites, blogs, articles, through social media platforms. It’s unstoppable, this sliding movement, and the websites seem endless. Deeper and deeper down the hole I descend from the simple search where I started, and know that if I turn around and scroll up, I will eventually come back to the beginning, but as long as I continue the descent, it’ll never end.

  At the start of these aimless searches, this scrolling movement seems the closest any of us can get to magic on the internet. The scrolling is a pull that emerges and exists only in movement. I feel as though, if I move my fingers fast enough, I can overtake the present and step into the future. And if the search words I type in are dark enough, I’ll be able to continue down the different layers of the atmosphere and then the earth. In the end, I’ll be able to scroll myself all the way to hell.

  I like the idea of hell. I like how easy it is to get there. Just by thinking or writing those simple words. In 1998, when I curse loudly in front of the class, I do it because I like cursing; I’ve had years to cultivate the most articulate fucking hells and holy shits. The teacher knows that when I say it the words are capitalised and in a particular font, so I get a written warning. Hell is a sea of written warnings. Hell is the place God doesn’t want to see, or can’t see, or has ignored. When I swear I feel electric. That same year, when I use the internet connection I’ve set up at home, I get a similar feeling, a tingle, as if an electric signal that smoulders in my body has been amplified. I put my hand on the modem and feel the frequencies of the dial-up sound drone through me. Since then I have not been able to separate the memory of electrical shocks from loose terminal blocks and copper wiring in the broom cupboard from my memories of swearing and the descent into hell, and connecting to the internet. I just remember information streaming through the arteries in my wrists.

  It takes a while for me to remember this when we first begin the search. It’s been twenty years since I got internet at home, and since then the internet has changed, alongside us. Our movements and rituals across the screen are superficially similar to what we were doing twenty years ago, but the internet has long since shed its mystical skin. The haphazard searches and screen trances that we fell into in the ’90s are now controlled and regulated by more mundane rituals, steady pulses between fluctuating browser banners. The movements don’t lead us down to the underground, but between inbox and outbox, new page loads, post uploads, and new posts in our feed. Venke, Terese and I breathe between applications, we slip in and out of images, as if the internet were no longer a mystical dimension but a rhythmic imitation of life. Above us the algorithms watch over our actions, on earth as in heaven.

  But then we really get going, and although we’re distracted, prevented and interrupted, we find the undertow is still there. We can still feel the hatred surge through our veins. We’ve found a direction for our search now, but what follows we don’t know. We’ve stopped switching banners and applications in time with our breath. It’s as if we’re rediscovering the internet and wandering through the ruins of the museum of interrupted connections, outside the all-consuming portals. We’ve yet to find anything else, but we do feel an ever-growing presence. Maybe what we’re supposed to find isn’t a particular place, but a process, a recipe, a code, a combination of keyboard shortcuts, a language. We begin to feel that old sensation of electricity surging from the power grid and into our bodies. Late at night, long after darkness has fallen both outside and inside the apartment because we forgot to turn on the light, we lift our gazes from our computers and see each other’s eyes glow like predators’.

  Inside the witches’ den, we scan and scroll our way down, with fingers and noses and eyes and external hard drives. The internet isn’t deep enough. Sooner or later it’ll stop and something else will take over. Hatred glows in the palms of hands hovering above keyboards. That
’s how writing begins, I think, not with a document or a text or a word, but with this glow, this prickling.

  Dear internet,

  The electricity in my hands is palpable now, and I’m starting to remember just how much machines meant to me, how high my hopes for the internet once were. I remember playing pretend-internet on computers as far back as 1989, before I knew it existed.

  This internet-before-the-internet game is my first ritual project. I draw the same things over and over again in the application Paint, as if I were waiting for someone else to continue the drawing for me, or with me. I talk to the hard drive when I play games and open programs in MS-DOS.

  It’s the same year I get really into Superman 3. I watch the film every weekend. I’m especially obsessed with the ending, where the oblivious bad guy Gus Gorman – played by a tremulous Richard Pryor, uncharacteristically free from profanity – has constructed a giant computer that suddenly breaks free from human control. In the process it attracts several of the main villains into its machine body. It then wraps cords and machinery around the villains, making them hybrid creatures; organic robots in the service of the computer. The villains receive wireless information from the horrific machine through invisible waves through space, or somehow at least they know what to do to hunt Superman and the other good characters. They have cords and metal plates on their faces, but still resemble themselves. As robots they are half living and half dead; they speak the words of the machine with their own voices, like mediums, or like Pentecostals speaking in tongues.

  In the middle of my Superman obsession I go to the hospital to visit grandma, who is recuperating after a surgery; various wires and hypodermic needles are connected to her body, saline solution, medication, something that looks like blood. All the wires make me dizzy, and I think about the machine people from Superman 3. Before then, I’ve never really thought about the body as real and mortal; that we also have to be plugged into something and get support to live sometimes.

  Does it hurt? Can you feel anything? I ask grandma, as I poke at one of the wires.

  I feel for that lady over there, she replies and gestures across the room at a woman in a coma, surrounded by just as many wires and drip stands.

  The comment is inscrutable to me, but when I think about it several years later I realise it’s true: they are both plugged into the containers and walls of the hospital. Their body tissue communicates with the wires, with the fluids and the plastic and the metal, perhaps also with each other’s tissue, and even with me as I drink red Ribena from a plastic cup and eat liquorice from the vending machine in the hallway.

  As I continue to draw increasingly macabre illustrations in Paint, writing love letters to computers and mocking God with demonic quartertones in the school choir, the modern internet really starts taking shape around the world. Different versions of Russian and French networks have already existed, but this year, while grandma and the other woman at the hospital are plugged into the machines and the walls and each other, various successors to ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Administration) are connected to each other, too, and this larger network is called the internet. The connections are material, but the web is perceived as something else: it’s understood as a virtual dimension where we could potentially contact anyone at any time. Without my realising it, we are connected to a global heart-lung machine, that a few years later will promise to pump our virtual blood between us, unrestricted and uncensored.

  The internet was kind of spiritual in the ’90s, wasn’t it? Terese says.

  I was looking for someone to talk to, I say.

  Me, too, says Venke, the dial-up was like a ringtone. Like ringing God.

  The Jesus teens don’t talk about the internet in that way in the ’90s. Maybe they feel that same electric surge through their hands when they fold them in prayer. And maybe I’m looking for something on the network, too, when a few years later I begin to surf the internet and chat on mIRC, first one night per week in a classroom and later at home. It always disappoints me that the ones I’m chatting to are real people from Ås, or San Diego or Johannesburg. Between the chat shifts, I dream up better conversations than the ones that exist in the real logs, and I continue to write to the computer, to invisible partners deeper in the mechanical systems. The feeling in my fingers as they rest on the warm keyboard reminds me of spiritualism. It’s the closest I get to communing with the spiritual realm. The electricity, the network, the connection. The internet is all I need to connect to another world, to disappear into another world, get away, or just feel close to something mystical and impossible. I fantasise about finding my own doppelgänger on the internet, or that I will suddenly be chatting to a version of myself from the future, or chatting to my grandma through the machines. A few years later I will be googling myself to sleep at night in imaginary search engines.

  In the witches’ den, with Terese and Venke, I type into the search bar the internet as a spiritual force. I delete it and instead type How the spiritual world is like the internet. I delete this too and write Find God on the internet. I don’t press Search, but I am searching.

  Dear God, who art online.

  In my witch’s den in Oslo in the early 2000s I study for my bachelor’s degree; I’ve long since become a nerd, like Gus Gorman in Superman 3, only a little more destructive. Of all the students taking the mandatory IT course, I get along best with the program. Not technically – I can’t even make the Word document black – but I’m the one devoting the most time to what I hope is the magic of the machine. I’m the one who fantasises about being an HTML code and being held in the arms of the brackets. I’m the one forever inventing clever and cleverer Alta Vista searches, as if I were flirting with the browser. I’m the quickest at finding smut and illegal MP3s. The rest learn good work methods and routines. I work my way into and down the internet and find Deep Throat and Sweet Movie. Even when I communicate with other people, via Messenger or email or mIRC, I’m mostly concerned with the computer screen and the programs, and later the laptop and the smartphone and the applications. I’m always communicating with them too. I study keyboards and the sound of buttons, I breathe in the electricity, and the eternal scrolling movement makes me zone out long before the internet achieves that seemingly endless stream.

  Then the internet grows, and it quickly changes from something deep, mystical and soft, like body tissue, into big, lumpy, stultifying portals and programs. In the computer courses and later in the programming classes, there’s no longer room to search for connection or community through the web and the programs. It’s not about the web at all; the web is invisible, something that just has to work, and the programs are just tools, codes you have to master. I resist for a while, continue to search the deep and find stuff no one else finds, or write clunky, unnecessary Java arguments to make the program short-circuit. For a while I approach the internet the way I do religion and the South, as a wall I have to break down and a system I have to destroy. And then, I become what we call grown-up, and the internet becomes what we call grown-up, and we abandon each other, automate our interactions, surrender to muscle memory and necessity.

  Look me deep in the algorithms. It’s as if the internet’s entire underground potential has vanished into their archives. The pull the internet has on me lies dormant, reduced to something unconscious and functional, memorised grips on metal frames and finger constellations on the phone case. I shape my body gently around the machines, hand resting like a soft pillow under my phone as I text. Even now, as I write this to you, my upper body hangs over the laptop like a cradling breast, or am I the one that’s held by it? Maybe we’re both suckling each other at the same time. All this time I’ve participated in a ritual where I extend myself into the machine, without thinking about it as an extension of me.

  Through the evening darkness in our witches’ den, I see Venke and Terese behaving in the same way with their tablets and laptops in the kitchen, and together we watch the neighbours participate in the same patte
rns. They walk cautiously around their apartments, rocking their applications as if they were rocking children to sleep. This is probably how I’ve always wanted to be rocked and comforted, by the metaphysical place with the biggest arms, the arms of the internet.

  Routine machine rituals aren’t magical, I say, still in the kitchen.

  But they could have been, says Terese. They have potential. Imagine everything we remember now, everything we’ve forgotten.

  Venke is deeply absorbed in an old sewing kit next to her laptop. She’s gotten excited by the image of a machine and man nursing each other. She sits cutting little bits of sewing thread from the kit and tying the threads around her nipples, where they press against her jumper.

  Isn’t that image just a metaphor for the echo chamber? I say. Life in the self-referential circuit, and the dependency that keeps us there. When did we get to this place?

  Even the echo chamber has potential, Venke argues.

  Her nipples are now poking out beneath her jumper, and she ties them together with a new piece of thread. Now they are connected like an infinity loop.

  They’re the same figure, says Terese, the echo loop. The little, anxious subject suckling its own body, all alone.

  But the loop doesn’t exist in a vacuum, says Venke: imagine it as a movement, a feeling, a connection.

  She raises a pair of scissors to cut the end of the thread that’s still attached to the spool, but instead cuts the loop right between her nipples. The threads fall away from each other, only to grow toward each other again. Down on the table the spool jerks. The threads around each nipple reconnect in new forms and loops from the thread under Venke’s upper body, and it starts to move, forming new bonds, weaving a steadily growing network of loops and figures around itself.

  Our father, who art in hell, I say, and we all laugh.