Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

  I wanted to meet you in this place. I wanted to meet you where we leak, where we’re almost nothing, here in someone else’s story. A place where I have given up almost everything: body, self, clarity, every component. I wanted to meet you here and talk to you about love, about bonds between people, about form and content within those bonds. About how they glitter like a shortcut to something human through the dimensions; I wanted to grab it, hold it, give it space and listen to it. I wanted to meet you, but it only exists in flashes, at moments, in little eggs.

  Are you here?

  Pale, faint sound waves have begun to oscillate in the white light now. Blurred electronic drone images replace the silence with sonic form. We sense that something is happening somewhere else, that the sound of it has been brought to us from places we can only hear, as if from behind an impenetrable wall. Our ears stretch and travel through time and space faster than sight or body. We’re getting nearer all the time.

  The girls come out into a clearing in the white forest, where the white light gradually dims until we can make out trees and grass in the background again. First we see them only as contours, as rough pencil sketches, the preliminary stages of a painting. Then the empty sections between the edges are filled in with pale colours from a thick brush.

  The wind is blowing hard. The music has gotten louder, and the sound waves, along with the sound of the wind blowing, fill us up. They fill us up, just as the gradually brighter colours start to fill in the sketches of trees and grass and sky. The ears and the image and the eggshell vibrate.

  VENKE, TERESE and the egg look around at their new surroundings. The landscape appears teeming and dramatic compared with the sedate forest and white light the girls have just travelled through. The place is both familiar and unfamiliar, a harsh Southern forest, estranged. A pale new moon hangs crooked between the clouds in the sky, above the birch crowns and the moors. The egg is in someone’s hands and gleams in the moonlight.

  Initially the girls think they’ve arrived at the family farm of Arne Myrdal, the leader of the People’s Movement Against Immigration. But then they understand that they are at Knut Hamsun’s farm in Nørholm, south of Grimstad, where Hamsun tried to write and cultivate the forest floor like Isak Sellanrå in The Growth of the Soil. Maybe Hamsun believed in magic, too contaminated by the Southern spirit, he wanted to make his own art real. Maybe Hamsun was interested in the spirits of the soil, too. Twenty years later he was a Nazi, and seventy-five years after that I raised my hand in Norwegian class to say his Pan was an insult to the brain.

  At the far end of the clearing is a little white house. It looks like a summer house; it’s old and has thin walls. It’s Hamsun’s writing lodge. The paint is flaking, the windowpanes are fragile and thin, and water damage has cracked the windowsills and wall panels.

  The girls walk slowly through the clearing toward the entrance on the side of the house. The door is cracked open, just enough to fit a small egg. They climb the little stone stairs slowly.

  Inside the house it’s terribly dark, and VENKE and TERESE are just sketches of insignificant shapes on a wood-panel background and the old hallway pictures. They glide slowly through one room and then a small passage to get to the main room where you can barely make out a couple of flickering black wax candles.

  A corner is turned and VENKE, TERESE and the egg are in a living room, where their eyesight gradually adjusts to the dim lighting. The room is almost empty, with panelled walls and faint shadows of old-fashioned summer furniture in the corner. Along one wall you can just make out the remains of a fireplace, but where the flue should be is a patch of black, blurred mass, framed by dirt and polystyrene packaging painted black.

  The rest of the girls, all those who appeared earlier in the story, have returned and are standing in the middle of the room, spread out around a chalk circle on the wooden floor. They look up and smile softly, and VENKE and TERESE smile back, as if they’ve all been waiting for each other.

  The egg is heavy in VENKE’s and TERESE’s hands as they transport it into the room, past the other girls, who stand just outside of the chalked circle that divides the dark wood flooring, making an inside and an outside. Then the other girls are allowed to hold the egg, one after the other. The egg is passed between hands and through the room; it’s constantly moving, floating along the perimeter of the circle, recognising its own shape and the five-pronged pentagram that’s sketched inside the circle. It is weighed and caressed, floating through the room on a sea of fingers and skin. The egg moulds itself around each girl’s body, and then it takes the bodies with it, lures them and beckons them further into the circle.

  We watch the living room gradually brighten, and in the black webbing where the stairway should have been, we spot a small crevice that slowly begins to resemble a rotten orifice with shrivelled labia. A little loosened webbing has congealed on the edges. The light is still faint and casts numerous shadows of windowsills, planks and furniture, but a light like a UV light or a tanning salon bulb shines on the web and the opening.

  The egg is in the middle of the circle. It floats along past the shapes. The music has become deafening, threatening the eardrums. Windowpanes vibrate. The shell’s surface temperature rises.

  The boiler is seething, the modem for the cosmic internet. Imitation smoke, which might be from a fire or a smoke machine, flows across the living room floor, and seeps in and out of the hole, as if, on the other side, a fire is breathing or someone is smoking a cigarette.

  TERESE’s and VENKE’s hands are visible in the picture. The egg floats in their hands, or just above their hands.

  With a lot of hubbub, the hands thrust the egg into the orifice.

  The black labia slowly widen as the opening is enlarged.

  The girls push themselves, head first, through the opening.

  3

  THE EGG

  Let me see …

  At first the darkness is all consuming and boundaries are insignificant. We don’t know if we see out of or into our own bodies. We don’t know if we’re at one with everything, or if we’re buried alive. Then we spot a few edges, shifting, or contours that gleam in light from an unknown source, or perhaps from the whites of our own eyes. The contours hurl themselves at us, forming geometric patterns through the dark, like a knife carving secret signs into black paper. We stretch our eyes into the patterns and see a brighter spot in the distance, above us. We get the feeling that we’re underneath something, that above us there’s a surface. With fingers and arms and legs we kick off to get up and out of the dark. It’s the same movement: legs that kick off from underwater to rise up, and fingers pinched and flicked open across a screen or a touchpad to zoom out.

  We zoom out. We’re now in a digitised class photo. Behind the lined-up students is a vague background, that kind of generic wallpaper that’s always put up for the backdrop of school photos – blue with cotton-white clouds, as if all the teens who have ever gone to school were angels in heaven … The room constructed in this photo has minimal content, little depth, and no sense of time. It’s a room that denies us comfort, that doesn’t let us be ourselves, as we’ve defined ourselves. The room makes room for something else, something flat, finalised and arranged, conventional. The students, the teacher, every item of clothing, the glasses and jewellery, all personal characteristics, everything is interchangeable. Every class photo could be any class photo.

  The class photo, as photographic reproduction and genre, doesn’t care about the teens in the photo. It doesn’t depict who’s had sex, or who would’ve had sex if they’d had the opportunity. It doesn’t care about who speaks in tongues, who sings in metal bands, or who will march with the Nordic Resistance Movement twenty years later. The high-resolution bitmap graphics split people up into tiny little points, reproduce pimples and moles with supreme accuracy, but at the same time ignore us entirely as individuals, as sinners, as moral, judgemental and doomed beings. The image doesn’t give a flaming fuck about the students’ s
ouls, or their mortality, or their grace or their misery. The photo says, Even Southerners are points and pigments. The photo speaks matter-of-factly, without magic or blasphemy.

  Class 2B, 1998, it says in the bottom right corner, printed with thin white letters, like a stage-prop tombstone, Class 2b were here. There we are, submitting to the systems. We are perfectly arranged, wedged into the institutional pattern. We are evidence, lined up where the church and the school system naturally meet. We smile the wavering smile of conformity.

  I’m the black-clad one in the top left corner. Around me are Christian and non-Christian classmates dressed in white, purple, red, green and pink. The girls wear low-rise mini-flare jeans. They have long corkscrew curls or hair straightened with a flat-iron. Some of the boys have crew cuts, some wear their hair long, others keep it shoulder-length. Many are wearing knitted jumpers in grey, blue, and white Icelandic patterns. Some are lighter-skinned, others darker. Some have put on makeup, others not. Some look straight ahead, some glance at one another.

  Look at the picture this way, and then look at it again.

  It’s impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot. Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts. A moment later everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed. But right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word. Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves. Everyone in the class is a potential sinner. The uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defiled. Just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher: they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her.

  The photo is stuck in this moment, in the uncertainty. It comprises us, compresses us, cranks up the pressure and the temperature. The whole image, this place, is a witches’ Sabbath for teenagers.

  In this moment there’s hope. There’s hope for transformation and magic. It’s possible to interpret class photos differently. Maybe all of Class 2B, and every student from all Norwegian class photos, are actually standing there hating. Maybe we all hate the photographer, the angelic blue background, and the Christian Democratic People’s Party’s first government, and the royal family and the school nurse and the teachers and the charismatic pastors and the laughing gospel choir and God, and What Would Jesus Do and the rhythm and the tempo and the vocals and the consonants in that outdated creed.

  And who am I? I’m the one honking outside reality, disrupting and cursing. I’m the one who flares up like a shadow behind others, threatening to paint over and darken the whole picture in misanthropic black. Blacking out the images is always a possibility, even though we usually choose the concealer and the powder when we want to make ourselves invisible. I’m the other option, the smouldering dome, the black steam from the occult fires of hatred. I am Girls hating through centuries, THE END.

  Or maybe it’s not THE END.

  The most important thing about magic is obviously that it never ends. What’s most important about magic is to create meeting places, so that later, others can stretch further into this artistic space. The desire to go there never ceases. This need to change, translate, transgress, transcend, smudge, it’s never satisfied. We never stop hating. Hatred and hope don’t change. Hatred and hope will continue to chime together and curse the world with its clearly articulated h-sounds.

  The film script is finished, but the writing of the film continues anyway. I never stop writing. Writing happens in the margins; the future bonus material is written there. The word END, or FIN, or SLUTT in Norwegian, in white on a black screen, has always just meant YOU’RE WELCOME. It just means that the screen goes blank, that the film’s images are swapped for an impenetrable black slate, a mysterious blank sheet which you yourself can continue writing on, or seep into. That’s why I like films better than books: they end in black instead of white. The book’s last blank pages always look like walking into a white cloud, the paper fibres are illusory optimism and total absorption, as if all the characters that were ever written into a book are angels in the sky.

  The film’s ending, as I originally wrote it, is my tribute to the fade to black, to transcendence in the dark as an alternative to the light. When the girls enter the black orifice of the writing lodge, it’s me wanting to tamper with all the white, with the white sheet, the white silence and the white parish centres. I want to open up the Southern towns and reveal the darkness in there. This darkness should be both frightening and sensual, as if the South put two fingers inside its own body, pleasuring itself. In 1997, when I walk into an auditorium during a prayer meeting by mistake, the pastor is preaching about the dangers of tampering with yourself. To tamper: to finger, to pull at, destroy, manipulate. Smudging the Christian soul. A selfish sin, like the first text I hand my writing tutor, according to him, before I learn from the outside, with insight. Selfish, alienating and private, he says. Pitiful and primitive.

  I never come to understand from the outside, with insight. But I understand that art can tamper with itself, with its own past, its own history, and create new bonds and new feelings. Now, after the film is finished, I think I can go further than when I wrote it. I dream of one last image in the film. This isn’t an image I want to write into the document itself, not after the girls’ hike through the white, invisible forest, the ritual in the writing lodge and the writing lodge’s orifice. We’ve already reached the end, gone from the recognisable to the white, and then to the black. But still, I’m thinking about another scene, a new version of the end, a scene that’s cut out of history even before it’s written.

  Let me show you the scene. We’re back in 1998, for the last time, I promise. It’s after the gig that my metal band and I play at the old parish centre, the venue that has been converted to a rock club, but not converted enough. We’ve left the room where the contours of tightly nailed-down crosses push into the walls, where the crocheted curtains are tangled together like folded hands, and the contours of the words ‘Jesus lives’ are still visible on the wall over the pool table. I have played a whole gig while nursing a suspicion that I’ve been tricked into attending another ‘youth night’ in a venue that’s a Bible school in disguise, with the microphone stand resting in a hollow where the altar once was, the black-clad metal boys watching us, their hands stretched into the air in exactly the same way that hands stretch toward Jesus in praise and glossolalia.

  Now my metal band, the two boys and I are on a forest trail, on our way to a churchyard and a church in the distance, to take a band photo. It’s an early summer evening, midsummer solstice, and still completely light. The band stops between a few trees to take a picture here too, a test shot. All three line up. We stay here, as if this were a freeze frame, even though the wind ruffles my hair and my eyes blink.

  The Southern forest where the boys and I are looks like the one surrounding Hamsun’s old farm. Perhaps I’m looking at the writing lodge behind the camera as the test shot is taken. But the camera doesn’t turn. Instead the frame and the band and I remain totally still as it slowly grows dark, from dusk to total misanthropic black.

  Let’s imagine that this scene is the end of the film, even though it isn’t. Up until this point the film would have been pretty short, under an hour. This image could be spliced in afterward, keep running for a long time while the band’s members, myself included, stand totally s
till and the wind rushes through our hair and the tree canopies. Three hours, maybe five, exactly the time it takes to go from day to night in the Norwegian summer. During the scene, as dusk approaches, unexpected details appear. I don’t know if it’s the image itself that changes, or if it’s our watching that begins to change what we see, but through the dusk we notice that the guitarist in the band has Venke’s hair and neck, and that the drummer perhaps shares some of Terese’s facial features. The vocalist, me, has my black hair and black clothes, but maybe I’ve also got a new shadow drawn from my nostrils to the bow of my lip. Is it darkness that has thrown a shadow across my face, or is it a scar from a cleft lip?

  At first the forest is quiet, only the odd bird chirping, but then you start to hear music far off. Maybe it’s coming from the church at the end of the path, from behind the churchyard, or maybe it’s being played deep inside the band members’ bodies. This is what can be heard: A guitar playing fast riffs, distorted and buzzing, insect-like, and a drum beat with a timbre as deep as if it came from a mausoleum. The vocalist sings something slurred about hating, in Norwegian, maybe this: ‘I love hating so much, the hatred burns, do you hear me?’ Yeah! someone from the audience yells, because now we’re hearing an audience too, from far off, through the music. Maybe you’re the one yelling, maybe it’s everyone.

  After a while the music dissolves again until it’s just reverberation, along with the summer winds making the leaves and grass rustle. Then it fades into the tempo of dusk itself and the scene continues until it’s dissolved by darkness. First to melt into the shadow of the canopies and the surrounding trunks is the band. Finally, the sky and the faint contours of canopies surrounding us are also totally gone, black.