Some excerpts from Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

“I’m watching these black metal clips because I want to write a film. I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred.

The next clip I watch is a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school. I note: ‘Wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too. It doesn’t burrow down completely, but for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls. One of those youths could have been me. If I’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If I hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen. It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred.

…

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 the 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 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.

…

Magic is far away, because it’s a place where God can’t see you, I think; that’s how we can find each other there.

…

Where is God?

God is in the knitted hats of the humble billionaires, the
heirs’ sailboats, and the shareholders’ velvet-lined inside pockets. God is in the pillboxes and the protein powder at the gym. God watches over the reality TV producers and the media corporations’ financial advisers. God surfaces in the threshing machines separating bad art from good art. God’s hand rests protectively over the hand that slaps your arse at school, at the rock club, at the university and on the underground. Because God is always in the system, in the sewers, in the trash, in the garbage. With the whores and the poor, like they teach us in school. In the 1990s the word whore is used frequently in the South; it’s apparently biblical enough to be used in public. Society’s trash. God looks after them, though. That’s why it’s good to be poor and exploited. You’re closer to God that way; you know better than others what it’s like to live. You’re a straight-talker. And God’s a straight-talker, too, Let there be light, he says, and there was light, and now the sun rises over the hills and the rooftops and the car parks and tints the hoods of cars and the pedestrian’s intestines.

…

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.

…

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.

…

Have you thought 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.

…

The book repeatedly describes how the inability of devils and witches to reproduce has been verified, and that they instead collect men’s sperm to create perverted demon children. Those who might threaten the balance of power in society are often described as sperm collectors. Europeans were referred to as such when they began to infiltrate the portside brothels of Nagasaki and other Japanese cities. When Europeans appear in shunga, Japanese erotic art, they are frequently, and strikingly, shown collecting sexual juices in cups and other containers. Witches’ brew.

…

As I type in I write a satanic pact between you and me … in the email application, the word I is corrected to AI by the automatic spell check. Representation and subject are switched. In the future there are no boundaries. YOU could be UUE, or maybe that O could stretch a little further, into the magical DOC or DOCX of the text. ME could be MPEG or MP4

…

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.

…

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.

…

I’m the one who fantasises about being an HTML code and being held in the arms of the brackets.

…

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.

…

The cosmic internet communicates through noise, we note in our dialogue. It creates confusion, poor connections, pixelated images and digital one-way streets.

…

We agree that in the long run, when it trusts us, the web will evolve into a fleshy peer-to-peer network, where a small part of your flesh is always seeding.

…

The desert air up here in the highlands is thinner and clearer, the sky wider, the ground, the earth less significant. New Mexico is 80 per cent sky and 20 per cent scorched red mountains, cacti and tufts of grass. My feet only barely hold on to the ground, my fingers barely reach down to the keyboard. No wonder the people around me wear thick boots and stiff, heavy hats. They’ve got to keep themselves grounded.

…

Trinity Site, scene of the first atom bomb test explosion, 16 July 1945, postponed for three days because of bad weather. The Trinity bomb was based on the fission process: atoms, once regarded as indivisible, exploded or were torn apart. Trinity’s power came from splitting atoms in two. It rose through the atmosphere, a glowing, mushroom- shaped erection fantasy, with the aid of Oppenheimer’s technology, the United States’ immense defence budget and the modern establishment’s unwavering faith in the logical binary division of the universe.

The biblical creation process is a story about fission, too, or at least a version of it. The first man, Adam, originally contained both masculine and feminine forces, united by the inevitable seam of cosmic threads. Adam was in this way completely androgynous, but then, according to the myth, they were unhappy with their own bisexuality, and as preparation for the universe, they cast out their feminine parts to become purely masculine. Only then could divine power shine from his eyes – from those reformed, straight eyes.

For scientists and philosophers, the atom bomb had the potential to become something more than a total meltdown of atoms and a catastrophe for mankind. Trinity and its successors could be conclusive evidence of a divine power, impelled by the pure masculine symbolism of a process that split its own components, casting off the waste to create the most powerful force of energy humanity had ever seen. Perhaps that’s why the research programme behind Trinity, Little Boy and Fat Man was named the Manhattan project. Casting off the feminine parts made it possible to rise, surging with inhumane power up toward the sky, like a skyscraper, with an architecture that united Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy in a holy trinity, horny for God.

I identify with the feminine parts, those left scattered around Adam’s body, the trash left behind by mankind’s fusion with God. The atomic waste is invisible; it has long since been dumped and buried underground, beneath towns and neighbourhoods populated by minorities and poor people. But out here in the desert, another kind of masculine waste glitters in the dry sunlight. The area is populated by oil field and military workers, and they’ve scattered their empty beer cans, used condoms, junk food containers and petrol cans across the landscape. It’s a modern version of the ram heads in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. In front of her never-ending New Mexico landscape, she displays the universe’s sacred waste: the skeletons float in the air, in front of mountains, sand and sky. They glisten; they are made of the salt of the earth and the sugar of witchcraft.

What a disappointment it must have been for God’s scientific apprentices when they discovered the even more powerful fusion technology. In 1952 Operation Ivy detonated the fusion bomb Ivy Mike, equivalent to ten megatons of TNT, and even at that point the men of the establishment had begun to pull out of the American nuclear project.

These bombs are a dead end, they thought; the potential destruction is too great. They hadn’t said that about Little Boy or Fat Man. But the fusion bomb really could blow the world as we know it to pieces. This process fuses atoms instead of splitting them; it brings isolated parts together into new forms that previously couldn’t exist. I imagine the fusion bomb as a recording of Adam’s gender-splitting process, the whole of genesis, in reverse, a restoring of the masculine and feminine into one condition, an impossible dimension, a join-the-dots feast. A perfect blasphemous construction built in the name of piety. Ivy is both a boy’s and a girl’s name. Has someone made a superhero figure of Ivy?

…

The next day, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque, I see bits of the glass that the desert sand was melted into during the bomb detonation. The matter is called trinitite, green like kryptonite, inside a dusty display case. A Geiger counter is exhibited above it as a demonstration. It crackles as it registers the atom’s processes. The sound of radio-activity. Trinitite is still too fresh to touch, too pure and masculine. Or is it we who are too frail, and allow ourselves to be radiated, are we too feminine, and ?

…

Genitals are already sea creatures. Wet and soft, from birth till death. We can only ever partly understand and grasp this. Like the sound of our voices and the blood that streams from our body, they are human osmosis, just as much connected to the world as to us. They represent something infinite and only partly real to our realist eyes. They are sluggish semi-fungi, partly submerged in water, moist, smooth, slick, perforated, born eyeless. They are half human matter and half imaginary creature.

…

I’m so sick of being a soul that can be converted or improved or healed, or that’s dangerous and needs to be stopped from contaminating others. Give me a salvation break, I’m exhausted. I want to be in a place where I don’t have anything to hate; I want to be that place, a place that can’t be manipulated, conversed or converted. I want to be a thing, a series of things, things without religious potential. I want to be out of God’s reach.

In school I’m never allowed to be that place. I imagine it’s because I enjoy hating too much. I’m too fond of transgression. But now, twenty years after college, when I turn the screen toward Venke and Terese and we watch the black metal bonus material together, we sink into the undergrowth, and we choose the camera over the trees, or we choose the black and white trees over the real and green ones. We look past and into the patterns. We don’t stop the movement, but let it continue, like an eternal scroll down the black whirling branches. We choose the pixels.

Listen to the MP3 buzz from the fan in the computer. It whispers a heathen psalm.

…

Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin.

…

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.”