Girls Against God

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 sacred 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