Girls Against God

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 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.
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.
In Venke’s flat, colloquially referred to as the witch’s den, Venke is stretched out on the chaise-longue drawing graphic erotica. I’m seated by the fireplace typing in an Å or girls hating through centuries, THE END. Terese is time-lapsing sourdough loaves rising on the kitchen counter. A new, long conversation has been happening between us, over several days, and it continues every time we meet in the hallway. We discuss what’s progressive, what could be subversive, why we care about it. What’s the point of confronting anything at all in Norwegian society? Can art express rebellion in our time? It’s been fifty years since performance art got explicit, and soon it’ll be thirty years since the arrival of black metal, riot grrrl punk and Gender Trouble. If there’s anything at all that might still have a subversive effect, says Venke, what would it be?
How would people today have reacted to all that performance art, those horror films and subcultures? asks Terese.
Perhaps by just ignoring it all, excluding it, quickly sweeping it under the rug, like they did to black metal before all the crime, I say.
Weren’t the black metal bands actually still there, even after the murder and the arson? Terese replies.
That depends how you define black metal, Venke interjects.
And how you define ‘excluded’, I say.
Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. The nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialise into language. The subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained. But it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised.
In 1991 you could, on the surface, ignore black metal and its subversive content. Norway was too secular to be shocked by upside-down crosses and guitar riffs without the usual muting of strings. It was as if they didn’t exist, until murder and church arson existed: conventional crime, dangerous young men. That was a language that could be understood. Later, black metal music was commercialised, too. It was translated, adapted for sales, polished and tightened, giving it a more saleable image. When Varg Vikernes was imprisoned, society’s idea of rehabilitation, the music lost that messy, fat-stained, insect-like buzzing, and was remastered into a more modern, healthy and powerful rock image. Man emerges from the gutter, transformed into the übermensch, again, as always. An understandable language. Crisp and crackling photocopier fanzines projected into the big and beautiful picture books of nostalgia.
The genuinely subversive is still untouched, the hs are still silent. What is it we’re lacking if we, in art and in life, just repeat and repeat and repair and repair versions of ancient hierarchies and rituals? What do we exclude? Can you hear it? What is it we’re still not saying?
Terese lowers her head until her ear rests on the kitchen table. She’s filming one of the sourdoughs, one that has risen over the edge of the bread tin. It looks as if she’s listening to something inside the woodwork. Venke is stretched out on the couch, arms dangling over the sides. If I photographed