Girls Against God

her now, she’d resemble a young Varg Vikernes, with that long hair and graceful posture. That image is far too romantic, nostalgic, adapted for sales. We paint it black. The death of art.
That’s what I need to write. The death of art. That’s the black screen. That’s where we have to begin, where writing has to begin. It makes more sense to talk about art’s potential if it’s already dead. Total misanthropic black. With art-death we have the opportunity to see the significance of the resurrection we desire, the colourful text that’s slowly typed and fed into the black screens, keeping time with the fermenting dough. The band searches for a resurrection. Maybe that’s why the only scenes in my film that I’m able to write are the ones where someone dies or disappears. Maybe it’s not just about God, and maybe hatred isn’t about burning something to the ground, but about discovering a flame that illuminates the darkness, a match that ignites or creates something new.
This conversation has been carried on in band practices and knights’ duels. But this afternoon it’s more extensive. We look at each other, Terese with her ear to the kitchen counter, Venke with her head resting upside down on the couch, me through the laptop screen, and without a word, a pact is written in black misanthropic ink on a parchment of gurgling sourdough. I, we, start to see the contours of a future where we can dig up a few ghosts, find a few new and radical definitions of art, of relations, participation, creation. Maybe we have to kill off our entire definition of what art is. Because didn’t art distinguish itself through separation of aesthetic practice from rituals, magic and revolt? Ritual, magic, people’s revolts, they are the thick brush, the bad art.
We know that the band, and the symbiotic relationships we create, have to be centred. We know that’s what people are looking for: the relations, the symbiosis. We want to experience them, and create them, see them swell and form between others. We want to study and act; we want to be actors and voyeurs. The goal has to be coming together, an artistic connection, ingredients that together make a brew. Is it at all possible to get close to people that way, or in any way? Was that how I was able to see you during the gig? Or was I? What does it mean to ‘get close’?
Maybe this is what writing could be, too: a place for communal, creative rituals, instead of that lonely voice confined to a white text document. Am I actually lonely when I write? If I am, it’s only according to that one definition of reality, the one that reproduces the subject in God’s image, and so declares that I am alone, that I occupy the role of the solitary genius. Maybe writing could be redefined, so that it isn’t a position but a search: I’m in search of community, and I search for that place where God isn’t. God isn’t the one writing anymore; it’s all the girls sitting inside paintings, hating. I’m looking for us.
THE END, for now. I put aside writing for a while, and we the band begin our search for ingredients for what we no longer call gigs but rituals. In this expanded band format we begin by studying Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches’ notes on witch practice and the witch trials. But instead of looking at the arguments and the content of the descriptions, we study their tone and the sound, as if they were music. The descriptions are full of meticulous detail, of the witches’ rituals and of society’s – the torture and execution of witches. Crime and punishment are set to surprisingly similar tunes. The language looks like one long black metal text, Venke points out, and she’s right, the sentences downright glisten with their own dark ecstasy. But the perspective is more specific, clearly punching down, delivered as dribbling phrases driven by misogyny and xenophobia; the bourdon notes of the dominant. This is patriarchy’s own seething witch’s cauldron. We dive below the surface and go deeper into the books to find what we are looking for, what concerns us.
The Hammer of Witches was digitised a long time ago and can be read on any screen in the world, but there are printed copies in existence, too; they’re nestled deep in old library shelves. You could easily confuse these editions with other medieval manuscripts, but they differ from such books in one particular way. The paper’s makeup, if examined through lenses and tested in a laboratory, would resemble a porn magazine more than your typical old manuscripts might, because of the conspicuous number of stains smudging the text. Some paragraphs are practically illegible; they feel rough to the fingertips and page after page sticks together. The chapters on punishment and torture are particularly difficult to decipher without having to resort to the digitised edition. The book has been subjected to some rigorous use over the centuries.
But no one has looked at these stains under a magnifying glass. The physical content of this book hasn’t received the same depth of analysis as the textual – all those hundreds of pages of information and discussions concerning the nature of witchcraft, and crime and punishment. The confession and punishment scenes have attracted the most diligent attention and therefore have the stickiest paper. It’s impossible to determine what the stains are composed of … if it’s spilled wine, coffee, milk, sweat, or semen. Venke, Terese and I reckon it’s the effluence of excited genitalia.
What is certain is that the stains are part of a conversation, a comment section that transgresses time, place and dimension. A stain is also an imprint, an imprint from one person’s situation, something that stretches out of the body and is projected, involuntarily, into the future, where another body in another time, in another space, will open that same page and study the stain.