Girls Against God

behind can’t even be called art. This thing called opening up is really just repeating instructions. Repeating instructions is human: lonely girl kneeling before God.
I’m sick of being lonely. I want to be part of something. I’ve been practicing since 1991. While Fenriz and Nocturno Culto stagger around with their camcorder and destruct the forest structures, I’m doing the same thing in my exercise books and notepads. I write my school assignments and my Norwegian essays to someone. Not to the teacher, but to famous authors: Ibsen, Bjørnson, Shakespeare. They frequently reply in the margins, leaving biting comments about today’s youth and correcting my spelling and syntax long before I hand in the assignment, and I get a written warning: the teacher insisting in that wet southern accent that he can’t mark a paper that’s already been marked. But I continue to hate in the A4 paper margins; I do anything to avoid thinking about how I’m really writing to God, God in the guise of the teacher. I’ve always needed to write to someone else. Writing has to be a place, a place to meet, a place where you meet someone other than God.
The only thing I like from the party scene is the image of blood flowing: that living and dead tissue. It flows continuously, unbroken and shapeless, and it gives me hope, just like the camera that sways between pines. Blood doesn’t have nationality, religion or gender. Maybe I have to rid the film of all plot and psychology and focus on blood and guts. The way black metal did at its most abstract, or when their recordings were so shoddy that the murder and Viking lyrics couldn’t be distinguished from the buzzing guitar riffs or cymbals. When everything sounded like howl, a space filled with shapeless components. Maybe I have to write like that, too: blacked out.
I grew up in southern Norway’s white Scandinavian paradise: white walls, white fresh snow, white painted laminate and white chipboard, white flagpoles and white chalk lines on the blackboard, white cheese and white fish, milk, fish pudding, fish gratin and fish balls in white sauce, white pages in books, white pills in pill boxes, white roll-ups, platinum-blond hair, white brides and white doctors’ coats, meringue and cream cake, Christian virgins from Jesus Revolution with white wooden crosses, Christian grunge, listen, the music sounds like regular grunge, if you just forget about the lyrics, irony, nothing means anything, boys from White Revolution at summer camp, girls who think it’s fine that the boys are racists because they’re hot and because boys will be boys, boys and their Nazi punk songs, listen to this track, the lyrics are so distorted you can’t hear it anyway, listen, the melody’s great, you girls are gonna love it, it’s got acoustic guitar. Sugar and salt are the only spices. Sugar and salt look exactly the same. White revolution and Jesus Revolution, Nazi punk and evangelist grunge, swastikas and purity rings, mid-morning gruel, pimple pus, egg whites, cream of wheat, semen.
The word white even has an h in it, imagine, a hidden letter, white. And we let that pass, linguistically. What does it do to us, that hidden letter, what (what) do we hide in that h, what hides in the white?
The white postwar period is scrubbed so clean it doesn’t have shadows, like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films. Protestant, newly rich, superficially liberal, minimalist and modern. Southern Norway in the late ’90s is not as newly rich and a little less modern, but just as white: It’s completely acceptable to point out the rightful supremacy of the white race. It’s totally fine to call someone a nigger, to beat up boys who look feminine in any way, or to raise your hand and ask to leave the classroom when confronted with a lesbian teacher, because homosexuality is not respectable (we respect you as a person and pray for your salvation). It’s acceptable to look down on those miserable wretches who aren’t Christian, who aren’t Norwegian, aren’t white or who aren’t straight. Inside that hidden h there are hundreds of commandments, from the ten first and onward into white eternity, ones that no one can pronounce, but everyone knows. The childhood I have left behind/tried to leave behind is like a metaphysical cesspit surrounding me, where the Christians have dumped their thoughts and their prayers for my salvation and purification.
Purification reverberates in every conversation. Dear Lord, and My Word, the evangelist Christian girls say when they’re angry, because they can’t say God – that would be taking the Lord’s name in vain, which after all is an act comparable to murder according to the Scripture. Language shouldn’t transgress boundaries, language should be tamed, you can’t just go wherever, don’t come here with your words. You have to keep the h silent.
The only thing I can do to stave off the south is to turn pitch-black and severe. I start playing in a metal band, dye my hair black, the colour of blasphemy, and dress in the darkest colours possible. I imagine that my presence in the classroom is itself destroying or disrupting something, even though the clothes I wear are what I call provincial black, meaning whatever you can get in dark velour or velvet, down at the friendly Arena shopping centre in Arendal. I walk the halls at school with Dostoevsky, Joyce and Baudelaire in my arms like an armoured plate across my chest. Around my neck is a chain with a black rose on it, one of the flowers of the dead, and through my headphones walking to and from school I listen to music I imagine is made in black and white. I christen the room I rent near college the witch’s dorm, and hang black velvet over the curtain poles, light black wax candles and write obscene comments in tiny print in the margins of the copy of the New Testament in the drawer of the nightstand. These objects, words and symbols, all