Girls Against God

about ‘magic’, never even questioning why I’m using the word at all. What do Japanese people think about ‘magic’, what are ‘rituals’, what are ‘spirits’? Japan is so alien to me that it doesn’t cross my mind that this is the first time I’ve talked about gods and spirits without feeling that hatred of the South pulse through my body. At some point the South must have let me go, or Kyoto has pushed it so far from my consciousness that I’ve been able to forget where I’m from. I’ve given up, or suppressed, the provincial black hatred.
In Japan it’s so easy for me to forget to hate, to forget my entire emotional register, everything I’ve brought with me. Here I’m a total stranger, even to myself. I don’t know a single character of the written language, and I have no idea which are used in the word hate or whether they even have such a word. People’s behaviour here, their tradition, their religion are so different that I can’t see my reflection in them. I’ve disappeared almost completely. If I haven’t already forgotten or erased myself, I can do it here. I identify with the temple, with what’s demolished and rebuilt without traces from its previous life, without revealing where it came from.
As I’m speaking to the temple guide, people keep stopping next to us, outside the passage into the most sacred room, where statues of guardian gods rest on their pedestals. As they silently pass through the rooms, cold now in February, the visitors greet the gods, or leave something for them. Later that day I realise that everywhere I’ve been I’ve also greeted something or given something or other away. I removed my shoes to enter the temple, removed the red temple slippers to enter the inner chambers, and handed my ticket to the ticket inspector. The barista in the coffee shop handed me the receipt for an espresso with both hands, and I gave coins in return, attempting to make my thank-you just as ceremonious. In Kyoto, even buying coffee has significance: I give something, and the weight of the action, the bow, the emphasis, gives me the feeling that I’m also giving away part of myself. I’m participating in a ritual. This is how easy and free of sin it can be, like a magical transaction, a movement to participate in.
Later that evening I practise greetings. I bow to the rooms in the apartment where I’m staying, to the hands of the waiters that pour tea in my cup at a tea house. I stop and nod in an art gallery inside a metro station, and nod to the metro station’s revolving doors and to the guard smoking on the floor above me. I bow my head to the underground engine, the ticket inspectors, the drivers, the passengers that exit the metro before I get on.
It isn’t until now, as I write my film many years later, that I understand that what I was doing in Japan was a form of blessing, the same action practised by the pastors of the South. In Japan, I bless the rooms, the things and the people. Maybe without knowing it I’m compensating for something I never allowed myself to do. Maybe I don’t recognise the movement because it seems so easy without the Christian association. In the South, blessing seems to be about getting some sort of permission from God, a holy white stamp. I haven’t had access to that type of communication. I’ve only learned to use the curse, its depraved twin sister, profusely. From the window in my witch’s dorm, I surveyed Bible-belt suburbia, and I cursed the college, the supermarket, and Kingdom Hall, the gas station, the late-night McDonald’s, and car after car zooming down the motorway.
In Japan it’s different. For the first time I’m able to let go of the hatred, and the first thing I do is seek out religion. I remember several other moments from the trip now. I recall a Bible shop in Tokyo that doesn’t scare me; I even walk in. It looks just like a regular bookshop, except the paper quality, the binding, the forms of the books seem more sacred than their content. I remember, too, how among the unfamiliar temples, gods, spirits and rituals, I feel disconnected from myself as spiritual content, as sin and soul. I can be material, elegantly formed bones, intricately packed intestines, colourful kidneys and ovaries under smooth skin cells. I exist as the parts and the whole of the beautifully wrapped food in the bento boxes. I don’t need to hate all this religion. I reclaim the act of blessing without thinking about it, without knowing it.
In the side panel of my film document, next to the notes on black metal, I note this: ‘Writing summons the unfamiliar places.’ In this place, the Kyoto I didn’t know I had experienced until now, the blessing and the curse form a richer whole, an act that doesn’t need to be religious. It can be magical instead: simpler, more open, taking a lower aim. I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through a connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you.
Maybe writing this film has created a place to meet. Do you also recognise the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?
Let’s see … We’re in a room, I think, a nondescript