Girls Against God

ritual, where the witch reconstructs herself and becomes an impenetrable snow globe, surrounded by thick glass walls.
The glass is a camera lens. Terese lifts one hand and curls her thumb and index finger to make an objective lens. She rests her finger- lens on her right eye and lets the camera glide around the room. The lens fixates on the girl whose name might be Venke and zooms in on her upper body.
As this takes place, I write a list in my film document’s side panel. I need lists there, lists of what my intentions are with this classroom. The list opens with the phrase science fiction. By that I don’t mean that it’s set in the future or that it’s dealing with dystopian technology. Science fiction here means an impossible place, like an alternate reality. The images look real. I imagine girls together, in a class, or in a cluster. I imagine girls hating in unison. White to black. Mystical communication, community. Ecstatic intimacy, intimate close-ups. Intimacy through the body’s waste and secretions. A self-constructed network between bodies.
(like the internet before the internet)
((like the internet during the internet))
(((or underground internet)))
((((deep web))))
(((((deep tissue)))))
((((((deep web and deep tissue))))))
(((((((ecstatic deep-webian intimacy)))))))
((((((((primitive language))))))))
((((((((((I want to understand this language)))))))))
(((((((((((insist that this language signifies)))))))))))
(((((((((((until it signifies)))))))))))
((((((((((((for you too))))))))))))
This is the kind of room I want to show you. A world surrounded and shaped, no, reshaped, by subcultural layers. Maybe we could turn back time and create a black metal movement where only girls hate?
The girls in the classroom look up, look at each other, smile.
An episode:
Groups of girls from different classes and schools are at a railway station waiting for the next train. They chat enthusiastically, send texts and upload photos online, look at each other, smooth their hair.
The tracks start to hum, as they do when a train is approaching.
Abruptly, a girl walks to the edge of the platform. She looks down at the tracks but continues to chat to the friends behind her.
Her friends join her. Then several more groups do the same. Everyone smiles, giggles, and whispers, as they grip each other’s hands and stare at the tracks. The remaining girls don’t notice the row of people forming along the edge while they wait.
The train approaches the station.
The girls on the edge all count down from three and jump off the platform.
A series of thuds is heard as the train hits each body thrown in its way. The blood splatters from the track and sprays the platform, walls and ceiling and the other girls’ clothes, hair and faces. It gushes so violently, it fills the mouths, eyes and noses of everyone still on the platform. The whole image is dyed red, then black.
THE END
The Band
What happens to hate? Does hate age? Can it be cured? Can you fling it off a subway platform?
In 2005, just a month after my Japan trip, I’m sitting in a university library in New England, on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe I’ve been cleansed, demolished, blown up, either during the Kyoto trip or in my new existence as an exchange student, and now I feel I can delete, turn off, restart and restore myself. I’ve begun the master’s course and I’ve decided that this, finally, is far enough from the Norwegian South. Now I can be a whole new person, one who isn’t pitiful and primitive, one who doesn’t hate. I can be a person who creates herself, a less primitive and more open being, done cursing church assembly halls and hexing the Christian students, done painting the film screen in the lecture hall black.
I’m completely consumed by this novelty that’s me. I feel easy and unreal in the reading room, as though I’ve been digitised. I feel indistinguishable from the bookshelves I stand by, from the students I get to know or sit next to, the white laptop I’ve got. No one but me can observe these changes; I’m the only constant in my own life. No one but me knows that just a couple of years ago I was black-clad and dark. Now I’m so malleable, I can chew myself like gum. I can reach right into my body and change its shape, comb myself into another physical existence, as if I were made of the whipped cream on my own birthday cake. I’m white and soft now, and I am God, but who cares, I don’t care about am, about being, I only care about becoming, about distance, about the keyboard shortcuts, about the drive away from something. I scroll down and through myself, finding less and less of the South the further and further down, or away, I get from there. It’s not here. In the new me, I can put it away, finally.
I’m someone else now, a stranger. Lots of people think I’m Swedish or Danish. I don’t correct them. I only stretch as far away as possible from the Southern hatred, as far away from the original version of myself as I can take myself. I work on white paper that I no longer try to paint. I worship canonised films now, films that I previously would have been sceptical of, and I read novels that I wouldn’t have touched in college. I don’t protest, only smile, while the professor tells me, since I’m Norwegian, that Hamsun, pronounced Ham Sun, ham and sun, is one of the greatest writers in history. I’m far enough from where I came from not to care, and mature enough. I accept and respect the professor’s perspective; maybe Hamsun could be Ham Sun to me too. I’m efficient, productive and positive; it’s as if I shook my head and my hair shed its black pigment.
In the years that follow, after I’m done with the