by Jenny Hval
We walk down Tøyen. Under our feet is Oslo, southern Norway, the South, in ruins, layer upon layer of refuse and faeces, fossils of Norwegian folk tales, paintings and monopolies on food production. And below that are the archives of the underground, mile after mile of blood.
From the chain coffee shop, or from Venke’s apartment, you can spy on the American metal tourists getting off the 37 bus at the Oslo Street stop to visit old Helvete, the record shop, now called Neseblod, nosebleed. A lot of them come here after reading that crap book Lords of Chaos. Unsure about what exactly it is they’re looking for, they stand there in their cute leather jackets and collars, peering across the road before they cross it and enter the shop to buy jumpers with printed band and record logos.
Sometimes I spot black-haired couples with pierced lips and DEATH written in fake gothic font on their denim jackets, buzzing around in the streets below the Munch museum. Smart phones in their hands and map apps on the screens, they search confusedly for the apartment where Varg Vikernes killed Øystein Aarseth in 1993. Once in a while they get as far as ringing the doorbell. When Lords of Chaos was made into a film the producers wanted to shoot it there, to make it more authentic. But they would have found an entirely ordinary Oslo apartment with a cosy living room and kittens playing around chair legs and burrowing into the sofa cushions (they are lords of chaos, too), and a window with a view right into the botanical garden, Oslo’s 200-year-old root system. If you stand by Venke’s window and look to the right, you can just make out the herb garden through the beech leaves where liquorice root, lavender, vervain and agrimony are intertwined in a witch’s brew. Drink this brew daily, to ward off unnecessary masculine problems.
The sun has been shining directly on the flat for hours, and inside the air is dense, like the air in a tomb furnished with our belongings. Venke opens the window, pulls out the coffee machine and pours water into the kettle. Terese slumps on the couch in the living room and opens her laptop. I’m in the hallway reading a message on my phone, then I put the phone in sleep mode and kick off my shoes. If a line were drawn between us, we’d form a triangle pointing into the flat:
hallway
me
kitchen living room
Venke Terese
Or, explained in band terminology:
me
guitar
Venke Terese
bass drums
The triangle is a simple shape, but more complex than the simplified binary that language is stuck in. The triangle is always expanding. It always opens up to a multiplicity that branches out in our subconscious. When we introduce that third component, we no longer have only a mirror image, but depth, or a magical symbol, creating portals to other places. What happens to two counterparts if you add a third? It becomes hard to define what the third component is; it could represent a sea of different possibilities. Reality, fiction, and? Man, woman, and? The presence of this third point makes the counterparts tremble.
We flip the triangle and point the tip down. This is the first shape we find on the body, and the most magical: the dark triangle of pubic hair. We step into the magical, with the trash, the underground and the shadows.
The root of all witchcraft is in this first magical shape. The magic lies deep inside, far away from the South, far away from Oslo and Norway, and at the same time so near that you can stretch out your hand and pluck some wilted grass for your witch’s cauldron from the exit to Grimstad on the E18 highway. Magic is far away, because it’s a place where God can’t see you, I think; that’s how we can find each other there. We leap out of the sinful, lonely subjective and into something that’s somewhere else. In that place I’m no longer subjective, but subversive. In that place I can write. I can write because language is allowed to transcend and transform. It’s the film’s place, and it’s the band’s place.
Strictly speaking, band is probably not the most accurate classification language has for us, but witches. In the old days some called us beldams – belles dames. That probably carried a more positive charge and could’ve made a cutesier band name, but we honestly think that’s too much about appearances and not enough about magic. Witch is the more commonly used term anyway. Definition: ‘Witch represents that which defies God.’ Definition: ‘Witch represents the ideological being that symbolises everything capitalism has had to destroy.’ All in all, we’re pretty pleased. Witches were the first band, but no one calls us a band, because a band is a transgressive community. A community like that can’t take the blame for anything, and blame is what we’re supposed to take.
Traditionally the world has been seen as a series of binaries: inside and outside, living and dead, man and woman, fact and fiction, science and witchcraft … (We know all this, Venke, Terese and I, and you probably know it, too; it’s obvious, it’s ‘reality’.) Power, too, needs an antithesis, an ‘it’ or a ‘her’ that can be a container for everything that has threatened it. The witch is that container; she’s the one who threatened the church, God, Christianity’s domination, the establishment, emperors, kings, barons, Freemasons, medical science, philosophy, logic, brute strength. The deciding characteristic of a witch is: she hates God.
I move on from looking at ’90s Darkthrone to poring over old books on witchcraft, studying the language used to describe the witch, her transformation, her art and her crimes. A lot of effort has been put into these definitions. Since the witch is the symbolic antithesis of power, her existence has to be constantly accounted for, and the threat she poses justified. The witch hunts of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mostly targeted women, and as a result a lot has been written about why women more often become witches. The witch is most often referred to as she and her. The old scriptures claim that witchcraft has to be more accessible to women. Some describe the witch as dormant in all women, intrinsic to woman’s nature. Others, later, claim that only certain kinds of women perform those devilish rituals. The real rituals are where the transformation happens, where witches swear that they really do hate God, with both soul and body, and in the presence of Lucifer and other witches. Witch-begat.
I read that the laws concerning witches and witchcraft were usually interpreted by secular courts of law, not the Church. Maybe that’s why it seems as if most of the people burnt at the stake during the witch trials were those who had challenged the establishment in some way. Political rebels, disobedient wives, shamans, midwives, unmarried lovers, agitators, Sámi people, and other people who threatened the position and prerogatives of church or kingdom, were singled out, persecuted, prosecuted and convicted as sorcerers.
What’s supposed to perish when these women are convicted and burnt at the stake? What is it that must go up in smoke? It usually boils down to two words: communal resistance. The fire is symbolic as well as real, meant to inspire social as well as bodily fear, to weaken any lingering resistance in the remaining population. The witch trials are in many cases associated with the establishment’s own fears of revolts by the common people and the strengthening of collective movements. They take place at the time of the emergence of capitalism, a period when ideologies had to be shared and developed without provoking any particular resistance in order to be established. The new theories of society include not only religion and the nation state, but also value production, exploitation of workers, and definitions of paid and unpaid labour.
Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too). These ideas and distinctions are pretty much the pillars of capitalism, of a capitalism that aims to become itself a mysterious, natural and un
controllable force (that is, God). This is how definitions are created that decide what constitutes paying work, and what isn’t actually work and therefore cannot be paid: all based on ancient cultural and religious prejudices that profit the powerful. In one stroke, a hierarchy is also created that determines which people can be paid or should be paid the most. At the same time, linguistic hierarchies develop between clearly defined tasks and tasks that are less quantifiable, more social, less valuable, in all kinds of labour. Work produced in bonds isn’t work. Not even in art. The band isn’t work, either.
Reproduction, this work that isn’t work and that can’t be paid, is oddly tangled up in theories about witches. During the witch trials it was constantly pointed out that witches aren’t fertile and that childlessness itself could be proof of witchcraft. Fertility (the ability to be impregnated and reproduce, not the ability to produce, or create), itself the proof of womanhood, is what the witch sacrifices in the pact she enters into with the devil.
Instead of bearing children, witches are said to devour them, or sacrifice them to the devil, and to enchant men into impotence. They are tried for the following: murder, abduction, causing impotence, cursing, hexing and not giving birth, all paraphrases of the greatest sin: resisting power, asking questions, hating God.
But what if these divisions ceased to exist? What if you stopped drawing a distinction between women and witches, between production and reproduction? What if you no longer separated arts and crafts from witchcraft? What if you examined what happens in the bindings, in the channels, in the blasphemy, in the dark triangles?
That’s our band.
The whole world could be our witch’s dorm.
We stay only partially visible now. We keep to the underground, in the shadows, in the apartment, as we plan the future, our future as a band.
The triangle rests.
Venke can be seen sleeping by the kitchen table with a tablet on her belly. Terese is hunched over her laptop, and I open the coat closet and stare into the darkness, thinking about the girl from Puberty and her shadow.
I give her a place on the page here, and hope I don’t insult her. I just want to be close to something by being close to someone, and if I’m near her, I can perhaps be a little less primitive and pitiful; I can open up and get even closer to Venke and Terese, other people, you. Perhaps Puberty could rub a little paint off on me. Her pigments – the red and white flecks in her skin, the black background, the brown bed frame, are made from rock and metal oxides. They look like the colour charts of my own skin, my skeleton, my organs.
Or maybe it’s her shadow bringing us together, that smouldering texture up against the wall that’s so easily folded up nicely and forgotten inside a psychological metaphor or an expressionist historical detail. We step into it, into this space that’s dark and a little thicker than air. The hatred gathers into a compressed texture. There’s so much hope in here, hope that the shadow will finally get so dense that you could take it with you, or hope that you could mount it, step up off the ground and get out of here and into somewhere else. Maybe, inside this shadow, I could get closer to you, maybe in there we could change our own texture, get something and leave something behind, in a place between imagination and reality, life and death, myself and the world. We could hate together.
The palms of my hands are sweaty now, and my breath a little too quick; the way it gets when I stick my hands a little too far down into fiction, or too far off in the margins. I look increasingly like a cartoon character, sketched in a few lines, or perhaps more like that accelerating, sleepless online network. The internet is everywhere and reminds me of midmorning gruel filling up the house. Gruel is fairy tale blood, or fairy tale Wi-Fi.
Rats rummage in the basement under Venke’s apartment. They always find another impossible way into the basement storage. Even though rats don’t know about capitalism or the internet or contemporary Oslo, they know the only thing necessary, the thing I also seek. They know the underground, the ways in, the colours and the walls, and they understand how the world expands in the spit bubbles, in the uneven surface between canvas and dried oil paint, in the air pockets between our hands when we hold them, in the spaces between us; there’s always space.
We follow the rats. The rats are always just ahead of us. First come the rats, then comes the plague, call-response, and it’s never just one rat. The rats are a band; rats are always plural. Rats are always we. Ghosts, gruel, aura, fantasy, magic.
An episode:
A band composed of six girls plays in a bowling alley with gloomy lighting. They are dressed in black and the music they play gradually becomes darker and slower.
Suddenly their instruments are made of paper.
The girls begin to touch their instruments as if they don’t understand what just happened.
They pick up pairs of scissors from the floor and begin cutting up the instruments instead of playing them. The music continues as if nothing has happened.
Suddenly the girls are made of paper, too.
The girls look at their scissors, smile, turn toward each other in pairs and cut each other’s throats in one synchronised snip. Their heads topple off their bodies and massive amounts of red fibre silk paper streams from their empty necks.
THE END
The Gig
Where is God?
God is in the knitted hats of the humble billionaires, the heirs’ sailboats, and the shareholders’ velvet-lined inside pockets. God is in the pillboxes and the protein powder at the gym. God watches over the reality TV producers and the media corporations’ financial advisers. God surfaces in the threshing machines separating bad art from good art. God’s hand rests protectively over the hand that slaps your arse at school, at the rock club, at the university and on the underground. Because God is always in the system, in the sewers, in the trash, in the garbage. With the whores and the poor, like they teach us in school. In the 1990s the word whore is used frequently in the South; it’s apparently biblical enough to be used in public. Society’s trash. God looks after them, though. That’s why it’s good to be poor and exploited. You’re closer to God that way; you know better than others what it’s like to live. You’re a straight-talker. And God’s a straight-talker, too, Let there be light, he says, and there was light, and now the sun rises over the hills and the rooftops and the car parks and tints the hoods of cars and the pedestrian’s intestines.
It’s early morning, sometime during the spring of 2016. We’ve just finished our first project inside the rock under Ekeberg Hill. This is our band’s first gig. With copper bit, death knells, mistletoe and scans of the root system in the botanical garden, we’ve cooked up a razor-thin infected metal thread that we’ve pushed into one of the city’s main reserves. It doesn’t interrupt the internet or the electricity, and it emits no more sound than a faint peep. Only particularly attentive dogs can hear our gig, and right now they are still waiting patiently for their owners to wake up and take them out for a morning walk. But you’re not supposed to hear anything, either. We summoned smell with our incantations, not sound. We’ve asked for the silent h to manifest.
Our result oozes from the mountainside and continues to do so for the next two years. Colloquially it becomes known as the trash stench, because it smells like rotten milk and wet dog. But the smell isn’t trash or animals. It’s metaphysical waste. Just as a percentage of the dust in our homes is our own hair and skin, the smell comes from internet waste, from email after email of generic asylum application rejections, cuts in social services, social housing rent hikes, press release after press release from government spin doctors. We’ve made porridge out of metaphysical pimple pus. Right now, even God is wading in it out there. Call it our little noise project, our little wool factory.
Frequent updates about the trash stench pop up on news apps throughout the following year:
UNEXPLAINED SMELL IN OSLO
and later
IS THE SMELL HERE TO STAY?
SMELL EXPERTS CR
ACK THE STENCH CODE
TIRED OF STINKING
THE TOURIST INDUSTRY IN TROUBLE
ESTATE AGENTS FEAR HOUSING MARKET STENCH- COLLAPSE
CITY COUNCIL HIRES TECH GIANT FOR STENCH INVESTIGATION
and
FINANCIAL SECTOR SPONSORS STENCH INVESTIGATION WITH MILLIONS
The final update, a year later, is
TECH GIANT ON THE TRASH STENCH: BENIGN BUT SERIOUS ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORISM FROM UNKNOWN CRIMINAL NETWORK
In the article the private investigators emphasise that while the stench hasn’t brought with it any measurable air pollution, they fear that it creates worry and confusion in the population, and so they are developing new tech to improve air quality as they investigate this unknown criminal network. They add, ‘We believe that we can reverse negative tendencies in social development using the right technology. The right technology could, we maintain, be the answer to questions usually regarded as social issues.’
That last sentence automatically produces an extra puff of stench above central East Oslo. An invisible cloud brews down in Grønlia, only to travel against the wind towards Bjørvika, making good time, and seeping into every air vent in the new Barcode development. It’s a start: a slow, modern church arson, but we need more. We need sound.
Black metal. What is it, when did it begin?
1993, says Terese. Church arson and killings.
1987, says Venke. Mayhem releases their first EP, Death Crush.
1981, I say. Hellhammer’s knight rituals and cassette tapes.
Trash the year then, and let’s stick to Norway, says Venke. True Norwegian black metal.
Is it perhaps the closest we ever got to rebellion? someone asks.
Rebellion against what, someone responds, Norwegian Christian culture? It was just a couple of teenage boys.