Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

  Not far from the malpaís is more burnt dirt of an entirely different kind: Trinity Site, scene of the first atom bomb test explosion, 16 July 1945, postponed for three days because of bad weather. The Trinity bomb was based on the fission process: atoms, once regarded as indivisible, exploded or were torn apart. Trinity’s power came from splitting atoms in two. It rose through the atmosphere, a glowing, mushroom-shaped erection fantasy, with the aid of Oppenheimer’s technology, the United States’ immense defence budget and the modern establishment’s unwavering faith in the logical binary division of the universe.

  The biblical creation process is a story about fission, too, or at least a version of it. The first man, Adam, originally contained both masculine and feminine forces, united by the inevitable seam of cosmic threads. Adam was in this way completely androgynous, but then, according to the myth, they were unhappy with their own bisexuality, and as preparation for the universe, they cast out their feminine parts to become purely masculine. Only then could divine power shine from his eyes – from those reformed, straight eyes.

  For scientists and philosophers, the atom bomb had the potential to become something more than a total meltdown of atoms and a catastrophe for mankind. Trinity and its successors could be conclusive evidence of a divine power, impelled by the pure masculine symbolism of a process that split its own components, casting off the waste to create the most powerful force of energy humanity had ever seen. Perhaps that’s why the research programme behind Trinity, Little Boy and Fat Man was named the Manhattan project. Casting off the feminine parts made it possible to rise, surging with inhumane power up toward the sky, like a skyscraper, with an architecture that united Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy in a holy trinity, horny for God.

  I identify with the feminine parts, those left scattered around Adam’s body, the trash left behind by mankind’s fusion with God. The atomic waste is invisible; it has long since been dumped and buried underground, beneath towns and neighbourhoods populated by minorities and poor people. But out here in the desert, another kind of masculine waste glitters in the dry sunlight. The area is populated by oil field and military workers, and they’ve scattered their empty beer cans, used condoms, junk food containers and petrol cans across the landscape. It’s a modern version of the ram heads in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. In front of her never-ending New Mexico landscape, she displays the universe’s sacred waste: the skeletons float in the air, in front of mountains, sand and sky. They glisten; they are made of the salt of the earth and the sugar of witchcraft.

  What a disappointment it must have been for God’s scientific apprentices when they discovered the even more powerful fusion technology. In 1952 Operation Ivy detonated the fusion bomb Ivy Mike, equivalent to ten megatons of TNT, and even at that point the men of the establishment had begun to pull out of the American nuclear project. These bombs are a dead end, they thought; the potential destruction is too great. They hadn’t said that about Little Boy or Fat Man. But the fusion bomb really could blow the world as we know it to pieces. This process fuses atoms instead of splitting them; it brings isolated parts together into new forms that previously couldn’t exist. I imagine the fusion bomb as a recording of Adam’s gender-splitting process, the whole of genesis, in reverse, a restoring of the masculine and feminine into one condition, an impossible dimension, a join-the-dots feast. A perfect blasphemous construction built in the name of piety. Ivy is both a boy’s and a girl’s name. Has someone made a superhero figure of Ivy?

  Here in the malpaís, the scorched sand belt right next to Trinity’s melted circle, I feel the presence of the atoms as they always are, inside us, always moving. They own us, contain us and disintegrate us. When I rub my hands together, the atoms are closer to each other; perhaps a few even fuse between my wrists, heated by the desert sun. What I’m feeling is the atoms’ potential. I’m standing on the black belt, wondering if there were witches among the atom researchers in the ’40s and ’50s. Because if you learned to fuse atoms, you would also be able to see that the melting process doesn’t just unify two parts; there’s also a third, meddling component, an unnecessary addition, dust in the plug, a part that contributes to chaos, the original chaos. Atom, atom, and? Masculine, feminine, and?

  When the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961, the whole world’s elite trembled, not just because it was the most destructive weapon ever created, but because a bigger potential for and? had never been observed. The potential and the transgression found in the atoms could be transferred to philosophy, music, literature, film. That very same year, Věra Chytilová directed her first film, Agnès Varda made Cléo from 5 to 7, and Meredith Monk had her first solo performance. Shortly after, Roland Barthes began to write The Death of the Author, Luce Irigaray finished her master’s degree in psychology, and Jacques Derrida began to jot down ideas for the lecture he would give at John Hopkins University in 1966.

  After stopping in the Valley of Fires, I travel as close to the Trinity Site as I can get. There are no official signs or buildings in the area, just the odd roadside bench, boarded-off gravel roads and a single cardboard placard with something or other about the crater on it, probably hung there by an individual conspiracy theorist. The road into the crater is closed permanently, like most country roads in America that aren’t freeways or highways. When the map application shows me I’m nearby, I stop to look around at a garish rest stop, but all I can see is reddish brown desert hills, bone-dry shrubs and a run-over UFO badge on the ground. The next day, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque, I see bits of the glass that the desert sand was melted into during the bomb detonation. The matter is called trinitite, green like kryptonite, inside a dusty display case. A Geiger counter is exhibited above it as a demonstration. It crackles as it registers the atom’s processes. The sound of radio-activity. Trinitite is still too fresh to touch, too pure and masculine. Or is it we who are too frail, and allow ourselves to be radiated, are we too feminine, and?

  Here, right here, in front of the display case with trinitite, the film starts. Here I can write.

  In 1997, too old now for connect-the-dots, I’m stretched out in the witches’ dorm after practice with the metal band, watching German late-night television in secret. Every weekend they show soft-core porn films. I’ve been watching them for years already. I know the narrative style, the scenarios, the boundaries, the humour. My favourite scenes in these films are the ones where people are having sex but then can’t pull apart, the so-called penis captivus, when the vagina’s muscles are clamped around the penis with such power that it’s stuck. Penis captivus is as good as nonexistent in reality, but a frequent feature in the world of soft-core porn. One such scene: a group of nuns encounter a couple who are making love. The ensuing panic causes penis captivus.

  Soft-core porn presents these scenes as comical, but the humour is founded on the relationship between sex and sin. Porn’s existence is founded on sin. It’s no accident that a group of nuns is the catalyst for the penis’s plight. The soft-core world presents as a Catholic confession, duly followed by penance. Young novices enjoying themselves with candles after bedtime, church servants and priests coveted by old mother superiors, and the men of the church wreaking havoc on young girls in their congregation and in the convent. There’s an entire subgenre called nunsploitation. It’s easy to comprehend and easy to construct a plot about how sex is illegal and suppressed and therefore particularly exiting and blasphemous. As a result, conditions like penis captivus occur, as if God himself intervened and punished the naughty application of genitalia. Sex consistently results in unwanted, humorous and degrading consequences.

  But in these scenes of penis captivus, there’s something else afoot, something beyond guilt: a fusion of the atoms between penis and vagina, a Tsar Bomba, or perhaps something more: an addition, a creative line, a join-the-dots, a usually invisible and impossible bond between people, perhaps Siamese, perhaps radioactive and perhaps magical. Subtitles emerge
for me, when I watch soft-core porn, a map of the infinite possible relations between an infinite number of people.

  Contemporary hard-core porn is different: Puritan, American, evangelical. It reflects Protestantism. Following the golden era of the ’70s, hard-core porn becomes increasingly commercialised, smooth and tight. The oversized penises are only displayed erect. It’s efficient and low-budget, with clean canvases; the plotting is minimal and offers fewer consequences. The guilt isn’t in the desire or in the story; it’s transferred to the object, presented in the form of close-ups of female genitalia and other orifices. It gives the impression of being a documentary, with every scene concluding in a money shot where the penis pulls out of the hole so that I, the audience, can see the cum and confirm that the plot is real. There are no muscles in any orifices, no fuckability, holding it back. The penis is not in captivus, it’s independent and strong, like a mushroom cloud or a skyscraper rising toward the horizon. At the same time, it’s cleansed of bonds, connections, viruses and magic.

  Outside the school library, the girls from Jesus Revolution are discussing the moment when something becomes sex. I’m seated behind the glass wall reading, but end up listening. The girls try to define exactly where the boundary is; exactly when to stop. When does God come into the picture, when does God cum, when does something become sex? Is it the moment your boyfriend’s tongue slips in between your lips and you’re making out? I can’t hear too much through the glass wall, but I think they conclude that the tongue isn’t allowed because it’s a physical metaphor for penetration. Other girls talk less; for them, metaphors don’t count, and sixteen-year-olds have oral and anal sex (magical sex), because it’s not sex as long as it doesn’t touch the sacred hymen, the proof of innocence, the righteousness of woman, the veil that God’s eye sees right through, the connection between heaven and hell.

  The hard-core porn aesthetic resembles the imagery in the evangelical worldview. Desire, taboo and guilt (the holy Trinity) are all incorporated into the fetish objects. No one desires another person in hard-core porn: only objects are desirable. The person fucking, usually a man, is just an innocent victim of something sinful and fuckable. It can be reduced to a protestant maths equation: desire equals guilt, and it has to be distributed at the bottom of the hierarchical chain. The guilt is pushed down on the object, the body that’s being penetrated. The resulting hard-core porn is the proof of the equation. The protestant equation is in this way so relentless that it becomes pornographic itself. True protestant love.

  Think about it: in my language, the word LOVE, kjærlighet, contains the entire word TRUST, ærlighet. Norwegian love is 80 per cent honesty, 80 per cent confession, bowing your head to the powers of definition, naked in the face of God, truth and honesty, love and honour, the money shot. Is love, in Norwegian, hard-core? Is it cleansed of bonds and magic?

  But even the hard core contains a residue, 20 per cent mysticism and hope of transgression. If we forget submission and fetish and sin, there’s always something else. If you look closely enough, there’s always a clit in the throat, or a strange way of chewing gum, or a camera reflected in an eye, or an eye that looks like an egg. Even for the Jesus girls there’s always a handkerchief gone astray, a bare neck under the ponytail, a glass window flashing a rainbow into their mouths or along their zippers. There’s always an escape route from structure and rhetoric.

  There has to be room for them, too, these escape routes. I don’t just write to analyse; analysis can so easily become judgemental, categorical and clean-cut. Judgement only sends our actions underground, where they can continue to play out. But in analysis we lose ourselves and our desire, we lose the escape routes and the hatred. I want to enter the hard-core image now, enter and transgress, change the plot, put the penis in captivus, paint the screen black, watch the film backward. Maybe if I watch it enough times I’ll find something, like with the poo ritual in Sweet Movie. Maybe if I splice them together in writing, or into other films, into a shooting script or a film script that doesn’t belong to any film, if I splice together the cum shots into a white river that’s nauseating to watch, I’ll find something. I can fuse, I can be Operation Ivy, superhero Ivy, I can be a virus. I can infect porn with complex desire. The desire to find something, to dig out new meanings. The desire for hatred.

  The virus is the standard metaphor for the diseased elements of society, which sometimes spread quickly and dangerously, and sometimes cause a slow disintegration, rotting social democracies and nation states. Black metal has been called a virus, and homosexuality and porn culture and the Southern cruisers. The disease the virus causes spreads through the body and constructs a pattern for a new shape. It’s a communal, painful language that can infect us all. Influences connect people, bring us down and together, equalise us. Virus is a bond, after all.

  I dig VIRUS out of the word LOVE. I dig it out of I. I’m still looking for a bond. Or is that just something I etch into my memory to get closer to you, to make you a little more me? I’m looking for someone who can bring me closer to something. Dots I can line myself up between. Is that what I’m looking for in you? We share the same virus, I carry it for you, from you, on. Virus captivus.

  Let’s turn over the layers of pages, scenes, fabric, texture, character and images from porn, till we come to the iconic Japanese wood-block print Octopi and pearl diver from 1814. In this image, a woman lies on her back by a beach while two octopi pleasure her. One octopus has its head between her legs; the other is by her side caressing her chest and her mouth. Magic, fantasy, ecstasy.

  Genitals are already sea creatures. Wet and soft, from birth till death. We can only ever partly understand and grasp this. Like the sound of our voices and the blood that streams from our body, they are human osmosis, just as much connected to the world as to us. They represent something infinite and only partly real to our realist eyes. They are sluggish semi-fungi, partly submerged in water, moist, smooth, slick, perforated, born eyeless. They are half human matter and half imaginary creature. That’s why we have a separate sensory register for tentacles, molluscs and shell-fish. The first time I try to eat octopus I have such a strong reaction I think I’m allergic: I get hot, sweaty, red, salty, foggy. But maybe what I’m actually feeling is sensory empathy, a cannibal cautiousness.

  The sex is my internal organ, on the outside. My amphibian part. Genitalia displace my existence, distort the bond between life and death, matter and metaphor, land and sea. I extend myself physically out of myself. Fact and fiction meet and rub against each other, fill me up, smudge me, caress me.

  I’ve seen a picture of my own intestines, taken during a gastroscopy while I was at university. It’s a world where all sci-fi dreams meet, directly beneath my own ribs. The doctor shows me the image while I’m still woozy from the general anaesthetic, and I can remember seeing a foggy, strange planet, a soft landscape that coils in toward a narrow iris. I look deeper and deeper into my own spiralling muscle. The doctor gestures and tells me I have an illness that has worn down my intestinal villus. I think it looks like the inside of a tentacle, even though I’ve never seen the inside of a tentacle. I imagine that I have an illness that slowly turns me into an octopus.

  I’m completely unconscious during the gastroscopy, even though the general anaesthetic is light and short in duration. You did so well swallowing the gastroscopy, says the doctor. I’m not sure if I should say thank you, as I don’t remember any of it, neither the swallowing or the anti-swallowing. I’m not certain I ever spat it out. But during an exhibition a few years later I see a video of a sword swallower and I have to run out on the street, retching.

  The pearl diver has one of the little octopus arms (or is it a mouth) between her lips. Her mouth is open; it hasn’t been forced open, but plays softly and freely with the tentacle. She has opened doors and gates and cavities and holes and let out all the fantasies inside. Maybe the octopi have manifested as an inversion of herself, but with this inversion she is also connected to the sea,
the universe and eternity. Magically she has turned inside into outside and is caressed by her own intestines and organs, gels and fluids, bones and tentacles.

  This is where magic takes over for logic. Don’t try to follow me, just close your eyes, like the pearl diver. The octopi have emerged from the water, but her organs have emerged from her body too. The body is strung out on the beach now, and the ocean waves and molluscs are washed into and over her. Because they are her, have come from deep inside her, they can give and receive, they can touch her entire inside all at once, caress every single taste receptor. They participate in this infinite beat, flow with the jet stream and inside the spiral that is the innermost and darkest space. The inner outer space. The pearl diver lights lamppost after lamppost, line after line, dot after dot, in her own cosmos.

  It’s those frictions, this spark, that let in the imagination, that slowly stretch and connect all the gentle, impossible places. This is where I can say: imagine Puberty and the shadow around her body as the pearl diver and the octopi on the beach. Imagine that the shadow is a glowing, black organ that stretches out of her body, fusing inside and outside, darkness and glow, fury and joy, her hatred and mine. This is where I can say: imagine the Southerner’s soft consonants and vowels, like when they say hate like hadår (or Father like Fadær), imagine how this softer language stretches like amphibian, salty tentacles from further down in the deep, down in the sea, the throat, the body, the underground, the magical dimensions.

  These are the associations that white honesty erases, scrubbing them along its sheepback rocks. They can only be resurrected in the underground. This is what I wanted to write to you, in a language that love couldn’t summarise.

  Tell me, in your darkness, in your ocean, am I ever there? Have we ever reached each other?