by Jenny Hval
and return like breathing, or like a children’s game
At times they vanish from sight, and we return to a few images of the forest, without VENKE and TERESE. We see the piss dry on the earth,
the blood dry on the flowers
something black trickling onto the red
black blood mixing with the red
All colours slowly fade to black, in the way everything turns black and disappears when the sun sets.
Another day begins.
VENKE continues to walk through the forest; TERESE is heard behind her. Close-ups.
Is it the same day, or the next day?
Suddenly new steps are heard, and VENKE crashes into someone else, an unfamiliar person, ŚMIERĆ. We see the collision in closeups, it’s embarrassing and weird, and they nudge a lot of places on each other’s bodies: hand against hip, hip against hip, belly against breasts, cheek against cheek.
VENKE and ŚMIERĆ both end up on the ground. TERESE bends over and puts her hand on VENKE.
TERESE: Are you OK?
VENKE (rubs hand on knee): Yeah.
TERESE and VENKE look at ŚMIERĆ, who is dressed entirely in black, with a tattered leather jacket, leather trousers, spikes on his arms and corpse paint on his face, looking a little worn out.
TERESE: Hi, are you OK?
ŚMIERĆ: Nie rozumiem, co mówisz.
TERESE: Oh, sorry … English? Are you okay?
ŚMIERĆ: (very broken): Ah! Yes, okay.
VENKE: What are you doing out here?
ŚMIERĆ: Oh … um … photo shoot.
VENKE: Photo shoot?
ŚMIERĆ gesticulates to signal air guitar riffs and bad growling.
ŚMIERĆ: Photo shoot with, you know, Norway forest. Black metal.
VENKE: Black metal band! Where is your photo shoot?
ŚMIERĆ: Um … I … up this way … no, that way … no … don’t know. I am … lost.
VENKE: Oh.
ŚMIERĆ: Yes.
TERESE looks at ŚMIERĆ, who shrugs, and then looks at VENKE. She wipes a little corpse paint from her cheek that has rubbed off on her from ŚMIERĆ.
TERESE: You had a little …
The three of them continue through the forest landscape, which now appears to be rooted in a Southern hilly marshland, somewhere within that magical triangle of Southern villages, Arendal, Froland and Grimstad. Dark spruce, ponds, and blueberry heather surround the hikers. TERESE and VENKE hike competently, reconnoitring at the clearings and on top of hills, stopping ŚMIERĆ when they sense a moose or a fox or hear other noises. ŚMIERĆ follows them; he’s more bewildered and wearing a spikey jacket and belt and boots that aren’t suited for hiking. He gradually smudges his makeup all over his face and breathes deeply. Sometimes he hums a little to himself, other times he just looks desperate.
During a break the three of them stop. ŚMIERĆ is whirling around, as if he’s a little anxious, looking for ticks or insects before he sits down on a stump. Brushes ants from his shoe.
TERESE: (to Venke, whispering faintly, but excitedly): He’s in a black metal band!
VENKE: Isn’t that sort of 1991, though?
In some frames we no longer see the people, we just wobble through the forest, seeing it from the people’s perspective. Gradually the sight line is lowered, with the canopies higher and higher up in the sky, until we see from the perspective of a rat.
The music over this hiking scene starts as a standard atmospheric black metal intro, with synths and maybe a gong, that extends over time, never becoming a song. The forest swirls past as the volume gradually increases and the drone sounds are slightly displaced and disrupted, as if we’ve entered a zone where electrical equipment doesn’t work, or we’re on a Skype call with a poor connection. The disruptions and the dissonances of the music shift over to the forest itself; it begins to flicker and grow more and more pixelated. VENKE and TERESE look around; they notice it, too. For a long time, VENKE stares right at us, has she glimpsed something? Then it’s peaceful and quiet again. A little darker, but otherwise unchanged.
The three of them continue on their hike. ŚMIERĆ starts to look tired, sweaty and scared. The girls take his tote bag, decorated with an upside-down pentagram, and take turns carrying it. They don’t look tired, but perhaps seem more detached, as if they sense something.
The music changes now, into sounds that we can’t quite fit into a genre. We’re in a new place, where we can make connections we don’t understand. The forest has done something to us, we’ve forgotten where we came from, forgotten that there are machines and clever indie pop music and noise and traffic and hard synthetic sounds and soapy hard-plastic products. We’ve disintegrated entirely, into little prehistorical jellyfish cubes, and find comfort in everything that seems organic. Blood and menstruation and shit and piss and rotting fungus seem safer than the gleaming and alien things we don’t understand.
The three wanderers are about to finish a break in a forest clearing. ŚMIERĆ looks calmer, but sweaty and twisted, as if he’s on his way into a trance. The girls are a little worried about him.
VENKE: Have some water.
ŚMIERĆ: No, no.
They start to walk again. ŚMIERĆ gets up, then collapses. TERESE and VENKE turn around, sit down on either side of him, place a rolled-up jacket under his head.
VENKE: What’s wrong?
ŚMIERĆ: (quiet): Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
VENKE: Are you in pain?
ŚMIERĆ : Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
TERESE: Tell us what’s wrong!
ŚMIERĆ : Aaaaaaaaaaa.
TERESE and VENKE try to help: they make a bed of moss and fabric they strip from the backpack; they undress him and start to wash his body. The water droplets they pour over him make crystal noises like the sounds from a wind chime, but just evaporate on his skin. ŚMIERĆ continues to chant AAAAAAAAAA, looking straight ahead, as if he knows what’s happening.
TERESE puts her hand on ŚMIERĆ’s belly to clean it, but then retracts it swiftly. We notice a round shape on his belly, a little bulge that grows gradually bigger.
TERESE puts her hand on VENKE’s. A thin white membrane covers their eyes like an inner eyelid. In a trance they continue to wash his belly around the bulge and the water runs down the side of his body, outlining its contours in water, like a chalk outline of a hand.
Slowly his makeup is transformed from corpse paint to an Edvard Munch face,
which is then made up into an entirely white face again,
as if dipped in sugar or crystals,
and then into a face without makeup
but also without characteristics, without eyes, nose or mouth
perhaps totally in line with what we recognise as human,
with only generic orifices
or is that just what a face looks like when the makeup is
removed and we look too closely?
VENKE’s and TERESE’s faces change, too. The skin around their eyes swells and becomes red and sore, as if their eyelids have become lips, and their irises are split into little kaleidoscopic colour particles.
Finally brownish black goo starts oozing from all of ŚMIERĆ’s orifices. It’s sometimes a little lumpy, then smoother, more watery.
The girls begin to smear the gunk over his body, initially trying to get rid of it, but later just to make a bit of a mess. It starts to gently etch his skin, like oil slowly brought to a boil.
Gunk begins to bubble under the skin around the bulge on his belly.
ŚMIERĆ breathes quickly and closes his eyes in pain. The girls demonstrate birth breathing with pursed lips, which he attempts to mimic.
The girls study the bulge on the belly. It moves as a finger under a carpet would. They start to gather lichen and moss and leaves and flowers and arrange their haul at the bottom of ŚMIERĆ’s belly.
The thin flower stalks and lichen flakes merge into thicker amphibian folds around the bulge. Slowly we realise that they form an opening, a vagina. Like a sculpture, or a p
iece of clothing they’re designing. When the girls remove their hands, you can see a hint of movement from the end pieces of the folds, like little tentacles.
Then the girls press their fingers against the vagina, which slowly begins to open. Brown-black gunk gushes over their hands.
TERESE shifts her hands up toward ŚMIERĆ’s face and places a twig carefully between his teeth, so he can bite on it. She starts to breathe in his face, strong quick breaths that he tries to mimic. In the meantime VENKE sticks first one finger into the hole to feel it, then two, and then her arm deep in, as if up a cow’s rectum. TERESE carries on doing the birth breathing. They shout.
VENKE and TERESE: PUSH!
ŚMIERĆ pushes and screams a long HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Black blood gunk doesn’t gush anymore but pulses calmly as it flows from the vagina, continuing in beautiful lava-like streams down the sides of the belly, over the crotch and back to nature. TERESE’s and VENKE’s tongues swim in clear spit, and the drool runs down their chins as they work.
TERESE has turned back toward VENKE who with some effort manages to extract a small, round, white egg as ŚMIERĆ pushes one last time. All three enter into a deeper trance with the egg between their hands.
TERESE: We found it.
VENKE: In a hole we made with our own hands. I was inside.
TERESE: What was it like in there?
VENKE: Warm and soft, red and black, white and yellow.
TERESE: Egg white and egg yolk.
VENKE: I didn’t have access, but I wasn’t expelled.
Slowly the three of them come out of the deepest part of the trance. VENKE rolls her head lightly from side to side, as if she’s stretching. TERESE carefully changes her sitting position. They look at each other.
It’s unclear who says:
I just felt like I’ve gotten so close to you now, am I nuts? Maybe it’s the forest, maybe it’s VENKE, maybe TERESE, maybe it’s me telling you.
TERESE and VENKE lay the egg, which glistens and glitters and radiates light as if from a flashlight or an iPhone, on ŚMIERĆ’s chest. He is tired and happy. He pets the egg and laughs.
But then he jerks and disappears into a trance again. We watch his hair and skin start to melt, and the magical vagina starts rotting. ŚMIERĆ is still all smiles, but his breathing grows irregular.
Then he slowly becomes grainier and grainier
like a picture that is corrupted as it’s copied again and again
like a picture that’s resampled and resampled in gradually lower resolution
until he’s completely invisible and blurred.
All the while TERESE and VENKE whisper, this time in Norwegian: Where are you going? Don’t be scared, relax. Go in, but not toward the egg white. See, do you see the other colours? There are so many more colours. Go to them. Do you see the black, the black yolks? Go to the yolks. Go to them. Happy death.
TERESE and VENKE (hum):
Over whites and through the yolk
Looms the shrouded song of death
Waves make for a murky cloak
Sounds of white bone on the breath
ŚMIERĆ has now completely disappeared into a bigger and bigger pool of black gunk that bubbles and seethes. Only the skeleton and the rotting vagina, the phantom hole, are left.
The egg is wobbling on the edge, as if it considers jumping back into the hole,
but the hole gradually closes, bit by bit, like a seam,
and finally melts into the black puddle,
which seethes and boils, reducing into a black blot of gruel.
Two hands are placed on the gruel.
A Satanic pact between you and me.
They start to pick up and break apart the skeleton pieces. After a lot of back and forth and with the aid of both teeth, elbow grease and crushing stomps, they manage to break them up and arrange them into a new form.
Afterward they lie on either side of the bone sculpture and exhale, relieved.
From above you can see two girls resting on their backs, hands stretched out across a white bone mass in the shape of an upside-down cross, with the skull at the top and the egg in the middle where the lines cross each other.
Slowly the bones, too, disappear into the earth, or the earth emerges up from the ground in the form of little ants, dragging the pieces down into the underground.
TERESE and VENKE (hum):
Sounds of white shell on its breath
The egg is left alone again on the ground, wobbles.
The egg trembles even more,
The egg is about to fall,
now the egg falls
into TERESE’s hand
VENKE puts her hand outside TERESE’s.
TERESE puts her other hand around the other side of the egg.
VENKE then puts her other hand around that one.
VENKE: One, two, three!
On ‘three’ the girls lift the egg and put it in Venke’s backpack. They wrap their clothes and a towel around it.
The membranes slide open and disappear from VENKE’s and TERESE’s eyes. They look at each other, they look at the egg nested in the backpack.
As the girls pack, the last pixelated remains of ŚMIERĆ drain down into the stones and moss and earth, down toward the underground and the deepest roots, like cream absorbed into skin, penetrating the layers of meat and bone and marrow. Soon the body and its shape have completely disappeared, and only a little stripe of black sand remains on the brown earth, like a tiny lava-stream fossil, a burnt-out witch’s bonfire.
The girls begin to walk again, slowly. The anxiety of the entire forest is dominated by the fragility of the egg. The girls monitor the egg constantly, hold the egg, warm the egg, rock the egg.
Their hands are visible on the egg, they stroke it, warm it, wrap it up in jumpers, moss and plants. They roll it carefully up hilltops and pass it to each other when they have to climb a fence or step over a brook. TERESE cleans the egg with a damp cloth and VENKE puts it on her chest, as if nursing it. They sleep with the egg between them, their upper bodies naked. They lie awake looking at the egg in the dark, in the flickering light from the fire’s licking flames.
Sometimes one of them wakes up while the other continues to sleep, and only when the first one falls asleep does the other wake. Without knowing it, they push the same nightmare back and forth between each other: one where the egg has rolled too close to the fire and been hardboiled.
It’s light again. The hiking continues, through thickets and over tree stumps, further into the Southern waves of hills and marshes. But the forest is gradually disappearing from the surroundings, as if the egg radiated a new light replacing everything happening around it. The girls walk through brush-wood and rain, over fences and down slopes, but the colours of the landscape are being rubbed out; first the brightest colours, then the softer shades, until it looks like we’re in a pencil sketch or a written-in notebook. Finally the lines fade and are washed white, and we move blindly along the margin, hesitant, as though we’re snow-blind after staring at the egg’s shell too long.
There are no shapes left in the picture anymore. Trees and hills aren’t visible. Nature has been transformed into vague memories of nature. Only VENKE and TERESE are visible, and only barely; we see them as a baby perceives contours or bold shapes, like a tongue that moves under the skin in the jaw. The egg is perceived only dimly and as a negative, as what’s held in the girl’s folded arms. VENKE is seen clenching white-knuckled hands around nothing, or maybe the egg, but TERESE’s hands, too, cling to something, hold something over her chest.
Then the sound of the walking and of the forest fades out, we no longer hear the girls breathe or sniff, talk or shout. We no longer hear twigs snap, or shoes squishing on moss, or birds singing or insects buzzing. Maybe it happened gradually: the sounds became more and more electric and manipulated and now the birds and the bumblebees and VENKE and TERESE have been replaced by synthetic effects and algorithms, or maybe someone abruptly switched off the sound.
>
Perhaps we’re on our way through a portal, where everything is toned down and rubbed out, cleansed, restarted.
The only sound left is the sound of my voice. This sound is everything, it comes from all directions at the same time, as if the mouth that speaks is around us, as if we’ve been swallowed by the forest itself. The sound is the sound of the text in my book, this book, read inside your own head.
We strain to understand the whispered words, but most of the sounds feel as though they have no meaning; they’re only a physical process, airy vowels and tiny consonants that rub against the mouth. The sounds of the voice have become abstract; they’re vaguely reminiscent of tingling, little grains of sand in an otherwise white and infinite room, like the sound of an old Geiger counter.
Each phrase from the voice is followed by a silence that disappears into the white forest. Every sequence full of sound has an empty twin, a moment of nothing, a negative. The silence emerges like a reflex, a blink, without associations, without content, as if every sound has been directed at something else and waits for an answer from the other side of the wasteland.
Upon encountering the light, the shape of the egg has been rubbed out or inverted, and the egg now beams so powerfully that we can’t look straight at it: the egg is everything.
Form is the thing in us that stretches, that pushes the boundaries between us, against us, creating the sensation of intimacy. Here in the white forest, feet are one with the ground they step on, bodies pass straight through trees, the bark and skin tickle each other, their movements synchronised. White mushroom caps growing from white sand stretch directly into our bodies, soft like porridge. We don’t know if we’re on our way through something or if we’re stuck. We don’t know if we’re alive. All boundaries are rubbed out, and nothing is impenetrable anymore.
Or perhaps these descriptions don’t describe the forest; perhaps they describe our own resistance to it. To describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread. Could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here? We’ve given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the egg white, the original place, the original life.