by Jenny Hval
This is the easiest way to tamper with reality, the most primitive, the least costly, the most accessible gateway, cheaper and simpler than toilet paper. I imagine that we can meet here, you and I, as an audience, and watch our own places, the South, Norway, the forest, the band photo, disappear so slowly that we can’t say exactly when the real forest has become a black, blank monochrome.
At some point we’ll feel like we’re hallucinating, that we see a colour that isn’t really there, or the contours of a little black goat will appear next to me, and in that moment, when we no longer know if what we see is actual pixel information, fantasy, or texture on the inside of our own eyelids, the illusion of reality and the illusion of fiction melt into a joint place, an impossible place, where reality and fiction are only the extremities, the space in front of the capital letter and the full stop at the end of the long impossible sentence that we can write in between, together, inside the magical.
Are you there, in that last unwritten scene, in the dark?
Are you scrolling through the South now? Risør, Tvedestrand, Arendal, Grimstad, Lillesand? Are you zooming, kicking off with two fingers across the touchpad?
Dusk settles in so slowly and lasts for so long that we might have time to think the same things, breathe in time with each other, imagine the same images. Lines and dots appear in the black and join to form an image:
A pair of thighs glimpsed underneath a skirt’s hem, with their moles and comedones, and if we study each point for long enough they form a constellation directing our gaze toward the deepest black hole. We go further and further into the room between the legs, between the lines, while the universe in there becomes steadily bigger and more expansive. Everything’s in there.
A series of images fade in during the zoom:
Star map
World map
Older and older world maps where borders and accuracy shift and more and more imaginary kingdoms appear. We get farther and farther away from the mundane globe, and nearer and nearer Hy-Brasil and Atlantis.
A waffle segment with brown cheese spins in kaleidoscopic crystals. Waffles already have patterns, and through the kaleidoscopic lens every little square on the heart-shaped segment beams different coloured lights into the surrounding air, like mirror balls, freshly fried.
A group of witches dressed in padded coveralls stand in a circle on a marsh, singing loudly and energetically and with their whole bodies. Every voice is different, every voice breaks away from the melody in different places.
A quicker collage sequence begins, perhaps a roll of film with rips and holes:
A girl swims, seen through the kaleidoscope.
Blood, or pinkish-red foaming water, runs into the drain of a dirty sink.
A nebula slowly twists inward in a spiral.
White larvae, insects and butterflies stream out of a hole.
A needle shaft, a little thick, pushes into skin, then punctures and shoots through it.
A thumb is stuck in a mouth.
Jelly flung through air.
Fast movements through hyperspace.
A close-up of frozen pizza topping melting, like a blurrier and blurrier prehistoric world map of Norway’s underground. Closer and closer to Hy-Brasil and Atlantis, in the shape of mythological bits of pepper.
A band, standing by a monument, toss their hair around in slow motion.
A waffle with jam is folded up and looks like blood-covered labia.
Marie Hamsun sits in a white hammock in a summer garden, Nørholm 1943.
Mashed potatoes topped with beets trembling in slow motion.
Body parts are displayed: abstract but sensual curves, one side of a lower leg, an arch, a spine, a close-up of an armpit with curly hair, the dip between collarbones, a wrist bone, an eye socket, an earlobe.
Labia open and close, letting out little drops of blood.
An eye cries or blinks.
A face speaks in tongues, coming extremely close, tears streaming from the eyes and nose, the edges of the mouth and chin wet from drool, lips and eyes swollen in the heat of ecstasy.
Inger from Sellanrå farm squats in the white hammock on Nørholm with her hand in the air. She has short, light hair and tattoos down her arm. Her index finger and pinkie form the sign for Satan’s horns.
Fish balls wobble in their tin, making the brine flow over the edges and down the sides.
A sourdough bubbles, ferments, rises.
A carton of milk, skimmed, fortified with vitamin D, is opened and tipped over a glass.
A long wad of spit hangs from a pair of lips.
Thick blood spills from the skim-milk carton and covers the glass, which is actually upside-down, so the blood runs down the outside and over the table surface underneath, evenly.
A fountain of blood.
Raisins are sprinkled over a bowl of rice porridge, forming the image of labia, if that’s what we want to think it looks like. Raspberry jam is added and the porridge grows redder and redder.
A six-year-old girl sucks her thumb with eyes closed.
Hands above the porridge, dripping milk and jam.
A Midgard serpent sucks its own tail energetically.
A banana that looks like the thumbs-up gesture is inserted into an inflatable vagina and disappears inside it.
Brown bread is sliced and blood comes out, as though it’s a severed arm.
A group of witch girls in leather jackets, white T-shirts and jeans stage the Munch painting The Day After in the shed where Mayhem took some of their most famous press photos.
The three images are superimposed: the hungover lady from the Munch painting, Varg Vikernes from Mayhem and the witches.
A hand with rings and black nail polish with a silver shimmer picks up a white plastic knife and spreads a brown topping, maybe chocolate, maybe shit, on a slice of the brown bread.
The same hand stirs a bloody meat casserole with a wooden spoon, fast. Big bubbles and liquid shapes rise and fall in the pot, like animals that attempt to reach the surface but are stuck in the blood.
More fruits disappear into the same inflatable vagina. Plums, a green apple, a little pear. Grapes.
The thumb that’s sucked starts bleeding.
Smoke rises from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred.
A leech draws blood from a foot.
Gooseberries.
The hand with rings and nail polish stirs the meat casserole without a spoon, the whole hand stuck into it.
The witches that staged The Day After perform a version of Puberty in the same shed. One of them wears a nude suit and sits on the bench with arms held in a limp upside-down cross over the crotch. The other witches are covered in black body paint, and together they create the shadow behind the naked girl, against the graffitied wooden wall. One of them forms the girl’s hair by sitting directly behind her and putting two black hands over her forehead while her elbows point down toward the shoulders on each side of the head. Then everyone looks up, peering at us with ferocious, seething eyes, hating.
Tinned sliced carrots.
The hand is stuck deeper and deeper into the boiling blood soup in the pot. It is reminiscent of a veterinarian’s hand deep inside a cow’s butt. As the arm is pulled out, it has a scruffy live chicken in its hand. The chicken squeaks.
Crabsticks.
Venke tears a sheet from Pan, third edition (1908, with gold typeface and a picture of clouds and sea in gold), puts page after page in her mouth and begins to chew. As her mouth fills with Hamsun’s book, she thrusts her fingers in and tries to pack the brittle old paper tighter. Spit runs from both corners of her mouth and is also gold-coloured, like bright, thick urine.
Over this scene, Terese is reading a monologue: it might be audible, it’s about the Apocalypse and its seven signs, first something about how the internet is drained, then about waffles contorting in their waffle irons, next about snowing streetscapes covered in white – it snows milk cartons, yoghurt cups, fish balls and grated whit
e cheese – then she shouts that the goat’s cheese will go rancid, and that the white and grey speckled wool sweaters will all simultaneously split their seams across the country, and the IKEA shelves, the IKEA chairs! Look! They’re transformed into pick-up sticks and falling apart. We should never have chucked those Allen keys.
Then the skies fall, and techno and black metal, too. Lightning and thunderbolts strike across the country. Classroom set after classroom set of the New Testament fills with black ink. They rub out their own content, turning white to black. Soon The Old Testament follows; the chapters eat themselves and leave hundreds of pages of black monochrome, until Adam and Eve and the myth of creation and heaven are darkened and the earth is stuffed and backfilled.
Prawns.
Now the world prints a map of itself in 3D, in tones of blood.
Now the 3D printer prints two plastic people.
It’s Terese and Venke, embracing each other like lovers hugging, or like newborn twins, or yin and yang. They suck each other’s thumbs. They are smoking, they are hot, melting into each other until they resemble a puddle.
The chicken keeps squeaking.
Then the material gets colder, colder, cold.
The Pool
Look! We see Terese’s and Venke’s bodies fall, legs first, head and arms last. They are dressed in swimming costumes and fall in slow motion, so slowly that it’s almost unbearable to watch. Centimetre by centimetre their feet come closer to the ground, which is shaped like a pool apparently filled with water. Since their movements are so drawn out, their bodies seem already stuck in something, something viscous, as if they are hanging in the air, as if we have opened a space between time once more, and the two are stuck in the mass between the milliseconds.
The beginnings of a shout can be heard in the distance, far inside the muscles deep down in the throat, extending into faint white noise that drones quietly in the stagnant room.
The two figures rush toward the surface in a long arc, making the skin on their faces, on their thighs and breasts and around their ankles, wobble infinitely slowly, like the heavy layers of stage curtains drawn up and down. Their skin is so elastic that it threatens to split and fall off, both upward and downward. In this infinity Venke and Terese look like unborn foetuses but also corpses, twisted by coagulated time, on their way to the underworld, the underwater world, the amniotic fluid world, down into the subculture.
Then we notice that the pool isn’t filled with water, but with jelly, and that it isn’t a pool, it’s a cleverly made aspic shaped like a pool. Huge bits of prawn and peas the size of tennis balls are hidden in there. Eggs as big as rugby balls are scattered around, split in half or in quarters, but with red, not yellow, jelly yolks.
When Venke’s and Terese’s bodies finally hit the pool’s surface, there is no splash, only a jiggle, and the gelatin swallows them both.
Aspic is a voyeuristic fantasy, a fantasy about being able to see through structures, through matter. We see straight through the form and into the contents. We see corpses in the ground, penis in vagina. The impenetrable web and enclosed surfaces that we’re used to seeing on almost all other objects disappear with aspic. In the objects’ place, the eye senses the possibility of hope, an alternative to the systems, an alternative that illuminates the mysterious and shows us what we ordinarily can’t see. The aspic is like an X-ray; it stops what flows and opens up what is closed. The aspic gives us access to eternity.
The aspic, set in savoury gelatine, is in this way an invisible container, without air, gravity or time; it’s 100 per cent texture. First concocted in the Middle Ages, it develops through centuries, parallel with the witch trials, reaching its peak in the 1950s. As the atom bombs and the hydrogen bombs are detonated and towns and landscapes and humans and animals are pulverised, thousands of cartons with aspic are congealing all over the world, and inside them are meticulously sliced fish morsels, seafood and vegetables.
When dinner is carried to the dining table later in the evening, it’s the notion of creating a space for what’s been blown to pieces that jiggles between the hands of the housewife. The soft but congealed world of the aspic dissolves gravity, and breeds absurd foetuses in its jellied, salty amniotic fluid, binding the chaos of the world as it quivers against the housewives’ bodies. It’s a draft of an alternative form of expression.
Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth.
Aspic is the original internet.
Aspic teaches me to write.
Aspic is our own man-made blasphemy.
I send Venke and Terese into the aspic. They’re lying there, fixed, perhaps with their heads poking above the surface, like two earrings fastened to the soft cloth lining of a gift box.
Below their heads I see chopped up bits of animals and plants, and now also Venke and Terese, liberated from their original form, components stirred together in random monstrous combinations. The aspic becomes a place for the impossible. In that place God can’t see us, I think, because there’s no I left. We escape our sinful subjects: I’m not a subject, but subversive.
Maybe this is what we call ‘magic’. Maybe this is ‘darkness’. Maybe this is the magical place where we can find each other. Maybe this is where I can get closer to you.
As I lie like an egg yolk, eyes shut in the thick mass, I feel you out there somewhere, in the same mass. Maybe this kind of love is the root of all witchcraft, to reshape dimensions to get closer to each other; maybe by writing this, I can bind us together.
and?
Tell me,
did we ever get that close?