This is the magic of magic; that it’s impossible to know whether it happens or not, since magic goes against reason and therefore necessarily becomes a question of faith. This afternoon in Tøyen we believe in phantom shit. It’s on the outside and on the inside, in the shape of the mass we chucked at each other and the chocolate-sauce face we ate. It’s magic double-sided tape, since the brown mass simmers both outside and inside us for the entire rest of the day. It burns on and under our skin, in our cheeks, in our jaws, our teeth, all around our gullet, stomach and intestines, and down toward our groins. When I close my eyes I can picture my internal form, a different form than the one I recognise as my own, a shape with new networks and escape routes marked by skidding wheels on the asphalt.
Let’s rewind a little and zoom in again, on exactly that moment when the ritual ends and we’re back in the ordinary chronology with the students from the canteen. Something has changed, as if systematic reality has been disrupted by the ritual. Look at all the mess in there. There’s ketchup on the floor, on the walls and the ceiling, and no one seems to be wiping it up. But have a look, too, at the girls who fought, and the girl who squirted them with the ketchup bottle. The two warriors haven’t left the room, and no adult has yet removed the third girl. They’ve just wiped their faces and hands, and now they’re sitting together around a table, all three, drawing inside a square on the tabletop, laughing. The teachers are nowhere to be seen. Next to the drawing square, in the margins of the Sabbath, I write in three coke bottles and a tray of almost-finished cheesy ground-beef subs.
This is their world, but also ours. And yours too.
Total misanthropic black metal, I write within the drawing square, for the girls, or in the film document’s side panel. They are all sheets in the same document, all this fabric in the same textual weave, with Venke, Terese, me and you.
I cross out black metal and think about the cruisers, not giving a fuck about colour, wearing distressed jeans and bleaching their hair in football patterns. They fill up their tanks with total misanthropy and its Southern twin, blasphemy. Perhaps they’re still the most blasphemous of us all. They are the only ones who want to disrupt, not by setting fire to the same tame state church or singing about upside-down crosses, but by blaring the Pentecostal prayer meetings into pieces, right in the middle of the glossolalia. Through the high streets and parking lots the cruisers write, like witches, outlining another world. Misanthropy, blasphemy, cruiser magic.
Aside from the obvious reasons, I don’t know why I feel I have to be able to justify my actions, or the cruisers’ actions, through analysis. Maybe it’s because it’s important to me that what we do should mean something, that language should be able to find different strategies and be something other than a machine for shame and denial. Maybe it’s because I can’t let go of the idea that we have to find society’s boundaries and transgress them in as many ways as possible, that we must highlight, study, analyse them, all the way down to even the most low-minded crap.
Are you also compelled to go down there?
I want to write about people and characters and places disappearing until they actually disappear, maybe becoming art, so that I’m able to believe the opposite: that art can be real. That there is a magical potential.
The Cosmic Internet
Something’s out there. We become aware of it soon after the stench takes hold. It’s as if the curse we cast dragged something else up with it; something that’s trying to communicate with us. We sense it in the draughty windowsills, the sockets and routers in the witches’ den. We have no word for it, we don’t exactly know what we’re talking about yet, and we end up glancing, sniffing and looking at each other without a word. We only get a whiff of it. Sometimes I feel it in the light wind created by my own fingers across the touchpad as I scroll down a website and finally ram against the bottom of the page, fingers still dragging the image down.
Venke, Terese and I take a break from gigs, rituals and film writing and start hunting in the places where we sense the whiff. We sink deep into the dark web, crypto blogs, old witch forums. We trawl through the garbage dump of the internet, through abandoned social platforms, obsolete blogs, and online news articles with formatting errors. We trawl through art archives, file registries, disks and minidisks. We play songs and videos that have never been played before. As yet we’re not getting any closer to it, but searching, being on a hunt, on our way, noses to the ground, has its own value.
I consider writing Online Witch Rituals into the browser’s Google search banner, and pressing I’m Feeling Lucky instead of Search. It’s obviously a joke, and I don’t do it, but I could have, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I realise that Google knows more about me than God.
I hate Google.
But I like scrolling. It’s an easy movement, like rolling or gliding or falling,
