This place knows nothing of God. It’s a screenshot, a series of moments, frozen and compressed from nature to JPEG. It does not know Holy Scripture. It does not know how to pronounce the ecclesiastical. No Christians see trees fall in this digital forest, and no god sees them, either. This is no man’s land and no god’s land. This is lowbrow, low-quality footage, hidden deep in the undergrowth of the cosmic internet. If this picture had any Christian content, or a parish centre nearby, it has been compressed out in the digitalisation. It’s free, pagan, and it doesn’t care. This is the bonus material of the South.
I want to be in a place like that in 1998, when I overhear recess prayer meetings organised for myself and other lost souls, when I’m in my witch’s den trying not to hear the lyrics on the metal records I’ve borrowed, or when I wonder what the hell black metallers were thinking when they started burning beautiful stave churches instead of working their way through the premises of the Free Church, Betania and Salem and Filadelfia, plastered up and down the town streets with their tiny windows and creaking floors, sort of spying on us as we walk past, gluing shut the Southern spirit and mouth. I’m so sick of being a soul that can be converted or improved or healed, or that’s dangerous and needs to be stopped from contaminating others. Give me a salvation break, I’m exhausted. I want to be in a place where I don’t have anything to hate; I want to be that place, a place that can’t be manipulated, conversed or converted. I want to be a thing, a series of things, things without religious potential. I want to be out of God’s reach.
In school I’m never allowed to be that place. I imagine it’s because I enjoy hating too much. I’m too fond of transgression. But now, twenty years after college, when I turn the screen toward Venke and Terese and we watch the black metal bonus material together, we sink into the undergrowth, and we choose the camera over the trees, or we choose the black and white trees over the real and green ones. We look past and into the patterns. We don’t stop the movement, but let it continue, like an eternal scroll down the black whirling branches. We choose the pixels.
Listen to the MP3 buzz from the fan in the computer. It whispers a heathen psalm.
2
THE FOREST
A film
We open on a long scene from the middle of a film. A group of girls, maybe a school class, are on a forest hike. This is the first time that we join them outdoors. Our initial focus lingers on the girls as they walk through the forest landscape. Some of them are outdoorsy types and focused, and others more skittish and giggly. Everyone has brought typical hiking gear, backpacks, rolled-up mats, water bottles and flasks. They talk about previous hikes, about things they’ve brought and animals they’ve spotted. They wear sensible clothes, a lot of them are in hiking boots, and we watch them step over grass and rocks, pass through thickets and over fences. As the girls go deeper and deeper into the forest, we see less of them; they pop up erratically in between close-ups and long takes of nature, and the forest gradually takes over as the main character in the scene. We realise that the actors playing the girls are changing all the time, and always seem a little unfamiliar to us on reappearance, even though they are still addressed with the same five or six names. The forest pulls everything in and makes everything part of itself.
This forest is all forests. It alternates between heather clinging to rock faces, and tall Sitka spruces North American rainforests, and Eastern Norwegian marshland with fog and tall grass. The forest moulds itself around the girls. More than something inanimate passed through by something living, the landscapes come to the humans and change their consciousness and form. Forest and humans are made equals: the girls walk through a transformable landscape, but they are also part of the transformation.
The girls always wear the same clothes, even though the people inside them change. There are no constant faces here, only figures, exchangeable frames for the forest content.
Shots of animals, big and small, pausing and breathing rapidly in and out through their nostrils; it’s as if the girls are taking the form of different beasts as they walk through the woods. All living beings are connected and belong together, become each other. Mushrooms and flowers stretch toward the hiking boots, the hooves and the paws that trample the landscape.
We hear individual voices ask each other very banal, mundane questions followed by quite long intervals of silence. For example:
ANNA: Carole, are you coming?
CAROLE: I’ve got a blister, wait up.
It’s impossible to differentiate between the calcified trees and twisted, scorched stone boulders in the dry desert forest they walk through. The sun blinks as it shines through the fossils, and in the next moment it shines through the foliage of huge spider plants clawing into coastal cliffs, before we move to high mountain thickets and after that gradually down to a windswept evergreen forest, and later to cacti and crystalline stone formations, as if the girls have been walking in circles. Dead desert forest curves around them.
IVY:
