Let me show you the scene. We’re back in 1998, for the last time, I promise. It’s after the gig that my metal band and I play at the old parish centre, the venue that has been converted to a rock club, but not converted enough. We’ve left the room where the contours of tightly nailed-down crosses push into the walls, where the crocheted curtains are tangled together like folded hands, and the contours of the words ‘Jesus lives’ are still visible on the wall over the pool table. I have played a whole gig while nursing a suspicion that I’ve been tricked into attending another ‘youth night’ in a venue that’s a Bible school in disguise, with the microphone stand resting in a hollow where the altar once was, the black-clad metal boys watching us, their hands stretched into the air in exactly the same way that hands stretch toward Jesus in praise and glossolalia.
Now my metal band, the two boys and I are on a forest trail, on our way to a churchyard and a church in the distance, to take a band photo. It’s an early summer evening, midsummer solstice, and still completely light. The band stops between a few trees to take a picture here too, a test shot. All three line up. We stay here, as if this were a freeze frame, even though the wind ruffles my hair and my eyes blink.
The Southern forest where the boys and I are looks like the one surrounding Hamsun’s old farm. Perhaps I’m looking at the writing lodge behind the camera as the test shot is taken. But the camera doesn’t turn. Instead the frame and the band and I remain totally still as it slowly grows dark, from dusk to total misanthropic black.
Let’s imagine that this scene is the end of the film, even though it isn’t. Up until this point the film would have been pretty short, under an hour. This image could be spliced in afterward, keep running for a long time while the band’s members, myself included, stand totally still and the wind rushes through our hair and the tree canopies. Three hours, maybe five, exactly the time it takes to go from day to night in the Norwegian summer. During the scene, as dusk approaches, unexpected details appear. I don’t know if it’s the image itself that changes, or if it’s our watching that begins to change what we see, but through the dusk we notice that the guitarist in the band has Venke’s hair and neck, and that the drummer perhaps shares some of Terese’s facial features. The vocalist, me, has my black hair and black clothes, but maybe I’ve also got a new shadow drawn from my nostrils to the bow of my lip. Is it darkness that has thrown a shadow across my face, or is it a scar from a cleft lip?
At first the forest is quiet, only the odd bird chirping, but then you start to hear music far off. Maybe it’s coming from the church at the end of the path, from behind the churchyard, or maybe it’s being played deep inside the band members’ bodies. This is what can be heard: A guitar playing fast riffs, distorted and buzzing, insect-like, and a drum beat with a timbre as deep as if it came from a mausoleum. The vocalist sings something slurred about hating, in Norwegian, maybe this: ‘I love hating so much, the hatred burns, do you hear me?’ Yeah! someone from the audience yells, because now we’re hearing an audience too, from far off, through the music. Maybe you’re the one yelling, maybe it’s everyone.
After a while the music dissolves again until it’s just reverberation, along with the summer winds making the leaves and grass rustle. Then it fades into the tempo of dusk itself and the scene continues until it’s dissolved by darkness. First to melt into the shadow of the canopies and the surrounding trunks is the band. Finally, the sky and the faint contours of canopies surrounding us are also totally gone, black.
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
