A Life In A Church: Out Of Touch with Reality.
By Kjetil Nernes
22 billion years into the future is the end of the world. Unless there are parallel universes with different time spans, it’s the end of everything. The universe will have expanded so much that all planets, suns, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the rest have collapsed into humongous pools of black holes. This will last for a crazy amount of time until the black holes also collapse and leave only a black void. It’s fascinating what mathemathics can conjure up. I flunked in maths, pulled up my hoodie with a Motörhead patch sewn across the heart and walked right out of the exams in high school. Then I went home and started a noise rock band. It probably would have done me good to learn some of that maths. I could get a proper job, earn some good money, buy a gigantic home telescope and spend my time gazing into the endless collapsing universe. The end of the universe is called the Big Freeze. Or the Big Rip depending on the calculations (catchy titles, I will write a song about this. Do not steal the idea!). Only a few lonely photons will drift helplessly in a vast dark void. I wonder where God went in all this? At the end of time he’s most likely still there with his white beard on top of a cotton cloud floating in the dark. Maybe the devil is still there burning his cauldrons, the two of them hand in hand atop the cotton cloud (given the devil there’s probably storms and lightning flashes coming out from underneath the cloud), sailing into an eternal nothingness.
Nothingness.
I have experienced nothingness several times. First time when I fell and broke both my arms trying to run away from the police. I woke up from a coma at the hospital two days later. Second time was when I nearly died from cancer. I was drowning in a vast ocean, pushed to the bottom, then suddenly came back up to the surface. All my eight cat lives have been used up, I’m barely hanging on to the last. I used to dream about drifting in space when I was a child. A recurring nightmare, a lonely and empty space, a horrible intangible feeling of emptiness and vacancy, my family and everyone else dead. Odd Nerdrum’s ’Burning Man’ is the exact reproduction of these nightmares. The feeling of floating in nothingness, the terrible meaninglessness, the void of substance. It’s almost frightening how much of my childhood fears are contained in that picture. I tried to buy a reproduction directly from the Nerdrum family a few years ago. It would make sense to have the painting on the wall here in our church. I arranged to meet with Nerdrum’s son in Oslo to get the painting delivered and then drive it back home through the woods. Then Norway closed its borders and I went broke. There where huge piles of car tires and military police on the borders. Rumours of a virus, a rough type of flu, circulated. It was the pandemic. The deal never happened.
The house I grew up in Haugesund was big and beautiful and very different from everybody else’s house. I had a gigantic room on the first floor with opaque widows that covered one wall floor to roof. On the opposite side were narrow windows, like squinting eyes, which me and my brother drunkenly tried to climb through when we were teenagers, trying to sneak back home without our mum noticing (she always did). There was also a fireplace with no pipe in my room, lit up by fake logs you could turn on like a lamp. We used to arrange football matches in my room when I was a kid. The house was drawn by the architect who is Odd Nerdrum’s father. Not the dad he knew, the airplane pilot Nerdrum, but his real biological father. Odd Nerdrum was the result of a clandestine affair. In his own words this was the reason for his continous feeling of despair and emptiness. A haunting existentialism which is the foundation of his artistry. Much the same as Edvard Munch actually. Odd Nerdrum sensed there was a missing piece to the mystery of his being, his gut feeling told him his story was different from what he was being told. His father wasn’t the real father. The architect dad lived in Haugesund and drew and built beautiful houses there. I grew up in one of them.
I am bewildered by these idiosyncrasies. I wonder if time is not linear. I cannot be, it changes in space. But I wonder if there is a conncetion between Odd Nerdum’s despair and mine. Is it universal or are the similarities just a fluke, mere coincidences in a vast befuddled world? I start reading up. In my twenties I was very interested in the futurists for their approach to music via Luigi Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’. Throbbing Gristle is one of my all-time favourite bands and they are clearly a next generation futurist orchestra. Einstürzende Neubauten too. I read the phenomenal Throbbing Gristle biography ’Wreckers Of Civilisation’ by Simon Ford around this time. It might have been mentioned there. Futurism led to surrealism which was a huge influence on the early Årabrot, especially the thematical part. I was trying to put words to how I felt, a lanky insecure man with long wild hair and a galloping heart and young man’s passions trying to find his place in the world. Or maybe just outside the world. The dreamy, almost incongruous ideas of surrealism fit the box quite well. I read Breton and Artaud and Bataille and ’Irene’s Cunt’ by Louis Aragon. I’m not sure what good ’Irene’s Cunt’ really did for anything but it catapulted me into what I see as a natural extention of surrealism, namely existentialism. Albert Camus is still one of my favourite writers. He basically just wrote one book didn’t he? ’The Stranger’ and ’The Outsider’ and ’A Happy Death’ seems like the same story centered around the same questioning reality. A Raskolnikovian worldview. ‘The Plague’ ventures just outside the spectre, I have read it twice. It’s a nice reminder how literature can put words to certain events decades or even centuries ahead. A literary written soundtrack to the pandemic a few years ago, a predictment of the future. Then I got seriously ill a few years later and almost died. The teenage angst was smashed to smithereens. I was left alone on top of a hillside, my ears ringing after the big explosion, craters of smoke all over the vast fields in front of me, shadows of bodies on top of bodies. It’s a war site. A shattering silence, nothingness all over. But I did get out, I was alive. I am back in the church in the province, still connected to the stars and the above by means of the great darkness, the nothingness we don’t know what is but has named dark matter or dark energy. I bought a book on quantum physics and read the first half page, read it three times actually. It made no sense whatsoever, I don’t even know what the symbols mean or what the letters are called. It could be any language, Chinese or Sami or Tupian. I had to look further and got a nice little book on the universe called ’Our Universe’ by Jo Dunkley. It’s a quick wondeful read on the universe that I warmly recommend.
But there had to be more to the story. I just had to find a way to put words to the nothingness. I picked up and read Adam Becker’s ’What Is Real’ without further ado. I didnt’ tell anyone, I didn’t discuss it with anyone. Becker is the kind of staut academics type of spade for a spade American. There is none of the metaphysical nonsense there, not a speck of Crowley or Blavatsky or anything but pure Newtonian cause and effect. It’s not the kind of book I’d normally recommmend. ’What Is Real’ is like a YouTube tutorial on quantum physics, a quick wikipedia summary: clear, understandable and dumbed down. It’s perfect. All of a sudden I not only understood but could also perfectly well explain the double slit experiments, the pilot wave interpretation, the decoherence and the madness of Heisenberg (so brilliantly described in Benjamin Labatut’s classic ’When We Cease to Understand the World’). I even got the the goddamn Schrödinger’s cat. ’’What is Real’ is the perfect introduction into the world of quantum physics for the modern popular ever-present insistent posers of 2025. Even the ending is fantastic. The fair and square Becker sums up everything by saying you shouldn’t believe what you just read. Quantum physics is just mathematical calculations on a piece of paper, he says. It doesn’t exist.
As above, so below.
It’s a scientist putting language to Odd Nerdrums ’Burning Man’. I’m glad someone could do it.
There is a TV-series on Odd Nerdrum and his family in Norway right now. It’s the most popular show. They are portayed as a sect of sorts; they are mostly analogue, they wear white robes and there are other excentric traits. They remind much of me and Karin and our kids living here in our church, especially how we appear in our music videos. It’s hauntingly similar. Everything is connected in a holographic world, everything is one. Karin came in to our living room. I told her to sit down in front of the TV and we saw the trailer for the Nerdrum show. Karin stood up and looked at me and said: ’Those guys are totally out of touch with reality.’
Kjetil Nernes
Kjetil is the vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the Norwegian band Ã…rabrot.
Listen to them on Bandcamp or Spotify.
A collaborative album between Ã…rabrot and Hifiklub is coming out on April 11th via Pelagic Records.
Catch Ã…rabrot on stage:
May 9th Desertfest Oslo, Rockefeller, Norway
May 16th Desertfest London, Underworld, UK
June 20th Hellfest, Clisson, France
August 27th Arena, Vienna, Austria (with Goat and Graveyard)
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