Oneiron

  Here was her Swedenborg: erotic longing, unfulfilled promises, which she felt like indulging, in which she wanted to wallow. Her personal pleasure-taking couldn’t hurt anyone, could it?

  But Polina was wrong. It hurt her. Her longing grew. It became a great, iron-hard feeling, which gradually formed an obstacle to normal life. Polina began having more trouble opening her liquor window each night. No more sensuous gales, no more revels, no more soaring thoughts. It was as if several meters of snow had fallen in front of the window, first soft, then hard, and finally freezing to ice, which wouldn’t melt no matter how much mulled wine she poured in her glass, how much hot punch, anything warm, fortified tea, straight burning clear vodka poured down her throat . . . There was only the longing. Nothing else. Suddenly she had no taste for books, and her drinking became poisonous intoxication, sleep from which her alarm clock did not wake her. She even received one verbal warning, which the director of the Agency for Damatic Arts came to give Polina personally: “Dear Polina, this can’t continue.”

  That was the final straw for Polina. She took her Swedenborg to a second-hand bookshop and bought books written by women instead, by Erica Jong, by Marguerite Duras. She shut her French gentleman and his intense gaze out of her mind. He had returned to his demented wife, and that was right. Polina kept her fingers in check, and that helped. Normal life resumed, and her liquor window opened and began operating in the desired fashion: just enough fresh air in, just enough books, and just enough sleep.

  Here on the other side, a gentle nostalgia hovers over Swedenborg, not a deadly thirst, and so Polina once again straightens her back. She shakes her trivial notions from her mind and rushes to the place where all her intellectual groundwork has led her and her listeners in such a spiral fashion, whirling like a falling leaf. And we will allow Polina to continue without interruption, won’t we? In order for us finally to get to vote?

  “On one April afternoon in 1745, something happened that completely changed the direction of Swedenborg’s life. The scene is a certain London tavern, and our main character is fifty-seven years old. Imagine yourself in a dimly lit, rather common watering hole. Before you is a large slice of hot, steaming liver pie you’ve just tucked into. You’re eating leisurely, chewing contentedly, when suddenly a fog, similar to the river mist that hangs over the Thames each morning, fills the entire room. It rises steadily, insidiously, spreading everywhere, not just from one or two corners. The fog is thin enough, however, that you can see in front of you, at least to your feet. The floor is covered in reptiles: snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and all sorts of god-forsaken creatures cloaked in scales. Instinctively you lift your feet onto the bench you’re sitting on. When the fog begins to clear, you see a man on the other side of the room bathed in light. He speaks to you, saying, ‘Don’t eat so much.’ This strange, parenthetical statement may explain Swedenborg’s ascetic diet, because according to the story, after this vision often all he would eat each day was a single bun dipped in milk with an enormous amount of coffee.

  “The apparition disappeared, and the tavern returned to its previous state, but the customers and staff didn’t seem to have noticed anything special. But beginning from that moment, Swedenborg knew that he had been chosen to unpeel the hidden heart of the Bible. And so he decided to become a guide to heaven and hell.

  “Could Swedenborg’s vision be explained by his circumstances? If Swedenborg had strayed from the way of tea to the beer streets of London, or farther to the gin lane of the proletariat? Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pence, clean straw for nothing! At the time of Swedenborg’s visions, wine and beer were consumed in abundance in London, but the Gin Craze formed a veritable epidemic. Sixteen gallons of gin was distilled per resident of the city. Genever or Madame Geneva or Mother Gin was the favorite of the soldiers and sailors, cheap firewater distilled from barley and rye, with juniper berries mixed in for flavor. Men and women drank it, and even children received some. People died of it, of course, but it was a patriotic death, because the state supported the distillation of domestic grain. Processing taxes were reduced, since the government wanted to support the large agricultural producers, and they didn’t want French brandy being imported. Drinking that was like an act of treason. So could the scholar from Uppsala have been under the influence of spirits?

  “Whatever the case, just as Swedenborg was on the verge of finding the human soul, he experienced the mystical revelation, as described, and permanently abandoned science. The theory of correspondences Swedenborg had developed earlier meshed naturally with his celestial visions.

  “Correspondence theory means that all things in existence have three meanings within each other: natural, spiritual, and celestial. There are the senses, then the thoughts, and finally heaven; and everything correlates with its own correspondences. Swedenborg was convinced that ancient primitive man knew the secrets of correspondences and that in the ancient world all books were also written in the language of correspondences. This was the original perfect universal tongue, verbum vetustum, which humanity unfortunately lost after they became too wise . . . They forgot the words . . . which Swedenborg spent years searching for . . . In human bodies and bodily functions he found codes, which would lead to the truth . . . The complete revealing of the correspondences . . . The understanding of symbols and metaphors . . .”

  (We don’t have anything to add to this. Continue, Polina, do not allow your train of thought to derail!)

  “Swedenborg also deduced that because God had created man in his own image, the universe and all its levels, as well as the afterlife, are in the shape of a man. If this is the case, then we must be located on the milky-white sclera of the eye, although the veins must have been removed! Swedenborg carefully studied every growl of his gut and burble of his bowels, because through them he believed he could access ultimate reality. He himself, of course, was a link in the chain of correspondences . . .

  “According to modern conceptions, Swedenborg is the first modern architect of heaven. He divided the afterlife into three parts, heaven, hell, and some sort of intermediate space, the spirit world, a place where the dead go first. There is no time in the spirit world of the dead. In the afterlife, changes in spiritual state correspond to differences in time.

  “In Swedenborg’s heaven people work, go to school, and improve themselves. They eat, drink, and make love—although marriage in the afterlife means a melding into one mind. Swedenborg says it this way: ‘In the spiritual world, love is conjunction. Wherefore, when all act thus, then from many, yea from innumerable individuals consociated according to the form of heaven, unanimity exists, and they become as one.’ Do you follow? And what do you say of this: ‘The spirit of man after the death of the body appears in the spiritual world in a human form, in every respect as in the world. He enjoys the faculty of seeing, of hearing, of speaking, and of feeling, as in the world; and he is endowed with every faculty of thinking, of willing, and of acting, as in the world; in a word, he is a man as to each and every thing, except that he is not encompassed with the gross body which he had in the world.’

  “Well now, dear women. Based on this, can you say where we are now if we even believe a part of Swedenborg’s teachings?”

  “In hell.”

  Shlomith’s reply comes as easily as from a druggist’s shelf. At least she had listened carefully to Polina’s speech.

  “Good,” Polina said, taking up Shlomith’s response without missing a beat. “Let’s assume we’re in hell. That’s fine with me. But in the meantime we must have been in the world of the spirits, and I at least have no memory of that. In the spirit world, everyone who has ever lived is arranged orderly in groups. The hallmark of each group is a special fondness for something or a peculiar quality of life—and I still haven’t been able to figure out what might connect the seven of us.”

  So maybe they are in hell. At least they are hopelessly far away from the normal world and the bustle of normal people, far from Moscow, Zwolle, Salzburg
, New York, Dakar, and Marseilles. But Ulrike looks alert now. Her mouth is open a crack, and she clearly has something on her mind, but she waits.

  No, they aren’t in the waiting room between heaven and hell, in the spirit world, looking forward to their final placement, which will be an absolutely just judgement. The surroundings should look different. It should resemble the world of the living. “Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t resemble life, it is life,” Polina says, as if she is reading Ulrike’s thoughts. “It’s a life more real than life. The ‘spiritual substance’ of the spirit world is the first, primordial substance, which the world of the living only reflects. Do you understand? Swedenborg was an arch Platonist!”

  Ulrike nods enthusiastically. She likes philosophy, and she especially likes Plato’s cave, which her teacher, Frau Schwartz, talked about before the summer holidays: she saw herself on the floor of the cave stoking the fire, the Fire of Truth, which threw terrible shadows onto the black rock walls. The distorted, almost unrecognizable silhouettes of all the stupid, doomed beings rampaged there: Elfride the prima donna with a smoking Lucky Strike in her hand, loud-mouth Felda and her constant powder mirror, Timberlake-oh-Timberlake Trixi waving her brand new mobile phone camera—Ulrike smoked all of them to death in the cave, all their lies and stupidity and loathsomeness. Thank God they aren’t here!

  “If we assume we’re dead,” Ulrike says, also not noticing that she is speaking her own language, which everyone simply just understands without a second thought as everyone had understood Polina’s Russian, “and if we imagine that we’re Swedenborg’s spirit beings, then what primordial state have we entered? What does the emptiness around us tell us about the world we lived in before? That everything, absolutely everything, is an illusion and a fiction?”

  Polina takes up the challenge. She positively waxes poetical as she describes the Swedenborgian death, a space that in terms of sensory perceptions was one-to-one with the world of the living. Flowers and trees, meadows and fields, asphalt and weeds growing from the cracks in the asphalt, sparrows, eagles, rattlesnakes, parking structures, cement foundations, saffron milk caps and all the other mushrooms; simply put, everything is exactly the same in both worlds. Both for the living and the recently deceased. When you mistake the sole of a boot thrown on the shoulder of the road for a crouching cat, or a paper tissue dropped on the pavement for a dead bird, you could be either living or dead. Even illusions don’t disappear when you die! Because the dead, Swedenborg believed, Polina argues vehemently, the dead first step into the state of the external mind. Which is exactly the same kind of state as the state in the world of the living, so the dead can’t even know they’re dead! The next step, Swedenborg claimed, says Polina, the next step in dying signifies a transition to the state of the inner parts. The dead become their own thoughts and their own will, and the body ceases to be an impediment. And pretending isn’t possible any more.

  “Hey, now I understand!” Ulrike suddenly exclaims. “We died long before we ever came here! We just thought we were still alive. We were wandering around the world like that guy Bruce Willis played, you know, in that horror movie . . .”

  Polina’s mouth hangs open in surprise. She didn’t see this transition coming. Even Ulrike hasn’t pondered it; the realization just flares within her, and the words come instantly. Ulrike searches for the name of the film, and a brightness resembling remembrance is somewhere near, but not in her; something definitive and sure drips with surging power toward her from just a step away . . . from Nina. Yes. Something floods from Nina toward Ulrike, something which at first is difficult to grasp, something delicate and strange, but then, suddenly, snap, utterly personal and bright and sure: “It was The Sixth Sense. Now I remember, and Bruce Willis played a shrink who’s dead but doesn’t realize it! It’s the perfect Swedenborgian film! Or The Others, the one with Nicole Kidman . . . The mother, her light-sensitive children, and the whole horrible tragedy, and the viewer doesn’t realize they’re dead any more than they do!”

  Ulrike goes silent, sinking into thought. So when did she start to be dead? Did she remember any situations where others couldn’t see her? Did people see through her on the street? Did she go home without trading news with anyone? Did she wander around the Eagle’s Nest in front of customers with blank expressions in a strange silence? Did dishes, coffee cups, and cakes rise into the air in her dead grasp . . . ?

  “Well,” Polina says, waking Ulrike from her reverie, “what if we vote now? Can we explain our current state using Swedenborg’s celestial doctrine? Let me give a brief review: we died, we unknowingly passed through an intermediate stage, which was a place like the world of the living, and now we are in the ‘state of the inner self’, we have become our own thoughts and our own wills, and our bodies have ceased to hinder us. Shlomith suggested that we’re in hell. On the other hand, we’ve been very quick to learn and very industrious here. We built this house around us and started a fire in the fireplace. So why couldn’t we also be in heaven? Left hands up everyone who believes the hell hypothesis! Right, if you believe we’re in heaven. And if you think Emanuel’s visions are just the ravings of a deranged mind, don’t raise your hands at all.”

  There it is. The straw. The magic has gone. She shouldn’t have said that. “Don’t raise your hands at all.” Of course Emanuel was a crazy head. Of course his visions were ravings. Of course they have wasted their time, whatever that might be here now. All the enthusiasm and attentiveness has gone to waste because of one poorly chosen phrase: “Don’t raise your hands at all.” Polina realized her error the instant she said that last word, but it was too late. Would the curse never end? Everything had been so beautiful, so like a dream. She had shone, and now she, she alone, had deflated the dream. A sullen, unwelcoming expression appears on the women’s faces, the resentful, wrinkled mug of a small child who’s been cheated in such a way to injure her down to her very heartstrings. In hell, in heaven: all a sham.

  And not a single hand goes up.

  SHLOMITH’S EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

  “In hell.” That was how Shlomith answered Polina’s question before the spell faded, and it was her firm opinion, not a joke or a game: they were in hell and that was that. However, it is necessary to stop at this point, because, as is well known, there is no direct reference to heaven or hell in the Pentateuch, and it is not easy to find a Jewish scholar these days who believes in messianic redemption, resurrection, or any otherworldly inventions—no, not if you should search all the synagogues of the world. Although Shlomith had been a passionate atheist since the age of sixteen, she knew her background like her own pockets, and she never made accidental mistakes. She dug out the dogma and placed it on the table and made contact with it; she dug out the belief and mocked it as necessary, but she didn’t make mistakes. That was not her style. The older she became, the greater her longing for nuance grew. She loved contradictions, and she didn’t fear conflict. She stood before humanity and placed her art on display, her culture, the most important raw material for her art, from which she drew compulsively some said, shamelessly and blasphemously said the orthodox. They hated her and organized protests in front of the museums and galleries, the places where she performed. They infiltrated the art-hungry crowd and pelted her with rotten eggs, but the eggs weren’t enough. Those white, sulphuric bombs were only a prelude, because Shlomith also began to receive death threats. The first one came in 1979 and was a ludicrous pasting together of letters from newspaper headlines: BITCH YOU’RE AN INSTRUMENT OF SATAN YOU OUGHT TO DIE!!! Shlomith smirked at this, almost feeling pride. She had now reached this point and joined those privileged few who were doomed to die for their art. She used the folded sheet of paper, which was stiff with glue, as part of her next performance, in which she burned certain books in a kiln constructed in the gallery space from red bricks. The death threat went into the fire, along with everything else as soon as she had read it aloud. It was the last piece of paper to go into the kiln during the performance, whi
ch we will return to because it became a turning point in Shlomith’s rising career—after this, the heavens opened, as the saying goes. Four more death threats came, and Shlomith didn’t smirk any more. The police classified two as serious enough that Shlomith was forced to hire a bodyguard for the next eighteen months. Although it began as a contractual relationship, this “experiment”, as Shlomith later described it in an interview, led to some unique situations; among other things, Shlomith found herself carrying her bodyguard’s child. She had an abortion and used the material (experiential material, not the aborted fetus!) in a performance named Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and never accepted that the novel by the same name published ten years later by the Hungarian author Imre Kertész had anything to do with her work. Shlomith was a pioneer in her field, and she knew it. People followed her work, something of which she was also aware. And that was precisely why she approached her material so seriously. Being in the avant-garde creates certain obligations, and she couldn’t give murderous religious fanatics even the slightest justification to throw stones. Now they could have a chance to swallow the strangeness of their religion down to the last bone, as she had done. But let them leave her in peace, Elokim save them, let them leave her alive! Because she, if anyone, didn’t make mistakes and that was that, and that was precisely why Shlomith absolutely could never be let off the hook so easily. “In hell”: where exactly did Shlomith think they were?