Oneiron

  It’s unfortunate if our thirst for civilization and above all our desire to unearth information causes disgust in two groups of people: in those who love adventure and quick progress and in those who already know everything, perhaps even more than us (which is hardly possible). But Shlomith must be held to account. We must explain how seriously her art should be taken (she herself took it deadly seriously). We must ask whether her art holds up to time or whether it was only born of a desire to shock. Of course we don’t doubt her intentions a priori. Surely no one would care to provoke, just for the sake of provocation, for forty years on end. Surely a person could find something better to do in all that time. Shlomith could have, for example (and this is only a suggestion), rebuilt her burned bridges. She could, if she wanted to, have devoted all her strength to finding some new connection to her two children, Malka and Moti, a connection which she had ruined by her own hand (one could also say: out of her sheer stupidity). But that is also another story. Now we simply want an answer to our question: where is a Jew when she’s in hell?

  The written Torah, which God delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, does not know heaven or hell. “But Gehenna!” some will shout with tremulous voice, “but Gehenna!” Yes, there is Gehenna, but it wasn’t located on the other side of the veil, it was just on the south side of ancient Jerusalem. From the beginning it was a profane, miserable place, a rocky valley where innocent children were sacrificed to Moloch and the Canaanite god Baal, or Baal-sebub, who later, among believers, became Beelzebub, as you may know: the Evil One, Old Scratch, the Father of Lies, the Horned God. It was rabbis studying the cryptic language of the Old Testament who invented heaven, naming it Gan Eden, and hell, which they called (and yes, the connection to the place of slaughter mentioned above is clear) Gehinnom. They invented heaven because, despite his promises, Yahweh didn’t remain by his chosen people’s side. He seemed to be doing something else entirely (sleeping? demurely averting his eyes?) and allowing his people to suffer, allowing the children of Israel to be enslaved through no fault of their own, to be tortured and killed, even though they were willing with one accord to follow literally each and every one of God’s 613 commandments and injunctions; or had someone gone AWOL after all? The irrational, unexplainable suffering simply began to exceed the human capacity to understand, so God a) was a sadist, or b) didn’t exist, or c) had something better in store for his chosen people. And so that had to be it. He had reserved something better for them in another world. Not in some ancient, murky underworld but above, in a bright heaven. The first two options were out of the question. Contemplating them wasn’t even permitted, at least not out loud. Those were ideas you couldn’t even taste with your lips, even if you left the thought silent, even if your lips only brushed by the words (out of some incomprehensible defiance) and even if you uttered the words all alone, with your whole body facing the corner: God is a sadist, God does not exist. It’s impossible. “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.” And thinking about points a) and b) might lead to that place we shall soon reach, the Jewish hell, which no one actually believes in any more these days, and probably never believed anciently either. Jews have always been practically minded. Heaven and hell were just the result of frantic digging by rabbis in the post-biblical period using a big, rusty shovel to fill holes in the Bible. One might wonder whether a dose of narcotic herbs might have been necessary to invent them, or perhaps the human imagination was significantly more prone to megalomania in ancient times than today. Whatever the case, hell had to be invented. There was no other option. Otherwise the atheists and all the other soulless degenerates might get out like a dog from its cage, and often they seemed to: Yahweh didn’t cast brimstone down on their heads; instead He let them become wealthy as their waists spread and necks grew thick, while He left his previous lambs, his most faithful bleaters, to the hands of their tormentors. And for this reason and no other reason, the rabbis’ brains began to tick, TICK-TICK-TICK; they ticked so loudly that God’s very angels heard the sound. Everything would be made right on the other side: it was better to die and wake up in heaven: Q.E.D.

  And so it was. For centuries proud Jews who knew their worth and held tight to their religion fought against the oppressor at the sacrifice of their own lives, Kiddush ha-Shem: they sanctified the divine name by killing their stoic selves, remaining clean, becoming martyrs, floating like angels in a weightless state of bliss. This strategy was followed beginning with the Maccabean Revolt, and using this technique—we apologize for the macabre choice of words—one could escape almost anything: Christian crusaders, the Inquisition.

  And then back to hell. Gehinnom. The rabbis believed that hell was a structure divided into seven parts, each section of which, whether you chose to move horizontally or vertically, required three hundred years to traverse from end to end. And every segment of hell was sliced into seven subsegments, through each of which ran seven rivers of fire and seven of snow, their paths guided by the Angels of Destruction. In each compartment of hell were seven thousand caves, each of which had seven thousand cracks, each of which had seven thousand scorpions. And each scorpion had three hundred rings, in each of which were seven thousand poison sacs, from which flowed seven deadly poisonous rivers. (Wait a moment, so there are now a total of three types of rivers, right?) With flaming whips the Angels of Destruction lashed sinners, meaning those who had broken the commandments of the Torah, insofar as the angels could spare their time from guiding the rivers. For Moses, at least, is said to have taken a guided tour with the angels through hell, like the Christian Durante degli Alighieri, alias Dante, did.

  On his journey, Moses saw sinners hung up by their eyelids, their ears, their hands, and their tongues, and women by their breasts and hair, each according to his or her crime, according to what body part had been active in committing the sin. In a place named Aluka, sinners were hung upside down by their feet. Long black worms squirmed on their skin. They had sworn false oaths, they had desecrated Shabbat, they had mocked the wise, and they had defamed their neighbors and done evil to both orphans and widows. Elsewhere, sinners were tormented by two thousand scorpions, each with seventy thousand heads, each with seventy thousand mouths, each with seventy thousand poison barbs, each with seventy thousand poison sacs. The scorpions struck with their tails, stung with their stingers, and in every conceivable way tortured those who had robbed their own kinsmen and abandoned them to heretics, those who had publicly dishonored their neighbors and denied the Torah. To top it all off, those who ended up getting the scorpion treatment had claimed during their lives that God wasn’t the creator of the earth!

  In Tit ha-Yawen, Moses saw sinners up to their navels in mud. The Angels of Destruction whipped them with fiery chains—they had time for that too—and hung glowing stones from their teeth. These wretches had eaten forbidden food, given money to usurers to loan, and stolen pennies from their fellows. They had used false weights, they had written the name of God on infidel amulets, and they had eaten on Yom Kippur, and, logically, they had also drunk blood.

  Finally Moses arrived at the level of hell named Avadon. There sinners were burned: one half of their bodies were submerged in fire and the other half in snow, and at the same time worms generated from their own flesh crawled all over them. The Angels of Destruction abused them without cease. These sinners were the worst of the worst. They had committed incest, they had murdered and called themselves gods, they had cursed their parents and teachers, and—well, that’s pretty much it.

  Then the bewildered Moses was delivered back to the surface of the earth, where in a daze he continued guiding his people away from the hands of their enemies. And the wretches didn’t understand to be thankful, instead grumbling constantly, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?”

  Of course there are also detailed accounts of the Jewish heaven, but as all who have read their Divina Commedia know (regardless of whether the bo
ok was read in the original language or only in translation), no one is interested in heaven. The rays of Beatrice’s smile are just as boring as lukewarm bath water whose rose extracts have stopped giving off their fragrance. Hell is what stirs people up! Hell makes your skin tingle and your heart race. And that’s why we will pass over the blooming trees of life and luxurious rooms paneled in olive wood (and also because the architecture of the Jewish heaven wasn’t on the list of things to be explained in the first place, of course) and conclude that the hell Shlomith referenced in answer to Polina’s question meant something other than the blood and thunder Gehinnom of the rabbis, where fiery chains flail and scorpions work their tortures.

  Perhaps when she said hell Shlomith meant other people, as a certain French intellectual wrote in his famous play set in the afterlife. The play was performed for the first time in May, 1944—note: the German collaborator Marshal Pétain was still in power then; Paris was not liberated until August—at a place named the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, and ever since the interpretation of the phrase “L’enfer, c’est les autres” has, well, gone all to hell. Not all people, always and everywhere, are synonymous with hell. Some of us at least sometimes are sublimely lovable. Just so long as it remains possible to get away from us for a while, if we can be missed and longed for, if we can be approached and retreated from, then, and only then, there is a particle of divine lovability in us.

  But our women in white have been connected to each other like bulls mired in tar: Shlomith a prisoner in Polina, Polina in Shlomith, Nina in them all and all of them in Nina, and likewise Maimuna, Wlibgis, and Ulrike prisoners in each and each in them, all prisoners except Rosa Imaculada, who had known to flee.

  This was most likely the kind of hell Shlomith meant when she snorted her response at Polina.

  This idea is supported by a certain fact, which most who followed Polina’s Swedenborg lecture closely may have overlooked entirely. If someone had happened to glance at Shlomith, they might have noticed a slightly downturned mouth, a jaw slack with disgust, belladonna eyes which had ceased watching Polina as she talked. Oh, so there’s love in the spirit world, and that love is oneness, those scintillating eyes said. And the six of us here form a divinely harmonious mind? Ha! I, Shlomith, beginning with S and ending with H, have lived purely on argument, and argument is what I’ve come here to bring. That’s my nature! Even when I loved, really loved, as I loved my husband Dovid, even then waves of dissatisfaction roiled and crashed within me, and I started arguments; yes, I was the one who usually started them, just like here. Just to indulge my frustration. So we’re in hell. You’re my hell, and I’m your hell, and that’s right for me and it’s right for you. So there!

  And this was how Shlomith got out of the fix we’d put her in, out of our pure malice and inconsolableness, because unfortunately we’re here too.

  It may already be clear that when Shlomith was at the zenith of her fame as an artist, she didn’t believe in anything but herself (in her best moments). She trusted herself and her material, which she viewed with a strange mixture of reverence and abhorrence. Yes, her material. It was like food you could put in your mouth and not be sure immediately whether it was good or awful. You can’t tell whether you can eat a lot of it or none at all. But Shlomith wouldn’t have been Shlomith if she hadn’t continued taking more. She had to go on ladling it in for the simple reason that she was Shlomith-Shkhina, more intimately Sh-Sh; she had also tattooed this letter combination on her left wrist. That stage name and the abbreviation formed from it was known not only by every friend of the arts on the east coast but also by every hater of the arts; even those who had little interest in high culture and its highest form, performance, recognized it superficially if they read newspapers with the slightest regularity. Because Shlomith-Shkhina had regularly appeared in almost all of them beginning in the early 1980s: The Times, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone . . . In honor of her sixtieth birthday in October, 2006, a cover story appeared in Vanity Fair: “Why Do We Drool Over Shlomith-Shkhina?” The author of the article, a young man early in a promising career as a journalist, had gone completely weak in the knees before the goddess he admired. Her desiccated body radiated a presence often called “charisma” but which was better captured by the phrase “Zen-Stoic grandness balanced with mania, impudence, unconsciousness, and erotic electricity”. Shlomith’s eyes bored straight into the viewer’s and from the eyes into the farthest reaches of the mind; she gave herself fully even to this insignificant aspiring reporter dressed in a silly, pink anorak and one shade pinker Converse high tops, this thin wisp of a boy with horseshoe-shaped acne scars on his beautiful face, concealed with expensive cover cream. Shlomith-Shkhina was present for him too. For the entire hour and a half the interview lasted, she gave herself to this boy, without reservation but at the same time protectively, tastefully but not at all intrusively.

  Shlomith-Shkhina as scapegoat

  The article turned out wonderfully. In it Shlomith-Shkhina’s most important work was reviewed, of course, including a piece named I Shall Fear No Evil for Thou Art with Me. That was an insult performance from 1979 that caused a terrible commotion. The audience was invited to pull out anti-Semitic slurs Shlomith had written in black art pen marker on slips of handmade washi paper from a willow basket covered in black fabric. The audience had a duty to come read the contents of the paper they had drawn before Shlomith-Shkhina. Otherwise the performance would have fizzled and the painful catharsis would have gone unfelt.

  Shlomith-Shkhina sat half dressed in an uncomfortable position, on her knees, on an Ionic column one hundred and fifty centimeters tall, a column on the cap of which spiraled twisted scrolls like ram’s horns. On her own head Shlomith-Shkhina wore large, heavy goat horns, which she had carved herself for this specific performance from Eastern poplar with the aid of a sculptor friend. Can it be said any more plainly: Shlomith-Shkhina was a scapegoat. She was suffering for her tribe’s entire agonizing history. Many cried hot tears as they slandered her, weeping before Shlomith-Shkhina’s gentle yet deeply mournful eyes, stammering as they read their papers and asking forgiveness with their whole beings. More than every tenth (by Shlomith’s count) simply collapsed: they fell to their knees and extended their hands in agony toward the stylite. They wished they could come and embrace Shlomith-Shkhina, wished they could wipe away the tears that had begun to run down her cheeks as well. But a rope divided the audience from the artist. DO NOT TOUCH! was written in large Gothic script on the shaft of the column. A guard with a truncheon stood at the door so nothing truly bad could happen. Most of the people who entered the gallery were friends of the arts, but every once in a while the wrong people would come in, and Shlomith always recognized them instantly. “It was OK,” she said to the Vanity Fair interviewer. “I knew they would come, and I was even prepared for a scuffle; I wouldn’t have fallen far.” The Neo-Nazis laughed as they read their slips of paper, stinking of beer, and then added their own significantly more derogatory comments, most of which dealt with Shlomith-Shkhina’s half-dressed, rail-thin femininity (although at that point she wasn’t thin enough to turn any heads, as had been the case before and would be again; at the time, her 164-centimeter body pressed toward the earth with forty kilograms of muscle and bone and liquid and the tissues that held her together; she was just “very Twiggy”, and no worse.)

  Believers shook their fists at Shlomith-Shkhina and read passages from the Bible. “You’ll burn in hell!” they might shout in chorus, rhythmically, pounding their feet on the floor of the gallery. But Shlomith-Shkhina let all of them approach. She didn’t draw the line anywhere, except, this time, around her physical integrity.

  At this point unfortunately we need to turn back to the performance we mentioned a moment ago in passing, unfortunately because it may still agitate some. It agitates us anyway. Under no circumstances do we intend to rehash Shlomith’s entire curriculum vitae, which would be inexpedient since there are simply too ma
ny performances. Including some (especially from the early stage of her career) which are less deserving of trumpeting. For example, the rolling about in food. But perhaps we can share a little about this after all? There was a milk basin and a basin full of roasted lamb shanks, and between them a large hourglass and Shlomith, who wasn’t Shkhina yet. Shlomith dipped herself, naked of course, in the milk, submerging herself in the sweet, white liquid up to her hair and greedily sucking it in. Then she moved to the hourglass. With both hands she rotated the hourglass on its axle, and the hourglass began to drizzle the sand of Jerusalem through its funnel. The sand took twenty long minutes to flow out, during which time willow-switch slender Shlomith shivered with cold, covered in milk, bones protruding cruelly through her thin skin as she stood near the axle. When the sand had all drained out, Shlomith moved to the lamb shank basin and burrowed in under the meat. She nibbled and she licked, but she was significantly more restrained than she had been slurping the milk before. This continued for six hours, which was how long Food Meditation (1976) lasted. This performance (which we’ve now ended up describing in its essentials) and a few others (which we promise not to tell about) were mostly “fumbling” by an emerging artist coming out of such obscurity that hardly anyone attended them. But of course they were recorded. Shlomith knew her value from the start and sensed, we presume, the future appreciation she would enjoy. And we agree with this principle: you should always remember to record everything. Everything! Every newspaper clipping someone has ever written, all the photographs, the letters, and the postcards must be collected and organized in a scrapbook. Diaries must be kept, feelings must be written down, because does anything else exist once all is said and done?

  Shlomith-Shkhina and God’s 614th commandment