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
