327 hours. Roughly. I have spent 327 hours in the library this semester. Last semester was worse. I have devoted myself to this place, an academic temple with desks for altars. Strained, praying, reading holy scripture, again. Like being in a chapel as a child, there I am in awe, a mixture of dread and envy. In awe of the pews of encyclopedias, I devote myself to an academic God. Worship becomes my ambition, to avoid the wrath of an angry God, who sends floods of failure and doubt. I work to be venerated by my success. The more time I spend here, the more it turns from monastery to crypt. I wonder if I am worshiping the wrong God, and some other one, a true one, will strike me down. What my God wants, what will please it, I don’t know, but I fear not trying so I try until I fall apart.
In my idolatry of success my body becomes the sacrament; my eyes strain, back hunches, lips dry and crack, and brain throbs. I need to do it. I pray through ink and flashcards for something divine. I sew my body back together as I study, using divine threads. My love of imprecise success is stitched to the same cloth as my fear of failure; so, I sew my vestments into my skin at my desk. Sporting my regalia of ambition, and carrying my backpack as a cross, I explore my temple on another late night. In the corner of my eye, I see the face of another God. A false idol. A snake in Eden on the first floor, right across from the entrance of the library, to the left. An amazed and dismayed curiosity begs me to investigate. Only to find a mangled angel, come to study beside me in this hallowed hall.
Originally built in 1966 and renovated in 2012, the Lucy Scribner library sits at the “heart of Skidmore College campus.” Art made by both students and other artists is displayed throughout the building. On the first floor of the building, along with other sculptures, behind a table, is Untitled.
Untitled, created in 1970 by sculptor and painter Igael Tumarkin. Tumarkin left Nazi Germany at the age of two in 1933 for Israel. Tumarkin’s mother was Jewish, and his father was the son of a Protestant pastor. After his mandatory military service, he studied in an art commune. Tumarkin was involved in multiple political causes such as an artistic rebirth in Israel which tried to inspire hope after the Holocaust. He also created several works to support the anti-war movement, particularly against the war in Lebanon. In the artistic world, Tumarkin detested the popular lyrical visuals of his time, he wanted to “be different” and did so by using violent expressionist undertones. Tumarkin is known for shocking his audience, and I am in awe of his nameless metal sculpture in my tabernacle.
I stumbled onto it, almost carelessly, almost haphazardly, a mangled metal face. It feels like a deception, a steel bear trap disguised as a face. A table almost purposefully obscures it. It is out of place. It’s disrespectful to put it here, it contaminates the space with its otherness. I stand, then sit, then stand awkwardly. I feel like a child in church again; watching a man bleeding out on the wall, all I can do is watch. So, I watch. Helpless. Again. It provokes me to contort myself to look at it. It looks like it is in pain or was in pain. It is ugly, profane, and worthless. If it had meaning it would be clearer. But no, it’s a symbol for nothing, it’s just wrong. I left, pushing it out of my mind. I returned to my altar, pulling a string on my shirt, making sure my doubts were fastened firmly to my notions of glory.
After hours of working, I returned. Just to look, no harm in that. In the chaos of scraps I grasp for coherence in its features; starting from the back, a large smooth light gray dome forms the skull. What starts as cracks on its temple turns into fissures, which divide most of the skull from a shattered face. It looks like an open casket of a mangled boy. His eyes are closed, at least for the eye that hasn’t fully become a fissure. Along the clefts are dark brown rust; dirt in his wounds. His dark gray metal face is rough, scratched, and scarred; weathered by years of decay. Protruding from his open mouth, what would have been his jaw, is instead a vomit of shrapnel. Steel puke made up of a handle with a red base and an amalgamation of unrecognizable trinkets and scraps. Where his smooth skull reaches where his neck should be, it instead bursts and frays. The inside of his skull is plastered bright yellow. His head is a warzone, starting from an explosion within. On his head is a jawless dark gray iron dog skull, a fitting crown. He rests as a colossal wreck, the shattered visage of an angel.
I don’t understand him, I see him, but his purpose still eludes me. Tumarkin was often painfully abstract, but at other times violently direct. In one of his most acclaimed pieces, he melted damaged weapons to create an impaled soldier. Instead of an impaled soldier, a slaughtered angel lays before me. Not by someone, but by himself. I wonder how many hours he spent here before his intellect fractured into insanity; until his ambition melted into decay. I can’t help him, only watch helplessly. The fluorescent lights of the library center on him, and my temple crumbles. My selfhood slowly tears. The fabric of my vanity is sewn into, and under my skin. But, there are loose strings that he pulls on. He starts with my eyes; my eyelashes are strings that get caught on the sharp spikes of his vomit. I tear as he tears. He works his way into cracks along my eyes and mouth, tearing out stitches. He detonates my vanity, my fear, and my scared ambition until I regurgitate my pride in self-sacrifice. He leaves me hollow, like a bombshell. We are now both excommunicated; fallen from grace. He crowns me with death and baptizes me of fear.
I see my fear, I feel where it was, etched into my skin, where it was sewn in. I feel the contours of my madness, it’s sharp, with few recognizable figures. I feel the ruptured cavity where it fed off me. It’s vomit now. This is not hedonism, an obsession with the pursuit of pleasure. The “worship” was hedonism. The pleasure of destroying myself. Pursuing success as God, not because I loved it, but because I was afraid. Afraid of not being enough. I was proud that it was destroying me, I thought that was success, that it would make me special, different. Carry the cross, bleed, be put up on a wall for others to see, that is success. Success transformed into my God, or rather, fear dressed self-destruction up as success. A false prophet that co-opted my love for my work into a cult of fear.
Tumarkin was inspired by his otherness. His pursuit of being “different” led him to be a celebrated artist. But as supernatural his ambitions, as holy as his efforts, he too, is crowned with a skull. Tumarkin asks through his work what is left once we’ve been hollowed of our vanity and relieved of fear. I look for what is left. Death, for one. All my systems of defense: all my prayers, spells, and ambition cannot protect me from that. Death still captivated me and I am childlike, helpless, in awe. But I realize that success isn’t a corpse. It isn’t martyrdom, a crucifixion via academia. Success is the love that’s left. Fear is pervasive, it can be stitched into love. But, it isn’t everything. Awe is dread, and envy. Envy is love that remains in the fissures. The naked love that remains when fear is torn out. The genuine self, not surrounded by fear. Perhaps Tumarkin presents this as God: the love that remains once fear is abated.
I go back to my table. Another hour logged. Before, I was scared my love wouldn’t be enough to make me enough. Now, I bear only love when I pray. I make it an early night. Possessed by some holy otherness, I find divinity in the face of the zealots that pray incessantly. Angels, trying to find a God to worship
