Tammuz 5786: Between Memorials

This month, we are honored to feature the work of Joseph Skibell — novelist, Talmud reader, and Idra participant — whose writing moves at the intersection of dream, loss, and the uncanny. His essay arrives in Tammuz, the month of broken vision and mourning, carrying exactly the quality of sight this season asks of us: peripheral, penetrating, and not quite of this world. Part II will come next month, in Av, as the communal grief builds and finally abates.

Part I: Dream of a Blue Man

I’m between two memorials. The first one, a week and a half ago, was for the master luthier Ken Parker in Gloucester, MA, and the second, for the novelist James Magnuson, will be in Austin, TX, at the end of the week.

Ken’s memorial was in a kind of upscale music venue/bar on Main Street called The Cut. Though he was a minister’s son, and though he loved his father and the family he grew up in, Ken was a man of science, and even more so perhaps of technology, with little use for churches. A music club felt like an appropriate place to say farewell to a man who’d devoted his life to making better and better tools for some of the world’s greatest musicians. 

(For a time, Ken was the only living instrument-builder with instruments in the permanent collection of the Met.)

A strange thing happened at Ken’s memorial. Shortly after I arrived, I ran into Larry Fishman, Ken’s partner at Parker Guitars. I’d interviewed Larry a couple of months before for a book I’m considering writing about Parker Guitars, and here’s the thing that happens when you interview somebody: because you spend upwards to 15 hours over the course of days, concentrating exclusively on someone, listening to their stories, asking them deeper and deeper questions about themselves, they start to really like you, and they also start to think that this dynamic is the only one that will ever pertain between the two of you: that they’ll always talk to you about themselves, and that you’ll listen with rapt attention.

It has nothing to do with narcissism. It points instead, I feel, to a human desire to have our stories heard, to feel that our lives have mattered. 

Larry was no exception. He repeated a lot of what he had already told me a few months earlier about his friendship and his working relationship with Ken, but then, as I say, something strange happened. 

Had this been a movie, we’d probably have seen an alien spirit inhabiting Larry’s body. As it were, apropos of nothing I could discern, he drastically changed the subject, and with no apparent segue, started talking about his dreams.

“Oh, boy,” he said, “my dreams! My dreamlife is so intense, I no longer really know which is my real life, the life I have when I’m sleeping or,” he gestured in the space between us, “this life, you know what I’m saying?” 

I shook my head. 

A reformed smoker, Larry snapped his Nicorette gum. “Oh, yeah, it’s like slices of a salami.” He made a lateral cutting motion with his hand. “It’s like they’re all these parallel lives, you know, right next to each other, and each is as valid and intense as the next.” 

“Well, and what are these dreams like?” I asked him. “Because, you know, I work with a dream interpreter.”

Meeting my gaze, Larry sort of looked me over before shaking his own head. I couldn’t tell if he was unwilling to elaborate – maybe he thought it was beyond me – or maybe he felt there was no way he could explain it, but then, again as though a second personality were speaking through him, he gave me a blessing. 

“This guy,” he said to a third person who had joined us,. “Have you read his work? This guy has soul. I get about 14 requests a day from journalists to talk about Ken Parker – Ken Parker – Ken Parker, and I brush them all off, but I spent hours with this guy, you know, because of who he is.”

I didn’t know what to make of this – the insertion into a breezy conversation of this intensely personal information followed by a seemingly unprompted benediction – but not two days later, having flown to Durham where my daughter and her family live, I fell asleep, following a Shabbat lunch of too much wine, on my daughter’s couch.

Despite the commotion of the family – two small grandchildren running around, my wife and daughter in fervent conversation, the clanging and banging of my son-in-law cleaning up in the kitchen – I had the most intense dream I’ve ever had in my life. 

In the dream, I was at a funeral or a memorial of some kind filled with light-skinned men with gray ponytails. (This, by the way, is a fair description of Ken Parker.) These people are all seated in chairs, and standing among them is a blue figure. 

Seeing this scene in my peripheral vision, I barely take note of it, though it all seems vaguely familiar. Have I experienced this before, I think to myself, or did someone once tell me about it? 

In the next moment, the Blue Man is standing in front of me, and I take in all these details instantaneously: he’s transparent; I realize he’s invisible to everyone but me; he’s wearing a suit; he’s dark-skinned, African; he meets my eye with a penetrating gaze that suggests he recognizes me and expects me to recognize him; and when he lifts his right hand in greeting and addresses me by my first name, I’m filled with a cataclysmic sense of surprise.

I gasp in the dream, and in the living room, sitting on a chair nearby, my daughter hears me gasp.  

In the dream, an enormous energetic force, coming from the Blue Man, pushes through my entire being. I’ve never felt anything more powerful, more penetrative, or more loving. This energy literally blows me off my feet, and I’m cast down into a kind of vortex. 

Spinning, falling, I’m sucked down, descending, my limbs limp, my body naked. 

I wake up completely discombobulated. I manage to sit up. I look around the room. I have no idea where I am. I’ve never had a dream this intensely real before. I tell myself that I’ll never doubt that there are other worlds, parallel worlds, worlds of powers and principalities.

I feel utterly changed. 

I look at my wife, sitting in a nearby chair. I open my mouth to speak, to attempt to describe to her what I’ve just experienced.

She raises her hand and brings it near her ear, quickly stroking the air beside it. “But first,” she says, “pat down your hair.”

My hair is long and kinky in this humid town, and I’m sure the side I’ve slept on is standing straight up. Still, her comment silences me, and I realize that, like Larry perhaps, there’s no way I can explain to her what I’ve just experienced.

Joseph Skibell is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in Humanities at Emory University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of A Blessing on the Moon, A Curable Romantic, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, and the forthcoming Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming, among other books.