Live, from Yoknapatawpha
All you have to do is dream
Nobody likes to hear somebody else’s dream. What seems so dramatic and consequential to them is simply yawn-inspiring to the rest of the world, including me. “But that monster looked just like my mother…!!!!” Who cares. I can’t even summon enough concern to end that sentence with a question mark.
Which is why I’m going to tell you about my dream I had last night.
I dreamt William Faulkner was my roommate. We lived in the same back room in somebody’s house. Yes, he was a writer like he was in real life. Hadn’t changed. He was pretty stand-offish, but he did call me by my first name. I called him Bill.
I went out one evening—same dream—and when I came back, guess what Bill Faulkner was doing?
Writing.
He was really into it. Tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Heavy concentration. Using a pencil. Papers strewn everywhere.
“Bill, I’m not bothering you, am I?” I asked.
“No, Rich, don’t worry.”
“Mind if I use the bathroom?” I said. “I’d like to take a shower.”
“Go ahead,” he said, “I’m fine.”
When I got out and walked back into the room, wearing just a towel, Bill was still writing.
“I’ve been to Rowan Oak,” I mentioned casually. That was WF’s home in Oxford, Mississippi.
“Oh?” he said, and went back to writing.
“Nice place.”
I believe later in the dream I took some people home with me to introduce them to William Faulkner, my roommate. Bill was quite civil, just nodded.
“That really is William Faulkner!” someone said.
That felt cheap on my part.
So WTF with this Faulkner dream?
True, I had recently read a fat bio of WF in Denver. He was on my mind, I suppose. He was a prodigious drinker, but he churned the material out, without fail.
Still, I wondered why I was dreaming about him. Aside from the fact that he looks somewhat like my Southern father with whom I have had a tumultuous, fraught, and agonizing relationship my entire life. I still do, even though he’s been dead for some years now. He looms over me constantly.
I quickly dismissed that interpretation. My father didn’t have a moustache.
Then I remembered Bill’s Nobel Prize speech in which he said about the writer,
“He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid…leaving no room in his workshop for anything but…the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
Which leads me to my point—and I think I have one.
What else is there to write about?
All the rest is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.