“I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
― Bob Dylan, Lyrics:1962 2001

“I was in a dream last night. Was it yours?”
― me

It was late afternoon — unusual for me to have been in bed that long. I knew, no, I felt this would be my last day on Earth. Probably the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.

Why are you telling me this?

Because you were there, sitting beside the bed, holding my hand. I knew then that it was O.K. to go. Are you embarrassed?

Just a little but go on — I guess.

Then you and all the color in the room drained away. Even the walls — the walls, the furniture, the trees and slice of sky I could spy through the window, turned white. Not some antiseptic hospital white. Not the absence of color but what color had always wanted to be: its total presence. Somewhere between South Sea pearl, white diamonds, and — oh, I dunno — cottage cheese. You wanted to smear it on toast with a slice of lox.

Now here’s the weird part. Rick Astlie was there doing his MTV video “Never going to give you up” in a sharkskin suit with those 70s pencil legs.

But you hated everything 70s! Remember, I was there, too.

I know. Weird. Except it wasn’t Astlie in the suit; it was Morgan Freeman doing all those 70s dance moves.

Then the room turned Farrow&Ball red, crustini without the basil. It was the Dulwich Picture Gallery and every painting I ever loved was there: ‘Das Floß der Medusa,’ ‘The Martyrdom of Crispin and Crispinian,’ several by Holman Hunt and Alma-Tadema. And da Messina’s ‘Condottiere.’ Damn, I’ve got taste.

And Morgan Freeman was there, too, minus the sharkskin suit.

Freeman was naked!?

No. Three-piece. You’d take him for an annuity salesman. I said ‘I thought You’d be Ella Fitzgerald,’ and He said ‘Oh, I could be, if that would give greater comfort, but she’s with Donald Trump just now.’

‘Trump?!’ I asked in a more accusatory tone than the moment called for. ‘I thought he’d be in the other place, you know, pitchforks, molten sulfur, Andy Kaufman.’

Then He shocked me: ‘This is what you’ve all got wrong. Everything’s Heaven. Some people just don’t get the one they expect.’

I gotta ask: What did you have for supper? This reeks of indigestion.

‘Of course it’s happening in your head, Harry, but why on Earth should that mean that it’s not real?’ By the way, when it’s your time, keep an eye out for Albus Dumbledore. This isn’t my dream, you know. You just watched Colbert, rolled over, and went to sleep. So all this is in your head, not mine.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The country and culture commonly known as ‘America’ had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees—its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

The Holy Spirit craves your attendance at Revival

Conducted by Messrs Plunkett and Figg.

Come as you are. Leave, a New Creation.

The torpid summer of 1925 was long, the latter because of the former. Revivalists Zadok Plunkett and B. D. Figg had announced their arrival months in advance. Anticipating crowds proportional to their reputation, they had also arranged the construction of a tabernacle on the old Parsons farm just south of Crispin Creek near the Broad Street bridge. The creek had been a popular venue for total immersion baptism since Agincourt’s founding in 1853 and it was about to be chastened again by a full ten days of refiner’s fire.

The Tabernacle was a ramshackle affair, mostly built of second-hand material donated in the spirit of expiation — contributions of labor and construction supplies toward the implied atonement for sin — despite how “Romish” the idea would have seemed if explained that way. Indulgences, after all, were a fundamental reason for the Reformation in the first place. Weeks before Plunkett & Figg’s appearance, wagon upon wagon deposited planks and posts in orderly heaps graded by size and quality for service to the Lord. Foursquare trumps fussy every time.

The revivalists had sent a drawing of the structure they required: fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long, with sides that could open for overflow crowds and, more likely, air movement on a stifling July night. The tabernacle had to be constructed in three weeks, serve for one, and then be dismantled, leaving the site as it had been. Did Plunkett and Figg know Sir Joseph Paxton? [If you know the conditions required for construction of the Crystal Palace, you’ll understand the reference.] But first a word about religious complexity.

Black & White or Shades of Grey

Bush 43 got some very bad advice or none at all on the eve of the Iraqi invasion. Quite aside from the botched intelligence on WMDs (which was either wrong or purposely spun that way), there was the matter of Islam and Bush’s sense that it is a monolith: the confrontation was a classic us vs. them, Christian “good guys” versus the purported evils of a religious faith other than Christianity, in this case, one with both oil resources and the weapons to defend them. It’s difficult to believe the Pentagon honestly believed Islam was one unified belief system. At minimum we should have understood the religious politics of the Middle East, where either Shi’a or Sunni dominate in each country — one is always an oppressed minority — and that Shi’a and Sunni are divided on a fundamental question of lineage with the Prophet. They not only disagree, they have been willing to shed blood over the question. Read Karen Armstrong’s Islam: a short history published in 2000 and readily available from Barnes & Noble by our military leaders in the Pentagon. If they’d read it, we’d have had some inkling of the can of whoop-ass that was about to open.

It’s far more complicated than that, for in addition to Shi’a and Sunni, and there are also Sufis (mystical Islam) and the Wahhabi sect, and very likely several other subsets of which I, as a secular Westerner, am ignorant. Karen Armstrong’s point in her 2000 introductory treatment of a complex topic was to draw a parallel with Christianity’s own Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the Sixteenth century: Islam has simply not undergone its own Reformation. And the more significant difference between that prospect and the Christian experience has been weaponry: ours occurred with the rough equivalent of bows and arrows, whereas today’s religious battles could be waged with nuclear warheads.

I only mention this as an aside for further discussion of the movement of the Holy Spirit across the land during the 1920s, when there were similar religious distinctions in the Evangelical movement that we often fail to note. Nuances that may be lost on the outside observer like myself but which were overlooked by Believers in the Arms of the Holy Spirit.

The Book of Revelation

Pre-dispensational-Post-tribulational-Antinomianism

For some True Believers, these theological distinctions are fighting words. So I wonder how smoothly the Plunkett & Figg revival may have gone.

Dorothy “Dolly” Pentreath [1692–1777]; Shanawdithit [1801–1829]; Fidelia Fielding [1827–1908]; “Ned” Maddrell [1877/8–1974]; Tevfik Esenç [1904–1992]. Do you have any idea what this disparate group of people have in common?

Each of them was the last native speaker of a language that subsequently vanished as a living mode of communication.

In the early years of the 20th century, anthropologists, linguists, folklorists and other academics ventured from their classrooms to record minority cultures vanishing in the advance of mass culture. John Wesley Powell, founding director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, sought “to organize anthropologic research in America.” In the current political maelstrom, such an idea is laughable.

In a similar way, composers and performers of music abandoned concert halls, scouring the countryside with early recording devices to transcribe and record folk music before it had completely disappeared. Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly did for Hungarian culture what Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams did for Great Britain, and we are all better off for their efforts. One of Grainger’s recordings, in fact, found its way to Frederick Delius, whose orchestration can reduce me to tears because I link it with the death of my grandmother.

Brigg Fair

It was on the fifth of August / The weather fair and mild / Unto Brigg Fair I did repair / For a love I was inclined

I got up with the lark in the morning / And my heart was full of glee / Expecting there to meet my dear / Long time I’d wished to see

I looked over my left shoulder / To see what I might see / And there I spied my own true love / Come a-tripping down to me

I took hold of her lily-white hand / And merrily sang my heart / For now we are together / We never more shall part

For the green leaves, they will wither / And the roots, they shall decay / Before that I prove false to her / The lass that loves me well

[Recorded on wax cylinder in Lincolnshire in 1905 by Percy Grainger. Incidentally, that antique recording device is the actual machine used by Grainger.]

Typically, this is my long way round the barn to reintroduce the topic of the Fennimore County Fairgrounds and its evolution. Now that the semester is complete (more or less), I can get back to filling some of Agincourt’s gaps.