A Chunk of Mildewy Cheese after the Timequake
I almost never remember my dreams. My seven years plus two of psychoanalyze have relied on very few epic night dreams, a lot of minuscule fragments and my rich fantasy, colored and often disconnected with reality imagination. One might say very narrow underground passages to my sewers with heavy gates that close with a spectral metallic echo (oh, the image comes straight from a version of Les Misérables for the French Television I saw when I was around ten years old).
So this morning I woke up to an epic one that connects my mentors, my Yiddish and musical peeps, my family and the present cataclysmic situation.
We were a ballet company on tour in a country of Eastern or more precisely Central Europe. You know these places where Zev Feldman, Michael Alpert and sometimes Zisl have a lot of artistic attachements and friends and where they bring their productions and/or transpose their creations. The ballet was led and choreographed by Abigail Ilan, the wife of my soulmate little cousin Yishai Ilan.
I see her showing us motions in front of a building like the ones hidden in the courts of Vilner Rudnicki Street. When I checked Rudnicki Street on the web, I first found that: YIVO building …. : https://ingeveb.org/blog/vilner-yidishistn-in-their-natural-habitat#&gid=null&pid=2
So Eastern, Central, we are somewhere aheym, home.
After a while there is a shortage of food – you have to know that I am (also) the French translator of Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World. Responses to Risk and Crisis. One of us, the administrator of the company maybe, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, manages to unearth a chunk of rotten, mildewy, somehow spoiled cheese, not really blue cheese, but more like a hard cheese that was going amok. It must have been a pretty big one. With this cheese she fed the company, insisting each dancer had enough every day to protect its immune system and stay strong enough to perform. And so we did under her firm guidance. Yes it was guidance and dance related, although the only dance mouvements that I saw were the ones of Abigail. But fermentation, nurturing, cultivation, transformation of food, by brewing and stirring, saltpetre and leavenous action were the physical and metaphoric subject of my dream.
A wonder that Trimalcion in person was absent of the next scene – now that I think about it, it pretty much resembled the reunion scene right after the earthquake, in the steam bath, of “Le Satyricon" (that I may have seen a dozen of times in my post 68 youth. Here the Art Gallery)
Except that, instead of sitting around the swimming pool, the little crowd of dancers were lying on individual beds cramped against each other (the beds) like in the children’s room when a bunch of grandchildren arrives for vacation and grand-parents have to accommodate all the gremlins. Almost everybody was sleeping, Rokhl Bas Cyprus that I recognized at her yoga outfit, Steven Weintraub, and quite awake and making funny faces Shane Baker, just after I have followed his Mina Bern evocation. That makes sense.
Sleeping in the YIVO building under the nurturing surveillance of Barbara with a bunch of friendly colleagues and futures (I wrote uftuers) after the time quake makes me feel confident in the uftuers and the future. Yiddish will live, dance will guidance, paideia and learning and teaching will develop and we will continue to conjugue verbs.
