James Baldwin's Funeral

I found myself in a cathedral, crowds of people surrounded me, thick but quiet crowds. The blue and red light through the stained glass, bruise colored, and the rhythm of drums, a deep-rooted beat close to that of the human heart, pulsed and tinted everything. Everyone was dressed darkly, it was a funeral. I found a seat in a rear pew under a column of yellow light. Behind me the murmur of the crowd dissipated in one long silencing wave, and the sea began to split. A coffin was borne through the breach. I didn't know anyone here, I didn't know at first whose funeral it was. When the coffin was placed on a sort of altar, with flowers set about it, I could hear softly, in different parts of the room, women beginning to weep. A man approached the pulpit. He was dark and solemn, the blue light gave the physiognomy of his face a deep look of reticent royalty. This odd light bathed the coffin, the pulpit and the first few rows of mourners, until it gave way somewhere in the aisle to shafts of yellow. But beyond these, the cathedral darkened to a point of complete obscurity. In fact, at first I thought I was in the Great Hall, that I had entered a wing previously hidden from me. But this could not have been. People in the Great Hall do not gather together, and emotions that can only be consoled in a mass grievance are alien to them. With the light on my brow, I felt utterly at peace. The man on the pulpit stepped toward a microphone which extended like an olive branch in front of him. I think that it was an olive branch, or at least it possessed some sort of verdure. Then the orator cleared his throat, a contemplative and anticipatory silence followed. When he finally opened his mouth to talk, not words came flowing forth, but light, great bright light came flooding from his ever widening mouth. And a dove appeared in the center of the light, and silently it grew to an enormous size. But the dove was also made of this seraphic light, and the entire cathedral became aflame with it. The dove, its head barely contained beneath the dome, turned its eyes, which were like two deep wells, and set them directly on me.

I awoke. Something like waves or drums still beat in me. I must have dozed off at my desk. The Great Hall was typically quiet and tenebrous. I took a second to gather myself, and then found a sheet of paper on which to write down the dream. But instead I wrote down these lines: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all of the people who were alive, with all of the people who have ever been alive." Oh Mr. Baldwin, why must everything be born out of so much pain? When will the splendor of the world renew itself?