The River of Dreams

Like a Ghibelline spy entices a street urchin to arson?

The trouble began in the third grade. Joseph Emmett Yudowski Jr. heard Billy Joel’s 1993 hit “The River of Dreams” on the radio at the Chillicothe city pool. The song confused and captivated him, and he hummed the melody to himself on the walk home with his brothers.

That night he dreamt of the song. In his dream he walks to the bank of a river at night. He wants to cross to the other side but cannot. He knows what he needs is on the other side of the river, but he doesn’t dare enter the water to attempt to swim. When he listens to the sound of the moving water he hears the melody of Billy Joel’s 1993 hit “The River of Dreams,” which is muffled, as though it were coming from deep underground or underwater. And he sees further on from him, on his side of the river, a multitude of men whose faces are lighted by an orange light. And he sees the ground clave asunder that is under them, and the earth opens her mouth, and swallows them up. And the junior Yudowski wakes up screaming, and no one comes to comfort him.

This dream became The Dream. At first it came weekly, then daily, until young Joseph walked though third grade like the last cavalryman of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, horseless, wandering under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remains unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, searches in vain for his horse.

Time gone by. Eleven years of memoryless fugue state. Eleven years of waiting at the river. Eleven years of Billy Joel. Family, home, Chillicothe, mind. Gone, gone, gone, gone.

Joseph Emmett Yudowski Jr. comes to himself again in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a valet parker at a garage next to the FleetCenter, home of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The moment his mind and memory return to him he is sharing an evening cigarette with the security detail for Oprah Winfrey. (Close your eyes for a moment and imagine how you feel when you find a precious object you’d lost. That feeling of relief and discovery only loosely approximates the feeling of coming back to yourself, rediscovering your own mind after it’s been gone a long while. For the mind is not an object, like a pair of keys or an heirloom. A closer approximation is the finding of a child or animal thought lost. Ponder, if you can, Christ’s parable of the lost sheep. Now modify the parable so that the shepherd and the sheep are the same creature and, indeed, that the sheep and the shepherd are also the landscape into which the lost sheep strays. That is, meditate on the parable from the perspective of Christ, and then you almost get the idea of what it is to return to your mind after more than a decade away.¹) Joseph drops his cigarette and walks away from the valet parking booth. The security professionals call after him, but he doesn’t turn around. One word resounds in his mind: CHILLICOTHE. Where do I live? CHILLICOTHE. Why am I smoking a cigarette in a parking garage? CHILLICOTHE. How old am I? CHILLICOTHE. Where is my family?

He walks to the Charles River, then paces back and forth along the south shore. Night falls like Ptolemy’s boulder. A crowd of DNC staffers gathers a block away. From the water comes the melody of Billy Joel’s 1993 hit “The River of Dreams”. The ground claves asunder that is under the DNC staffers, and the earth opens her mouth and swallows them up. And Joseph doesn’t scream.

So far a typical story of a young man from central Ohio. Joseph was, perhaps, preternaturally attuned to the rhythms of the Scioto River, but who hasn’t heard the cries of Korach in his sleep or fallen under the spell of William Martin Joel, if only for a moment in late summer, when heat and the hum of crickets and a pop song on the radio can draw even the coldest heart towards Love? But only typical so far. Some Ohioans, like our young man, holding in secret the racial memory of Ohio’s years of glory,² are destined for more than dreams and rivers.

“The River of Dreams” reached #3 on the American Billboard charts in 1993. Billy Joel wrote it after a long and patient study of Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, a text he first encountered in 1978 but did not study formally until the late 1980s. Joel attended especially to chapter IX "Concerning the Three Works", which Hugh adapted from Chalcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus. The lyrics of the song serve as a commentary on the chapter and, like most of Joel’s work, a hermeneutical autobiography on the ‘two-fold experience’ of reading.

The DNC staffers are gone. Yudowski still stands beside the Charles River. The melody gets louder. It emerges from the water as a solid disc, 13.5’ in diameter, opaque and inviting. It beckons to him (How? Like a courtesan at the grating teases death? Like a Ghibelline spy entices a street urchin to arson?), and he climbs aboard. The disc is dry. All songs that allow themselves the pleasure of solidity are dry. The son of Chillicothe, so recently returned to himself, is not afraid. When he climbs atop the disc he is enveloped in the song that rises from the river. I go walkin' in the, in the middle of the, I go walkin' in the, in the middle of the, I go walkin' in the, in the middle of the, I go walkin' in the, in the middle of the night. Night. Period. Full stop. End. The final things. The sheep returns to the fold. The landscape folds itself around itself. The Midrash says, "God desired a dwelling in the lowly realms"

1. Medieval medical literature is replete with accounts of decade-long fugue states, which were common especially in 13th and 14th Century Lombardy and Andalusia. See, for example, the 13th Century Latin mistranslations of the treatises of Aëtius of Amida produced in the Palazzo Bonacolsi in Mantua.

2. See the author’s forthcoming historical monograph The Age of Ohio: 1869-1913.