A mystery (resolved?)

Sometimes it seems as if the Universe is sending you a message.

Last month, as I was driving to Atlanta to take my crashed hard drive for data retrieval, the iPhone randomly chose to play William Blake’s Inn. As you may imagine, faced as I was with the possible loss of everything I’d ever created, I was not in the mood.

However, I let the piece play. As we got to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” I cried. It’s such a lovely piece, and although hope springs eternal I am pretty sure I will never hear it played live.

I remember working on the piece back in 2005–06. It’s the centerpiece of the entire work, and I had put off working on it until I had everything else in place. (Ironically, the piece that comes after it, “When We Come Home, Blake Calls for Fire,” was the very first piece of the book I set to music, back in 1983.)

Somewhere in my study or perhaps in storage I have all the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS that I had to crank out before I hit on those breath-holding first chords. The piece was a journey all by itself: I knew the form it had to take, but I had to fight to find the path every step of the way. I hope the results speak for themselves.

Anyway, a couple of days ago after dinner, the conversation between my mother-in-law and myself turned to my music. I fetched the copy of “Marmalade Man Makes a Dance to Mend Us” from my cello practice stand, and I ran up to my study to fetch one of my “official” copies of Nancy Willard’s A Visit To William Blake’s Inn, the one with this inscription in the front flyleaf:

I ended up singing “Milky Way” for her, and it was a nice moment. I put the book back on the stairs to my study, and we went about our evening.

The next day, I came into the kitchen to start my day, and there on the breakfast nook table, on top of the score for “Dance,” was this card:

I was dumbstruck. This was a “to-do” card from a system I used to use in a quasi-kanban kind of way, and it was clearly notes toward a production of William Blake’s Inn. It was clearly from several years ago: the late Don Nixon was the director of the Newnan Centre for the Performing and Visual Arts.

I couldn’t place what produced this card; it was apparently notes towards a collaboration between the Centre and Newnan Theatre Company, perhaps? Was this when Dave’s wife Jennifer was determined that the show would see the stage and we took a feeble stab at thinking about it? Was the “3 keyboard” note a hedging of our bets in case we couldn’t pull together the funding for an orchestra?

None of it rang a bell. More importantly: where did this card come from? How did it show up on the breakfast nook table out of nowhere? I asked my Lovely First Wife if she had come across it in her papers for some reason — nope. I knew better than to ask my memory-challenged mother-in-law; for one thing, why would she have this card in the first place? I asked her sitter if perhaps she had come across it and just put it on the table — nope.

Given my emotional response to “Milky Way” so recently, the Existential Mystic in me [see my world-changing REMS Scale here et seq.] felt as if that this might be a Sign From the Universe that it was time for me to stop hoping for a production (or a memorial concert) and to get off my backside and push through to get this thing in front of an audience.

Here in the middle of a pandemic, too! The nerve of some Universes.

It was a mystery, certainly, and it was only when I was recounting this story to a fellow Lichtenbergian in a letter, revisiting the evening in my head, that I realized: the card had been in the book and and simply fallen out without my noticing it.

So much for the Universe.

Now that I am off the hook for making sure this lovely setting of a Newbery–Award-winning book gets its world premiere, it seems the burden has been returned to you.

Here. Listen to it. Follow along with the score. Have your people call my people. Let’s make this happen. And by “us” I mean “you.”