Epiphany! You never known from where or when one might arise…if ever.
Yes, Christmas is around the corner, but I am not talking about the coming the Magi. Nor am I talking about a brilliant discovery of import to the world – think Einstein or Ben Franklin or Madame Curie.
For most of us, an epiphany is more likely just an A-HA! moment of small or large magnitude often triggered by a simple event. My epiphany was a sudden insight into the essential nature of something monumentally important to no one other than me, and last night I had a major 7-point-oh-my-god-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-before mind-quake.
For months now, I have been actively writing and re-writing, structuring and re-structuring, a book about Luther Henderson. If you known me for a long time, you may remember that I first embarked on this project 20-some-odd years ago and it has ebbed and flowed in my life ever since. I started off with five or six solid chapters of a standard academic biography when a very good friend (and exceptional writer) told me the truth. He was clear that I would have only tiny audience, if that. Not only is Luther an unknown, but I had no story, no narrative arc. He was born…and he died does not qualify; where are the desires and the obstacles to be overcome…or not. What is at stake? My friend was spot on.
Periodically I would berate myself for my inability to bring the book to fruition, particularly as it would have made Luther’s widow happy to see his story finally told. I started to reframe it as a man facing death and wondering if he had a legacy. That is a more universal question that many might identify with, but not much at stake if you are about to die anyway, and again, the story still focused on a man who was unknown.
I felt like I was living Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics to “The Windmill’s Of Your Mind:”
Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of it own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the un has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tossed in a stream
Like a clock whose hand are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind
Some things unfold only when they are ready…and I think that Luther had a strong hand in this.
Now I realize what Luther always knew – “his story” lies not in the facts of his accomplishments but in the trials Luther endured to achieve, and the impact it all had on his life, the lives others, and the music itself. His ability to transform and extend music in ways that became his unique speciality, influenced his jazz, classical, and Broadway colleagues, but he paid a price.
My epiphany is NOT YET fully formed. It was triggered by the simple event of reading Susan Orlean’s memoir, in which she reminded me that she always writes about unknown people, but finding the key into the story is the hard part. I’m not there yet, but I think I am on a path forward.