The Lost Masterpiece - Umberto Tosi

Jimmy Durante finding the lost chord

The other day, my inamorata, the surrealist painter Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, said she had dreamt of having the greatest blog idea ever, and that she had conveyed it to me in vivid detail. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember what it was. So, it will just have to wait, folks.

This sounded so familiar, the great idea, story, melody, image that slips away. Eleanor says that as a visual artist, she has dreamt of discovering a new color, one dazzling enough to shift human consciousness and foster a masterpiece by its very recognition and existence. The ancient Greeks, they say, did not have a word for "blue" in the way we mean it today, which is why the Odyssey refers to the sea as "wine dark," not azure.  The discovery of a "new," seemingly transencent color is quite plausible, given that the spectrum of visible light can be parsed into an infinite array of hues - but only a limited number of them named.

I thought about The Lost Chord - a hymn-like classical song that Arthur Sullivan wrote for his dying brother, with lyrics by Victorian poet Adelaide Anne Proctor, - mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses. It had healing powers, the singer relates, that "quieted pain and sorrow, like love overcoming strife... that one lost chord divine which came from the soul of the organ and enter'd into mine..."

Galahad off for the Grail
and a pint of ale.

Caruso recorded the song in 1912 to raise money for survivors of the Titanic. From the sublime, to the ridiculously sublime, I'm reminded of the great saloon absurdist, Jimmy Durante, whom I loved as a kid, singing: I'm the Guy That Found the Lost Chord. "I found it by sitting on the piano keyboard. Strange, because I usually play by ear."

The dream recurs frequently, finding its way into book titles and plays. For example, the 2009 fantasy novel by Canadian singer, songwriter Ian Thomas, The Lost Chord, which I picked up recently, the story of an 1847 Franciscan monk who stumbles onto a harmonic that enables the soul to leave the body and travel through time.

The idea of something transcendent and lost goes back at least a thousand years to Arthurian legend, to Galahad and Perceval in search of the Grail. You could say we're all Indiana Jones/Raiders of the Lost Ark when we set out to write a story.  So many stories, so little grail, it seems, because, we look for it in the wrong places. The grail is found in the telling of the story - in its journey - not a lost chalice. So many of the stories I write turn out to be picaresque quests. My Ophelia Rising, for example, secretly survives the tragedy of Hamlet, to embark upon an arduous adventure through late renaissance Europe with the players, seeking love, meaning and if not fame, then another day upon the stages of life.

I believe masterpieces are produced more often than we think and that more of them are lost than we can ever know. I've come across at least two book manuscripts I would rate as brilliant in my long career as an editor of books and journals. Both of these languished not for lack of distribution or critical praise, but because their respective authors did not believe in them enough. Too many authors wait to be discovered, to be told they are okay by some all-wise parental literary system of reviewers and book publishers. These systems - plus readers themselves - can and do bring forth the occasional masterpiece, but they miss as many or more than they find. Self-evaluation and editing of course, are essential functions of the creative process. Too many writers - particularly inexperienced ones - don't know when to stop and unintentionally smother their own works in false modesty and self-criticism, waiting for validation from elsewhere when they haven't yet given it to themselves.

Putting one's work out there means risking that it won't measure up one way or another. That's a given. But you can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. It's not for us to determine our legacy, simply to move forward and turn the wheel of creation, again, and again, long as we can.

---------------------------------------

Umberto Tosi is the author of My Dog's Name, Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. He was contributing writer to Forbes, covering the Silicon Valley 1995-2004. Prior to that, he was an editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and its Sunday magazine. He was also the editor of San Francisco Magazine and other regionals He has written more than 300 articles for newspapers and magazines, online and in print. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four grown children - Alicia Sammons, Kara Towe, Cristina Sheppard and Zoë Tosi - and resides in Chicago. (He can be reached at Umberto3000@gmail.com)