NOBODY
IS EVER
MISSING

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…What Is Inside this Solitude…

Around 10 years ago, living in Houston, I remember singing what would become the opening lines of this opera to myself one day while out walking. I was around Spec’s liquor store on Westheimer past Hillcroft. 

For as long as I can remember, I have walked to cope, to clarify, and to disappear. When I first encountered Catherine’s book, I was in a situation that made her character’s decision to disappear from her life seem deeply relatable. I felt the rhythms and rationalizations intuitively and found them beautiful and personal. That is what made such an impression on me when I first read Nobody Is Ever Missing: the buzzy pace of Elyria’s mind against the arrested momentum of her life. At that time, I would also frequently disappear by venturing aimlessly at night across sleeping cities. In this, Elyria was a friend— a fellow nobody. I composed the music from this mindset; one that feels distant now. But I still feel it.

Like the novel, the music is evidence of a brain trying to understand itself. Throughout the book, Elyria stares down her Wildebeest. The animal’s image– sometimes staring back from a stoic promontory, sometimes running at full gallop toward her— connects us to the feral aspect of ourselves. Our human nature is always locked in a Socratic battle with our animal nature. At times we trick ourselves into thinking our human nature is winning, but Elyria dissolves these pretensions for us.

In beautifully hewn sentences, Catherine traces the shape of our thoughts and feelings. She reveals how cold and logical and completely corruptible they are by this strange force within that is older and more powerful than either. I don’t see the opera as a sad piece, just as I didn’t read the novel as a sad book. It felt helpful for the moment I was in and sits with me still as a reminder to stay connected to the Wildebeest. 

The opera tries to capture how thinking feels and how it feels to when your animal nature takes control. Catherine’s story, and the music born from it, is about staying close to that part of ourselves.

…I Would Suffer More…

Tao Lin wakes up to the clattering of birds that surround his modest home on the Big Island of Hawaii. He prepares food for his three cats and himself and leaves out scraps for the wild pigs. He fills the day with writing, editing, posting online, ordering esoteric books and reading the ones that arrive in the mail. He researches spiritual phenomena, near-death experiences, conspiracy theories, autism, and autoimmune diseases. Tao Lin famously “left society” in 2020 and dedicated himself to reversing his autism and healing the afflictions of modern society.

An “anchorite” is a type of hermit who secludes themselves in a single place for religious reasons. The most well-known, Julian of Norwich, anchored herself to a brick cell in St. Julian’s Church in the 14th century. Her descriptions of her visions and messages of God’s love are the oldest surviving writing of a woman in the English language.

Both Tao Lin and Julian of Norwich focus on sickness. Removed from society, both attempt to heal the world through deeply personal investigations of their own illness. This imparts both a vulnerability and an urgency to their work.

When I read John Berryman’s Dream Song No. 29 printed in full in the epigraph of Catherine Lacey’s novel, I felt the same vulnerability and the same urgency in its language. The protagonist of the Dream Songs, Henry, is described by Berryman only as having “suffered an irreversible loss.” Anchored as they are each to their own time, Tao Lin and Julian of Norwich console Henry, as he struggles to come to terms with his own pain.

The pieces employ a simple musical language and occupy a modest space. The songs are named for their authors, rather than the works from which they derive, as a gesture of reverence for each author's dedication to the task of writing itself. These works, grappling with loss and virtue, convey an intimate understanding of the human condition and the delicate balance of suffering and resilience.