There is no way to ignore her blaring blunder; her voice has failed to deliver the sound that is anticipated by both herself and her live audience, and there is no option to go back and re-record it. At this moment, a moment in which many professional performers would be horrified by the unexpected betrayal of the body as an instrument of expressive beauty, Hill does something utterly magnificent, something that is now immortalized in this recording of her live performance: she giggles. She does not stop. She does not apologize. She audibly giggles. And then, in precise rhythmic time, she continues on to the next phrase and finishes her soulful song.

The essence of illusion. Our beliefs. Our flesh. Our clinging. Our grasping. Our thoughts. Our words. We have to get to love. Love is the energy that is the life-force of all human beings. It is stored within and beyond our vessels and we can experience it when we press into each other in nakedness. But here is why it is very difficult: We are afraid. We simultaneously fear annihilation while we cling to self-loathing. The sameness of the walls, as a repetition, becomes a dialogue, and through that dialogue, I recognize my own sameness—the unchanging body that encapsulates me to form the inescapable boundary of separateness. I have to press through, beyond this sameness; beyond the illusion of identity. Pressing to evaporate the physical lines is a philosophy; what is the emotion? How do I break through these barriers? With a knife? Fist? Sledgehammer? Fingertips? Or, do I not break these barriers, but, rather, stretch them? Dance into them? Sing through them? What is a boundary? Does a boundary require an “other” in order to be defined or disintegrated? What is the energy of being caught in the in-between? Could it be that the answer to my suffering has been this simple all along? That I simply need to create?

In 1993, British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman released a film called Blue, a 75-minute projection of an unchanging monochrome that stretches across a darkened screen—a rectangular symbol of Jarman’s slow descent into death from AIDS-related illnesses. Out of the glow of International Klein Blue, Jarman’s voice emerges as if from behind this eerie scrim, accompanied intermittently by the sounds of monastic bells, environmental noises, and composed music. In both narrated prose and poetic verse, Jarman tells the story of the interminable wait between his suspended life and his impending death, while his body is consumed by the virus. At the fore of the disease’s relentless attack is the slow diminishment of his sight, relegating his ocular vision to mere shadows and shades of blue.

In 2012, the eminent music historians Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker published a 624-page compendium titled A History of Opera. Hailed on its cover by the Times Literary Supplement as “The best single volume ever written on the subject,” this hefty volume traces the art form from its very beginnings to present-day practices, concluding with a section title that quips: “THAT’S OPERA. JUST A LOT OF PEOPLE IN COSTUMES FALLING IN LOVE AND DYING” (Abbate & Parker, 2012, p. 566). In the finale of their significant tome, Abbate & Parker (2012) consider humanity’s proclivity for art and beauty—both in those who strive to live as artists and in those who venture to witness their creations. At the core of this impulse seems to be the desire to connect with the archetypal: the gods and goddesses who live in our collective psyches and vie for their own expression through our bodies and our voices, in both their magnificence and their doom. Opera, with its multi-sensory imagery and masterful telling of well-known narratives, offers a most exquisite medium for archetypal transmission.

When I was a child, I used to sneak into my mother’s closet and snuggle into the perfumed clothes that hung above the rows of leather shoes and bunched up purses on the floor. My mother kept a shoebox in her closet that was filled with old photographs. Alone in the liminal space of shadows and muffled sound, I would open my mother’s box of mementos and pull out a photo of my parents, standing on a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, on the day they met. While I stared at the photograph, it was as if I was suddenly pulled into the scene: I imagined myself walking back and forth along the shore, wading through the shallow water, and jumping from rock to rock. Though I have no idea why this photo held such fascination for me, I visited that scene again and again; it brought me great comfort and a sense of place.