Più docile io sono

Well, one survives that, no matter how… If it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

— James Baldwin, The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity

 

I was hiking with my family recently, and my mom said affectionately that she was glad I’d learned to hike while looking at the ground.

As a kid, I evidently walked through forests looking up, forward, or sideways, but never down: unaware of the parameters of my own body, either absorbed in an inner world of my own making or projecting my imagination outward, far beyond my little self. Today, a kid like me would probably be recognized as neurodivergent, but in the vocabulary of the 90s I was bright, forgetful, spacy, shy—and clumsy.

I tripped on tree roots, bruised myself constantly, and lasted only a few awkward months in soccer, ballet, baseball, and tennis. Gymnastics I liked better, because it’s individual and a bit creative. Swimming was the best, because moving through water is itself a kind of surreal absorption, a separation of the body from mundane limitations like gravity. But competition and comparison eventually sucked the pleasure out of those, too. The feeling of being simultaneously too much and not enough settled onto me for the long haul, manifesting in too many ways to count.

We all grow up around the ghosts of early pain, maturing into bodies and souls pocked with little hollows we’re afraid to poke into. Dysmorphia is one of mine, but I’m lucky, because my all-consuming desire to sing has given me a reason to examine my own defenses, trying different ways of softening them in order to release decayed hurt, disperse shame, and forgive my younger self for hating the ways I didn’t fit. Somehow, I’ve become a reasonably self-assured adult with one athletic superpower—classical singing—and a normal capacity to enjoy a hike.

Starting this blog years ago and attaching it to my professional website was a parallel project, internal this time. It allowed me to open up about personal topics I chose, tell stories about vulnerability, and let others see and touch the tender soft tissue of my own bruised humanity. It’s brought special people close to me and my work, and it’s made openness on stage a breeze by comparison.

Until recently, I never questioned the inclusion of personal writing here. But the last couple years have been tough. I limp sometimes when I’m tired these days: a persistent foot injury (one I’ve felt a need to hide, for fear of professional repercussions) has made movement painful and changed my relationship with my body again. There have been a few work-related disappointments, deaths of several loved ones, troubles with house and car and money, and a debilitating heartsickness that I won’t go into. None of this fits into a tidy singer-story I can unpack for public benefit.

Mostly I’ve clammed up because the state of the world saddens me every day. Politicians routinely dehumanize entire populations. Communities are being broken apart. Bigots of all stripes scapegoat and attack marginalized people in ever more brazen ways. Genocide and colonial occupation are constant—before, during and after supposed cease-fires. Corrupt people in power gleefully toss climate and human rights protections to enrich themselves. And it’s becoming harder to organize against all this as billionaires buy up and enshittify the media platforms we’ve typically used to exchange ideas, drowning human voices with bots and AI slop. 

How do we deal with any of this? How do we talk about suffering when there’s so much of it? Music is still exciting to me, but the cognitive dissonance of caring about work while trying to comprehend the enormity of the world’s cruelty has been too much. Anything I tried to write seemed too raw, or too cringe, or not informed enough, or like it would only reveal my own weakness and not help anything. At particularly low moments, I’ve wondered if it’s even possible for most of us to address such personal and systemic hurts or if we’re no better than anyone else in history that looked away from atrocities and punted trauma down a few generations.

Know who else is searching for an escape from deep pain? The Countess in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, which I just performed for the first time with the Orchestra of the 18th Century. She’s a very privileged woman who’s suffering more than she can safely admit. Our problems aren’t the same, but in the months I lived with the character, her emotional arc provided a scaffold for my questions. Rosina the Countess starts out drowning in sadness about her husband’s rascally behavior (Porgi amor, 2nd act). In her second aria (Dove sono, 3rd act) she makes a decision about her own agency, supported by gloriously affirming music. Finally, she sings the last individual words of the opera to the Count after he asks for her forgiveness: “più docile io sono, e dico di si” (“I am gentler than you, and I say yes”). These words determine the direction of the emotional current flowing out from this beloved piece.

Forgiveness is a troubling concept, especially these days. Why forgive an abuser if you could leave him, prosecute him, impeach him, try him in The Hague? But I thought a lot about the Countess’s choice as I did my best to embody her. In my opinion, it isn’t a renunciation of self. Her choice is a chess move, not a valentine—a move that might actually release her from suffering. She can’t single-handedly end the violent misogyny baked into her society, but she can articulate her hurt, hatch a plan to make her situation publicly known, use the moral accountability of her community to humble the man whose cruel selfishness has silenced her, and chart a softer path forward for herself and a few others.

As I’ve struggled with all this stuff, I’ve found comfort in writers from the last century, some quoted here, who manage to illuminate the suffering of their time with deep emotional insight and moral clarity. I’m grateful for their words, and recently I’ve finally felt some of my own wanting to emerge again. As Zadie Smith said, “to write at all is not to completely despair.” Here goes.

 

 

—

 

I have always had the sense of Armageddon and it was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were dying, that we were killing our world – that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That this was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future.

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (“An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich”)

 

It isn’t just me. Lots of artists are struggling right now. 

Making a living from self-expression has always been tough. You need to hope that someone will hear and respond to what you’re making, that you’ll get to enjoy the resulting sense of connection, and that your efforts could lead to more recognition within the field, better compensation, or increased creative agency. As governments cut funding for the arts, redirecting it to weapons programs and tax cuts for billionaires—as blunt algorithms bury our careful, passionate work under endless clickbait—as human labor is devalued, jobs in all fields dwindle, and living costs rise—it’s hard to hold on to hope.

Some of us also struggle to believe in the relevance of art in a larger sense. On the train to rehearsal, we scroll through news of a thousand more people killed in Gaza or Ukraine or Sudan, people in the US pulled screaming out of their cars and disappeared, activists and journalists and children and aid workers and women and trans people indiscriminately murdered, cities flooded and burning, Nazism on the rise. Even if our musical work is beautiful or well-reviewed, even if our performance or recording made someone’s day better, music is doing nothing to stop power grabs around the world.

Can my voice change anything? Does my body have more impact at a street protest in the afternoon or when I sing a concert in the evening? (It’s hard to do both in one day with injured feet.) Can creativity provide real refuge when the stakes are so high? Should we be putting music aside, organizing ICE watch groups, campaigning for progressive political candidates, studying nursing or midwifery to counteract terrifying rollbacks in healthcare, joining aid flotillas? Are we approaching the scarier choice that some people have already had to make—flee or fight?

What’s the point of the work we’ve cultivated? Is it just to prevent a few of us from going nuts? Sympathetic friends assure me that that’s worth a lot. Is it? 

It was bizarrely comforting to read that Audre Lorde, a beacon of eloquent resistance to systemic oppression, also considered all these questions and wasn’t sure of the answers. We need to keep talking to each other, not just doomscrolling. Seriously, if you share these thoughts of mine (or even if you make it to the end of this post), let me buy you a beer sometime and pick your brain about how you’re managing.

 

 

—

 

Apocalypse, deriving from the Greek “apocalipsis”, originally means to reveal. To uncover. And the current moment is one of profound revelation, of truth, of reality beyond ordinary perception. The sacrifice of Gaza happening under our watch forces us to confront the system within; the horrid, brutal reality we are all part of; the truth of who we are as individuals, as communities, as states, as institutions – and compels us to choose between courage through principles or cowardice through acceptance.

— Francesca Albanese, Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture 2025

 

I’m trying to keep working at a high level—while also trying to protest, support people who need help, read, not spiral, and stay alert—while also trying to tend to my mental and physical health, heal my feet, rest, do other things I enjoy besides music, and spend time with people I love—while also trying to summon big, visionary creativity and preparation for artistic ideas that could manifest and sustain me several years from now—while also trying to keep my roof from falling down or my kitchen from succumbing to ants. I don’t know. Life’s a lot right now.

But I do want to step up activism in my artistic work, inspired by friends and strangers who are doing the same. Brave choices onstage can touch pain that felt private until it became collective in a hall; audiences are reacting especially strongly to these choices in the last year or two. I’m in awe of Ilan Volkov, the Israeli conductor who used his televised platform at the BBC Proms to issue a tremblingly delivered, passionate denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. My friend Manoj Kamps’s wonderful program with the Rotterdam Phil blended Weimar-era cabaret and classical pieces with narration by the drag performer Ma’Ma Queen, and the result was joyful and totally on the nose. Composers are creating new works of unusual social urgency and conscience. Friends are speaking to the audience more often during concerts and reminding them that nothing, not even beauty, happens in a political vacuum.

Thinking about my own work in recent years, the projects I’m proudest of are the ones that maybe moved the needle a bit. With Forget This Night and our recitals related to its release, Sam and I have convinced a lot of people that Lili Boulanger is worth serious, non-tokenist attention. (The next step is for her visionary cycle Clairières to be heard in a full orchestral version for the first time—and YAY, that’ll happen in 2027.) I’m singing an opera in Antwerp right now called Barzakh, with words by people incarcerated in Belgian prisons. It’s thrilling, touching, and could open many eyes about systemic injustice. It’s opened mine, and I get to wail out an aria/dance number about a fiery woman called Sandra who refuses to stop singing, even in jail. 

Friends and I are also discussing how to broaden the tent artistically and facilitate work by others, as well as our own playing and singing. I’m excited by our ideas, which are too new to share.

Art (from tiny concerts to Andor) can still give me courage. I’m saying this to remind myself, and you too, if you need reminding. Sometimes I’ve felt so low that I’ve forgotten it—forgotten how my body and soul can be shaken awake by a voice, image, shaft of light, something beautiful or troubling or fierce, an articulation of someone’s individual soul that I discover I share. For my whole life, art has made me curious and patient, eased dysmorphia and alienation, deepened my relationships, and struck me with wonder and a sense of belonging. It still works on me, when I let it cut through my paralysis.

And it can be a tool to address the current moment directly. I attended a terrific talk in Rotterdam recently by the historian Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project. Her take on world affairs was clear-eyed and unoptimistic, but one hopeful idea bubbled up through her remarks. When someone in the audience asked what she might write in the coming years, she mentioned dissent. “Dissents are not about today,” she said. “Dissents are for a future society that will be ready for that dissent and enact it.” She mentioned specifically the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which legalized racial segregation. One lone justice, John Marshall Harlan, wrote a dissent that became part of the public record. Harlan was a problematic man, but his words in this case became the basis for the majority decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned Plessy decades later and set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement.

Three SCOTUS justices are writing forceful, incredulous dissents these days, speaking for all of us who are horrified by the decisions of their colleagues. Who knows which of their words might eventually help right the wrongs of this Court, this administration, this moment of falling backwards?

Articulating disagreement or outrage or fear—dissenting by whatever means available—isn’t cringe. It isn’t a waste of time. None of us are perfectly wise, or perfectly informed, or able to hold all points of view at the same time. That shouldn’t stop us from dissenting, because we all matter. The dissents of people in the path of bombs and tanks and machine guns fearing for their lives and those of their families matter. The dissents of queer and trans people insisting on their own humanity matter. The dissents of millions who banged pots and pans at protests, contributed stories to the 1619 Project, or turned up in frog costumes to frustrate ICE agents? Those matter. They can add up to a shift, even if we wish that happened more frequently and quickly.

The roller coaster of news is shifting a bit, I think. Political cruelty is bolder than ever, but so is collective determination to resist it. People in the US are pushing forward on many fronts—unsticking themselves from fear and shock and fatalism, adjusting previously rigid positions, finding common ground, and getting creative with dissent as they realize they’re not alone. Rebecca Solnit’s galvanizing posts about the crisis are always worth a read; here’s a shot-in-the-arm piece about ways people are resisting, if you need a lift.

Whether they change a politician’s vote or not, street protests bring people together in person. So many things we used to do with other humans in public—dating, meeting, seeing movies, exercise, buying food, caring for relatives, looking for information, voting—have moved inside, online, out of sight, subcontracted to a delivery worker or chatGPT or a home aide. We’re forgetting how to maintain friendships, how to listen to someone we don’t agree with, how to “urge people to be thoughtful and vulnerable and eager to pay close attention to something besides themselves for an hour or two,” says Hanif Abdurraqib. Street protests remind people that they live in communities being systematically eroded and isolated, and that the communities are worth saving. Participating in art in person—going to a concert, show, film, talk, exhibition—feels a bit like protest against fatalism, cowardly avoidance, and complacence. It reminds us that we’re not just numbers, targets for propaganda and advertising and rage-bait, but people inhabiting real (non-filtered, non-perfect) bodies, doing our best to stay alive and connected.

Two of my Barzakh colleagues remind me forcefully of this: one musician who escaped his homeland decades ago, and one actor who left his (unrecognized) home country of Palestine more recently. Both have experienced hardships I can empathize with but never fully grasp; both practice their craft with irrepressible heart, immediacy, poetry, and humor. As the actor and I chatted over lunch on the first rehearsal day, I wanted to ask a million questions—but tried not to annoy him, curious for whatever he felt like sharing. Lots, as it turns out. And he has no trouble articulating why he’s a maker. Theater gives us space for depth and nuance, he said. During a play, we linger over people’s stories and decide how to tell them most clearly. We sit in a room with others, sharing one experience in real time, comfortably or uncomfortably, in joy or sadness or ambivalence, feeling whatever we feel and talking about it afterward, becoming less alone.

Art isn’t only for escape, although we need that too. It can help us articulate and understand our collective humanity, which can help us summon the mental clarity and resolve to resist the brutal modern push toward isolationsism. 

 

 

—

 

Forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance … the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.

— Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition

 

The Count spends most of the Marriage of Figaro behaving like an 18th-century Trump—entitled, narcissistic, driven by an insatiable need to feel desirable and masculine and important, uninterested in anyone else’s reality. At the end, though, he’s out-maneuvered and exposed as a hypocritical fool in front of his household and village. All of a sudden he is stricken with shame and remorse. “Contessa, perdona, perdona, perdona!” he implores. It feels genuine, because Mozart’s setting of his words is so heartbreakingly simple and sincere.

The cast and the audience wait in silent suspense. What will Rosina say? 

What can she say, actually? 18th-century women, even aristocratic women, didn’t have the options we have. Leaving her husband would have meant utter ostracism from society. If she wanted vengeance, she could have responded with angry reproach, emotional blackmail, or cold silence. Instead, she forgives: più docile io sono, e dico di sì.

The word docile (dɔ – ‘tʃi – le) in modern Italian shares associations with its English cognate docile (submissive, compliant, easily controlled)—a word chosen to beam approval upon children, housebroken animals, or wives that put up no resistance. It’s these associations that make Rosina’s choice unappealing to some modern listeners. Ugh, did she really just call herself submissive? Is she giving up all her hard-won advantage for one more chance with her abusive loser of a husband? Usually it’s translated euphemistically in the subtitles as “I am kinder than you.”

But Italian docile comes from the Latin docere (which also gives us the English words docent and doctor): “to teach.” Latin docilis, the adjectival form, actually means teachable, capable of learning and adaptation, apt, open-minded. I think this family of meanings gives us a better sense of what Rosina is saying. Unlike her husband, the Countess hasn’t hardened into an opportunistic cynic. She has plenty of self-respect (too much, as he grumbles at one point), but she remains curious, ready to be surprised, capable of changing her mind about people. 

When the Count asks for her pardon, she stays soft. She matches his tone, mirroring back his moment of humility and vulnerability in order to reinforce it. She gives her pardon by heightening his melody, enriching his harmony, extending his phrase structure, and saying yes (with just a hint of side-eye). Everyone on stage takes up the Countess’s music, again heightening and enriching and drawing it out into an almost unbearably bittersweet collective resolution: let’s put the past behind us. This moment always choked me up during our shows—not the arias, not the final dialogue, but that tutti before the frenetic final chorus. This fictional community understands completely the emotional ambivalence of the moment, but they’re on the Countess’s side, singing her tune.

Hannah Arendt understood that forgiveness can be a radical act of empowerment rather than capitulation. It can free both parties from the emotional trap of the original wrong. With her forgiveness, the Countess is rejecting the toxic cycles of dishonesty, aggression and point-scoring that have characterized her marriage, creating an opportunity to re-establish it on a more equal emotional footing. Vengeance would have trapped her in a permanent posture of reaction to her husband’s worst behavior. Instead, she dissents. She decides that marriage doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, a war with a winner and loser. Her choice, articulated in public, rallies her community to her side and reinforces the moral strength of her position. It also increases the likelihood of long-term accountability: because of the community’s involvement, Susanna and the other vulnerable women of the household have a better chance of freedom from the Count’s ongoing harassment, which until that point was covered up by a few yes-men.

It’s a transgressive choice to stay gentle—docilis, open, capable of learning—in a cruel world where bloodlust is currency. Vengeance and numbness are both understandable reactions; softness exposes us to ongoing pain and shock, for sure. But Toni Morrison said it best when talking about her reaction to racial violence: “I insist on being shocked. I’m never going to become immune.” The pain of letting ourselves react emotionally, honestly and without cynicism, to cruelty—genocide, abuse, greed, prejudice, dehumanization—is still better than giving up on our humanity in order to feel less.

Despite my occasional feeling of paralysis since the last presidential election (or injury, or heartbreak, or news cycle), I’m grateful not to be immune. Pain reminds me that I’m alive, and that there’s something needing to be healed or solved. I have tools—my pain and my ability to articulate it, empathetic listening, curiosity, music—that can keep me connected with others.

It’s hard for anyone to keep up their spirits alone, but I’m lucky in my community. That community has expanded to include a trans American who recently moved—fled—to the Netherlands. She’s super smart and thoughtful and fun, and we’ve talked a lot about gender conditioning, hormones, bodies, and how people shed dysmorphia and gain confidence at different stages of life. She lived in my attic for a while during the move (neither of us knew if we were allowed to laugh when she brought up Anne Frank). A few weeks in, she said: thank you for giving me something to run toward, instead of only running away.

Isn’t that what we all want? The freedom to run heedlessly, like a child whose center of gravity is low and who hasn’t yet internalized inhibition or shame or fear of pain, TOWARD something—peace, safety, good company, good food, good social infrastructure, good choices? Don’t most of us want to do something to reverse this falling backwards—to change our balance from a posture of defensive reaction to someone else’s wrong into one of leaning forward, running, collectively, heedlessly, toward emotional accountability and cooperative solutions to global problems? My friend’s beautiful, heartfelt words of gratitude mattered and gave me a sense of purpose, helping me thaw from my frozen shock-state and start wanting to run again. (Or at least walk, hike, and stand for a concert and protest. My feet are taking their sweet time to heal.)

Yes, let’s do everything we can to prosecute these murderous fuckers, the ones who would shoot all of humanity out of an airlock except the people bribing them and licking their boots. We all know which men are on that list. But we all have more power than the autocrats and billionaires would like us to believe—power to give, to listen, to articulate our shared humanity, to dissent, to disrupt toxic cycles of behavior, to scream and bang on pots and pans and wear frog costumes, to choose principled courage over cowardly acceptance.

Più docile io sono, e dico di sì.

I am reading poems … because I want [my students] to consider the responsibilities of the heart, responsibilities that the world will attempt to detach them from in the name of individualism, or the ever-growing realities of isolationist attitudes and power’s contempt for community. I am asking them, as I am continually asking myself, to imagine a heart that feels a connection to the hearts of others, even others you do not know. I would like to think that this is what nudges me forward, more than some mythological concept of “hope.” In the silence of a room after the reading of a poem, when the only sounds are small gasps and sniffles, I can say to myself that we are all carrying a unique ache, or a unique memory, or a unique desire that the poem ignited. And I would like to know about it. I would like to know what few inches of the wretched world can be made into an adequate space for you to mourn, or to make a plate of food, or to dance in your living room, or to bury something you’ve finally decided to put down.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, In Defense of Despair