JOHN LIBERATORE
composer

I began work on Catch Somewhere as a MacDowell fellow in February and March of 2020. While I was there, I discovered a Walt Whitman poem I had not yet heard, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”

 

 

How perfectly, I thought, this summarized my experience at MacDowell. I had been gifted this wonderful isolation through which I could more intimately get to know my own practice. Perhaps this is what Whitman meant to describe, the way in which an artist flings ideas out into space until one of them “holds,” according to some internal validation.

 

Three years later, I no longer interpret the poem this way. Within days of my return from MacDowell, the pandemic introduced me, like all of us, to a new, much darker kind of isolation. In this time, I revisited the poem, and the meaning changed. I realize that the anchors I search for in the solitary act of creativity are not internal, but external. In isolation, I’m seeking a way of speaking, of saying something true and genuine, and finding an anchor that connects to someone, somewhere. In her essay, “The Dancing Mind,” Toni Morrison paraphrased a similar phenomenon, calling it “that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s.” Catch Somewhere traveled with me through a year and a half of uncertainty, loss, discouragement, fear, and sometimes hope. Though the piece is not about this experience exactly, for better or worse, it is surely imbued with the circumstances under which it was created.