(Text compiled by Tarik O’Regan from anonymous responses to a survey conducted by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco.)


Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.*

A paradox.

My full self now.
Yet, I rarely feel anything.

All we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

That Paradox.

Floating.

My full self now.
Yet, I rarely feel anything.

A paradox.
Still a paradox.
Night and day.
Both at once.
The Empire of Light.

I initiated this.
My choice.

There is a poem floating around:

Contact.
No contact.
Low contact.
Cordial.
Contact.
Total. No contact.

How necessary.
Not specifically.
But the order.
The order of decades.
That kind of energy.

There’s this poem floating around:

Contact.
No contact.
Low contact.
Cordial.
Contact.

Yes, that kind of energy, back then.

Not Empire.
But Dominion.

Contact.
No contact…

I initiated this.
Kept hoping.
My choice.
But that was the time it stopped.

There is a before.
And an after.
A paradox.

A Dominion of Light.**

I initiated this.
My choice.

There is a poem floating around:

Contact.
No contact…

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I [do] assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.***

—

(*): From My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 3rd ed., Roberts Brothers, 1896.

(**): Reference is made to a succession of paintings by René Magritte, known as L'Empire des lumières, which portray a paradoxical image of a nocturnal landscape beneath a sunlit sky.  The French title is ambiguous in translation, becoming either “empire” or “dominion” of “light(s).” In the catalogue to SFMOMA’s 2018 exhibition of Magritte’s work (Haskell, Caitlin, editor. Magritte: The Fifth Season. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018), Sandra Zalman explains the distinction succinctly: “While an empire exists in relation to a ruler, a dominion does not necessarily require this.”

(***): From Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, 1891-1892 ed., David McKay, 1892.

In Dominion of Light: A Requiem for the Estranged, I wanted to give shape to experiences of separation (sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed) that were shared anonymously through a survey conducted by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. What struck me most in reading these testimonies was not only the intensity of feeling but also the way certain themes and phrases reappeared again and again. That repetition became the central musical idea of the piece: words circling back on themselves, as if trying to reconcile a paradox that can never fully resolve.

I interwove these fragments with lines from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, alongside a quiet nod to Magritte’s paintings of day and night coexisting. The result is not a traditional Requiem, but rather a meditation on estrangement itself: how we carry its contradictions, how the language of loss repeats and transforms, and how, even in the echo of familiar words, a kind of fragile light emerges.