beauty and wailing
notes on recent ideas
I had been pacing up and down on the sidewalk outside Spike’s Coffee for about an hour, loitering outside the bottle shop and apothecary. The drone of the Castro’s periphery on a weekday afternoon—kids walking hand-in-hand with their mothers, the occasional young adult running in to get a bottle of wine, a man in scrubs waiting by the corner with a naked bouquet—had already made its way into my ambient playlist. Music for airports, music for rapid and anonymous surveys.
Then a sharp, familiar sound cuts its way through the air. “I go through all this, before you wake up,” she croons, her voice echoing from the open window of a red sedan. The claps kick in, and tiny, hollow percussion sounds punctuate the background. A customary three-second pause at the stop sign, and the driver speeds off.
I was recently introduced to the idea that I hadn’t thought about beauty all that much. I think that’s kind of right. I appreciate art, things are cool and sick and amazing, but I never think of things as beautiful.
But, thinking back, it isn’t difficult to trace the feeling of beauty back and into many moments that I’ve had the privilege of encountering. A slight clenching of the chest, eyes tightening like they’re about to cry (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t), an odd squeeze somewhere in the mid-back of my skull, halfway between the back of my nose and my occipital lobe. And sometimes this feeling, I can trace it to a single moment, one giant wham that cuts through every other thing that is happening now and ever, and other times it’s a thread that weaves its way across time in some way:
two weeks spent binging an entire series (Hunter x Hunter),
twenty minutes immersed in the warm, enveloping canopy of the trees (Armstrong Redwoods),
three seconds since she opened her mouth (Ayano Kaneko at Fuji Rock ‘23; I weeped),
two hours of whiplash and whirlwind (Possession),
the instant at which a car blasts across the crosswalk with Bjork’s voice staining the wind (Castro and 19th).
And I was recently introduced to the idea that I hadn’t thought about wailing all that much, either. Do I wail, long, and yearn? Or do I transform that wail into furious, deep indents and scratch-marks in my journal? What makes me wail and long and yearn? Have I ever wailed? Into my pillow, or otherwise, or into the air?
The embodied feeling of beauty doesn’t feel all that different from a panic attack. The one and only time I’d experienced this was in 2021, squeezed into the back of a friend’s car with four other people. My memory is inevitably hazy now, but I remember that the evening had been great. We had all been hanging out and there was nothing off about it. But, somehow, maybe it wasn’t them or anything else and it was really just me, my chest clenched and my eyes tightened and my skull squeezed.
I dug through my notes for what I’d written in the aftermath of that:
My throat closes up, like someone stuffed the tiniest, bluntest of fishbones down my esophagus. It doesn’t stab at me, nor even prick, and it’s nowhere near dangerous enough for me to seek help. Like my mum said: forget about it, and it will go away. That happens with all things, and it does too with fishbones that get lodged in your airway. But it sits there, resting against my windpipe, my throat, pushing up and out like it has a mind of its own and is trying to tear its way through skin.
Then my exhales get heavier, my inhales devolving into staccato. And I don’t think it is the fishbone—my mum told me, fishbones are there and they will disappear with time, but they don’t affect your quality of life much except make you that slight bit more wary of fish—but I cannot think of any other reason.
As I tread across concrete, the fishbone grows bigger. (I thought that moving my body would get rid of the fog, but I was only ever correct fifty percent of the time.) Now the fishbone has migrated downwards, nestling itself right above my collarbone, and, any moment now, I think it will become one with my sternum. And then another weight pushes against the back of my skull. At the back, and then at the side. Against the corners, bringing heat with it in every charge.
Looking back is such a funny exercise. Four and a half years later, writing this from San Francisco, isn’t this slice of my thoughts a scarily appropriate example of my wailing?
The deeply sensuous experience of wailing seems suspiciously like that of beauty. Think about the physical act of a wail: a long, drawn-out cry, so high-pitched it pierces through everything around it, the sharpness that it invokes. Beauty also invokes some kind of sharpness. The present stretches and warps and compresses. A cut, tsss, a way of slicing and carving through space-time.