How is it that Hope Sandoval looks exactly she sounds? Was she willed into existence by 100 butterflies beating their wings 100 times into a summer wind? The wind, in turn, softly vibrating the strings of a guitar? The notes then re-materializing into a windswept enigma wrapped in a baby tee?
I just watched The Jesus and Mary Chain's Sometimes Always video for the first time, featuring the mysterious fairy woman with the sad eyes and the ghostly voice. Coincidentally, I had just read this article about teacup puppies.
I mention this only because that led me to read this chapter from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It is called "Beautiful Objects Small", and tells us duh, we all like pretty, delicate creatures because of DNA, or something.
...In most languages, the objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets...it is the small we are inclined to be fond of.
Until this moment, I had neither known nor cared what the girl from Mazzy Star looked like, but suddenly, I found myself inclined to be rather fond of her.
The aforementioned songs are both lovely, and I had a fleeting crush on them both in my university days. It never went much beyond that though, and I wonder if it's time I cultivate a deeper interest. I'm about 3 videos in when I recall a conversation I had last week about something called ASMR. A "perceptual phenomenon" which causes some to enjoy barely audible sounds to the extent that they have turned a random whispering lady into a YouTube celebrity. It gives them brain tingles! :)
"I think I have the opposite thing," I had told my friend. "That's why I don't like the Eagles, Norah Jones or Bob Ross." This is my nonsensical trifecta of mellowness, and I stand by that. Why? Because they all give me fucking brain tingles. :(
Mazzy Star are rather quiet. A lot of terrific things in this world are, but I am certainly not one of them. And so I I think that it's not just a confusion my loud self feels at the gentle sounds, but a kind of resentment at their apparent ease.
In Burke's essay, he makes a clear distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The separation was jarring at first, since it runs counter to my natural tendency to think that the former is actually most often achieved through the latter.
From Burke's same volume: "Of The Sublime".
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
Which I guess means that, for the most part, for me to truly acknowledge beauty, I kind of require it to kick me in the gut or the face or the heart or something. I am coming to understand that this standard is both unfair and exhausting.
When I heard Hope, for the first time in so many years, lackadaisically deliver the line, "I gave you all I had/I gave you good and bad/I gave but you just threw it back", my first instinct was to call her a liar.
My younger self saw an aspirational allure in such coolness, coveting her winsome poise. But at this moment in my life, I was having a bit of trouble with it. I was having trouble with how little trouble comes through in such delicate delivery.
And yes, I mulled it over far more than necessary, like so many overly fragrant drinks of the season. I thought about it while winter encroached, and my heartbeat slowed down and I officially crossed the threshold from early to early-mid thirties. And when I came out the other side...well, the quiet, the resigned, the peaceful, the muted- it resonated, for once.
Fade on, fair(y) lady.










