“Beauty needs a witness.”
Zan Perrion
I’ll let you in on a secret: certain parts of certain songs make me cry every time I hear them. It doesn’t matter if I’m in my bedroom, or if I’m driving, or if I’m walking down the street.
Case in point: I went for a rainy walk this evening, and – amongst a couple of other songs – the third verse of Castles Made of Sand by Jimi Hendrix did it to me. (There was a young girl, whose heart was a frown, ’cause she was crippled for life, and she couldn’t speak a sound…”)
I am powerless to Jimi every time he sings those lines.
But I’m not crying tears of sadness. Far from it. It’s much more like some kind of musical orgasm. I feel this rising tension inside me, and I know what’s about to happen, and then the dam bursts, and my eyes well up and I feel elation and euphoria for a few seconds, and then I come back down to Earth.
For those brief few seconds, I am free. There is no time. There is just beauty. I know exactly who I am and what I came here to do. And then it’s gone and I just have a happy memory of how it felt.
If I could bottle this experience and sell it like a drug, I would. Except that I don’t think that would work out because they do say it’s very bad business for a dealer to get high on his own supply, and I know for a fact I wouldn’t be able to help myself.
Is this something you experience too? I’d love to know.