I don’t like absolutes. Certainty frightens me sometimes. I watched Conclave the other day with my sister (curiously, it was days before Pope Francis passed away). When Lawrence gives his speech on certainty saying that “certainty is the great enemy of unity” and “certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance”, I felt that. For how many years I’ve asked for the ability to know something to shield me from hurt, I could say certainty is not something anyone should strive to have, at least not about a few things. You can never be certain about matters of the world for you are not the world. I would go as far as to say you can never be certain about yourself; the way the seasons change have nothing on you and your ability to change from a day to another. You can’t be sure of yourself.¹

So if someone says “what is your favorite song/album/movie/food/building/person” or whatever, you know that you know what the answer is in that moment, but you’re such a beautiful caterpillar that the answer will surely be different the next time this question appears to you. It is impossible to say for sure what is the most of something, especially something artistic, when we don’t know everything in that something. Yes, this movie is dear to me but, unbeknownst to me, it’s because I haven’t watched that other one yet. It’s because I’m not the person that is going to watch that movie yet, the person that relates to the other movie way more because they’ve been through other stuff. And the movie that’s dear to me now won’t know what to say to that person when they come around. I haven’t watched every movie and I know nothing of myself, I just wait for new movies and new me’s to appear, just as I wait for winter to come.

However, I wanted to write something today about how Roads by Portishead is probably the most beautiful song I’ve ever listened to and will listen to.

I’ve known the song for a long time. I’ve listened to it for many years. I’ve always loved it, but it took me a while for it to work its magic on me. To go from “beautiful song” to “most beautiful song”. This change is, once again, because I have changed.

I have changed in many, many ways. Change is… Complicated.² I’m an adult, a caterpillar like any other, but I’m scared of change to this day. Sometimes, when I think about the aspects I love about others, they’re always carrying a part of me that I lost. I wish I didn’t change. Even through my unhappiness, I was innocent. I don’t understand how that wasn’t enough to see the world as such a beautiful animal, but then again, as you can’t understand your present fully, I was never able to understand anything I did in the past. “Why did I do that?” I don’t know. I wish I didn’t do it. At the time it made sense. It felt right, probably. Maybe what I wished was that I changed sooner, perhaps? The person I am now would never do that. I should’ve become that person sooner. See? I’m incomprehensible. I don’t want to change, but I wish I changed sooner. How are you supposed to understand this person? How are you, as this person, able to tell what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

But in these past couple of years, I’ve appreciated many things. Things I came to love when I became who I ended up becoming. One of those things was beauty itself, the one mentioned on the title of this rambling. What is beautiful to me? Well, the me now thinks that kindness is the most beautiful thing. Innocence, naivety, maybe. But not purity. Purity is insanity, it’s filthy. For me the most beautiful thing can be being kind even if your mind is messy, even if the world doesn’t treat you right. It’s preserving a side of you you had before you were used to the world. Before you changed. Before you knew what a microwave did and you had to watch that box glow and make strange noises. Before you knew why the sky was blue, when you were completely indifferent about its color but you looked at it and at the clouds and you couldn’t know why but you thought it was kind of pretty. To preserve your interest in things the adults take for granted. To see beauty in such simple things.

Roads is very simple, as in it is very bare bones. It’s skeletal, it’s crude, it is naked in front of you. And from that absurdist simplicity, it can pull from our deepest heartstrings a sound, an immense feeling that you didn’t thought you could listen to in such a tiny space. Forget a tiny space! From the minute the song starts, the echoes make you feel like you are in a huge room with nothing on it. Forget a room! You’re in a space so big and so empty you can see everything around you but you can’t see where the space ends. And somehow, through such delicate and small gestures, the song manages to fill all of that space right before it ends, just to leave you alone with the nothingness before leaving for good.

How so much is done with so little is beyond me. The sound, so simple and raw, is gigantic and unrelenting. It is, to me, as if I’m seeing immense beauty in something I’ve never put too much thought on. It is like looking through the window at lightning coming from the clouds, not hearing the thunders but just watching it dance in the air in a meditated violence as an answer from the world to the world, in the conversation it has with itself such as our own ruminations and conclusions. Such raw beauty. Roads connects me with this side of beauty, and that is why it is (one of) the most beautiful song(s), to me.

¹ – I recommend the song Certainty by Big Thief. “My certainty is wild, weaving. For you, I am a child, believing.”
² – I recommend the song Change by Big Thief. “Change. Like the wind. Like the water. Like skin. Change. Like the sky. Like the leaves. Like a butterfly.”