I was asked to describe myself quickly in one word. I said “frustrating”. I feel that this is how most people would sum me up, at least as one of the top five ‘Bethan-defining’ words. And I think this is because I never feel entirely satisfied in the moment, and I somehow always feel the need to share this dissatisfaction with everyone around me in the most pitiful way possible. I’m always focused on what I should be doing, could be doing, or what I’m going to be doing in the next moment. I unnecessarily lose the enjoyment of single moments simply due to my irritating obsession with the future or contingent.

I’ve started to realise why I want to invest my life in creating beautiful things. It is the experiencing of these things that places me right in the centre of the present moment. And when I’m in its centre I never want to leave.

The best way I can exemplify this is by talking about my love affair with Handel’s Messiah. The Messiah and I have a relationship going back four years. I was 15, one of 300 young people, standing in the Royal Albert Hall at the BBC Proms, singing the soprano section. Two moments that evening took possession of my body so that all I could do was what the music asked me to. The first I found in a single note of the Amen Chorus, which for me represents a celebration of the entire oratorio.

The other moment happened immediately after the Messiah’s end. On hearing the silence, nobody dared clap, move, even breathe, because the moment beforehand, that almighty finish, was simply too powerful to let go of yet. This was also quite a difficult moment when another part of my body was urging me to cry in awe of what had just happened. If you haven’t experienced a moment like this, the closest I can compare it to is an orgasm. You know, that incontrollable, irreplaceable moment of ecstasy that takes your body above the realms of ordinary existence? That.
On arriving back to college from a music concert last week, I was confronted by friends with the argument that attending such scenes is only a means to satisfy a desire for a specific identity, which they attach to the culture surrounding a piece of art. Apparently, one only ever participates in art to feel ‘cool’.

It is the normalisation of this view that makes me sound a bit dickish in the paragraph above – classical music, Royal Albert Hall, the need to mention this – what does that say about me? Of course there’s an extent to which taking part in artistic culture can attach you to a particular image. But I want to make some space here for celebrating a connection we may find with aspects of art purely because of the bodily instincts the piece of art can provoke. Why do you think we dance, really?

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