The Ache of Beauty: Veedon Fleece, Memory and the Numinous Power of Music

There is something almost impossible to describe in the distinct, eclectic combination of Van Morrison’s masterful musical arrangements and the intense, impassioned resonance of his voice. It carries so much soul that it seems to evoke nostalgia and melancholy while somehow creating euphoria at the very same time.

You are brought to a place of genuine happiness, yet there is an ache running through it. The warm musical undertones provide a kind of comfort you cannot resist; you simply wrap yourself in them as the music envelops you. At some point, you are no longer entirely in control of the experience. You are taken by it.

There is something seductive, enigmatic and alluring in that power - something evocative, spellbinding and almost enchanting. The music resonates so deeply that it can bring you to tears, not simply out of sadness, but through some extraordinary mixture of beauty, longing, memory and consolation.

You begin to ruminate. Fond memories surface alongside heart-wrenching ones. Melancholy becomes indistinguishable from pleasure; nostalgia begins to feel almost euphoric. There is grief in it, but also comfort. Something is being revisited, released, perhaps even resolved. The tears themselves seem cathartic - a strange form of consolation and, sometimes, even closure.

It is the ache of beauty: that point at which something becomes so deeply moving, so hauntingly familiar and yet somehow beyond ordinary experience, that pleasure and sorrow cease to feel like opposites.

Perhaps that is why words such as numinous, transportive, elegiac, rapturous, haunting, transcendent and ineffable seem appropriate. Or why borrowed words such as saudade - that profound longing for something absent, distant or lost - and Sehnsucht - an almost indefinable yearning for some other place, time, state or possibility - can sometimes express what ordinary English cannot.

With Veedon Fleece, I experience something close to a kind of rapturous melancholy: music that is deeply consoling and yet emotionally devastating, nostalgic and euphoric, intimate and transcendent all at once.

And perhaps the real question is not simply why this particular album affects me so strongly, but what is happening within us when music is capable of doing this at all.