A Blank Wall Cannot Stand
On aestheticism, Felicity Sheehy, the end of an era, and the endless pursuit of being touched
Here we are again: we’ve landed back in the belly of another bone-chilling February, and I’ve returned to Substack after a much-needed winter break in the tropics. How’s everybody holding up?
Despite it being the realm of my birthday, February feels a lot like the Tuesday of months to me. It’s somewhat of a hopeless ether, the milky pallor of a frozen wasteland that sits between glowy holiday charm and the first bursts of spring. If you feel like you’ve been slowly descending to rock bottom through the winter, February is usually about the time you hit it. And if you think the way poet Felicity Sheehy does about February, you’re not alone. (“Like me, it is hard to love / It sits in thick crusts on the sidewalk, licking its boots…”). These seemingly endless 28 days are “midnight at midday and moonlight at dawn, the gray fuzz of a signal gone wrong.”
All of this has only solidified my belief that February truly is the right time of year for Valentine’s Day. The holiday serves as a small reminder that love still exists and should be celebrated, even in the most miserable of winter months. There is something very tender about the resiliency of our need for love, to touch and be touched. And the best way I can think to illustrate the beauty of our need to be touched is through the lens of public art, which I’m fortunate to be surrounded by daily.
I live in an apartment building next to a public stairway. You can picture it loosely as a kind of corridor: the front door of the building opens to a set of steps, and behind that set of steps for a couple of feet is a wall. The wall is always painted white.
I’m sure you can imagine what kind of temptation a blank wall presents to the scores of passerby that cut through the stairway each day. Almost every time I step outside my door, I’m greeted by a new piece of guerrilla artwork somebody has spray painted or drawn or written or taped onto the wall. Often they are pictures but sometimes they are messages—“Free Gaza” scrawled in thick black paint, for example, adorned on the edges with puffy pink hearts, and “Remember thou art God (and so is everything else),” written in clean block letters with a thick Sharpie.
The wall is also home to a few recurring characters which I have grown to love. There’s a big, goofy-looking skull wearing a snapback that resurfaces periodically. And then there’s a strange demonic figure—oddly reminiscent of the little boy Max in Where The Wild Things Are—saying not quite coherent stuff but not entirely invalid stuff, either.
I call these characters recurring because the city usually sends someone over every few months to paint over all the artwork, leaving another gleaming, pearly white wall for the artists to descend upon once more. And they always do. How could anyone expect to keep Oakland’s bleeding hearts away from a canvas like this?1 A blank wall cannot stand.
I love this wall’s firm resistance to being painted over. It seems to hearken back to the rallying cry of the aestheticism movement of the late 19th century—infiltrate the everyday with art and beauty! Art for art’s sake! But beyond that, it reminds me of something my good friend Zoë in Los Angeles told me years ago, as we got drunk on homemade gin and tonics and wrote poetry in her attic room: “Everything we do is in the pursuit of being touched.”
I’m pretty sure she meant physically, which to some degree I can agree with, but I had to think about it in terms of artistic measure, too. Why else would we listen to music, read poetry, wander through art galleries, go to the movies? No matter how habitual our consumption of artistic output may be, I’d argue that consumption stems from a desire—possibly even a human need—to be touched in some way. Like, I don’t read poetry to be pretentious. I read poetry to feel like someone has laid their hand gently on my shoulder and is guiding me into another room; a room of previously undiscovered truths that I would have never found if I’d tried to do so alone, as if to say, see, you just needed someone to show you this was here. You’re welcome.
Of course, touch is a two-way street. The act of creating artistic output is also in pursuit of being touched—possibly through the frame of being seen and understood—and the wall feels like a perfect example of that. Anyone who is brave enough to bare their soul on any sort of public medium is really saying: I hope this touches you. Knowing this has touched you touches me.
I can think of other walls that convey similar messages. If you follow my Instagram, you might have seen my most recent post bidding farewell to my favorite Oakland restaurant, Sister, formerly known as Boot & Shoe Service.2 Beyond the fact that it had been my go-to haunt since middle school, Sister oozed with the kind of mysterious, understated romantic energy that I knew I could impress anyone with, whether it was a first date or a foodie friend. The pizzas had sourdough crust and the bartender could make a Negroni so smooth it hydroplaned on its way down your gullet. But the best part about it was the wall. The entire perimeter of the restaurant was lined with original, beautifully imperfect exposed brick walls, and my theory held up there, too: a blank wall cannot stand.
If you were fortunate enough to ever be seated at a table on the restaurant’s edge, you’d have noticed small bits of paper folded and stuffed into the cracks in between the crumbling bricks. There must have been hundreds of them in the wall at some point, all of them notes left by patrons, scribbled onto receipts at the end of a full-bellied evening. Some were love notes to the restaurant itself; some contained pieces of advice from old folks to the younger generation. Others served as bold declarations: we were here, we were here together.
On one of my final visits to Sister last year, I wrote something onto my receipt that I’d seen on another wall halfway across the world in Berlin:3
So stark und doch verletzbar,
Das Volk, der Mensch,
Der Wald, der Baum.
I included the English translation, too, which reads:
So strong, and yet so fragile
The people, the person
The forest, the tree.
And, at the very bottom: con tanto amor—with so much love.4
The note was written in a euphoric haze, fueled in part by having housed a whole pizza and also several glasses of red wine. But it seems obvious to me now that the act of pushing notes into the crevices of a blank brick wall for strangers to read is nothing short of a plea: let me touch you; let me be the reason you feel something. Especially in these cold, ragged days of February.
I wonder what became of all those notes when the restaurant closed.
Anyway. Back to my wall. I brought up aestheticism because the movement—spearheaded in part by queer icon and revolutionary playwright Oscar Wilde—did away with conservative Victorian values in favor of art as self-expression. The English middle class had grown weary of untouchable religious symbolism. They wanted the stuff real people are made of, the need for connection.
Art as self-expression is the silent hand reaching out, begging to touch and to be touched in return. So when I see this blank, white wall next to my apartment being constantly filled with art, my heart melts a little bit. There are people out here willing to touch and be touched. They are strangers but they’re possibly my neighbors, maybe just passerby, but they are here in my orbit nonetheless. This is good to know, especially in the cold, rainy swells of February.
Oscar Wilde is known for having uttered some of the funniest last words with his dying breath: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.” Unfortunately, it was Wilde who departed first. Still, I find solace in the fact that he didn’t perish under the watch of a blank wall, even if it didn’t quite suit his tastes.
We’re only 10 days into February, which means we’ve got 19 days of this dreary month left to go. In that time, I’ll do my best to remember the sanctity of human touch, whether that’s through art, a shared meal, or the quiet meeting of hands above the table.
Stay warm, and I’ll see you in March!
Suggested reading:
February by Felicity Sheehy
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. I was planning to share this one because it’s unbelievably funny, but I only learned while writing this essay that the play was first performed on Valentine’s Day 1895. Feels like kismet!
Suggested listening (if you’re feeling inspired to be ✨romantic✨):
Working on Love by Jamestown Revival. Thanks to Alexander Hancock, my good friend & occasional editor, for showing me this song!
It’s only a matter of time before I start leaving lines of poetry on it.
This is a devastating loss to the Oakland restaurant community and to me personally. In the last few years, we’ve lost Calavera, Palmetto, Noodle Theory, and many other establishments I’d grown to love dearly over the years. If you’re in Oakland—please go out to eat and support our local restaurants. Text me and let’s go to Snail Bar or something. I seriously don’t think I can handle having to say goodbye to any more of these beautiful community outposts.
This quote comes from a painting found on the East Side Gallery, an old remnant of the Berlin Wall.
Spanish just seemed to be the more appropriate language here; you can’t argue with the romance of con tanto amor.