You see, when I picked up Our Ecstatic Days from the library, it was random. I'd gone to the library looking for some other books. I'd checked the online catalogue and confirmed that those other books were there, at the library. Of course, they weren't. Or, if they were, they weren't on the shelves, not on any shelves I could find. Our Ecstatic Days (along with another novel that has been sitting on my coffee table, untouched since I brought it home with me) was a sort of consolation prize. An "Oops, your first draft pick got stolen from under your eyes, how about you take home this little black volume with the neat title art and that weird typographic stuff going on" book. A book that began whispering to me, when I set it on the back seat of my car. A book that began to beckon with the seductive dance of promise when I set it on my coffee table while I finished Brave New World. A book that emanated waves of my own desire, every time I picked it up to ask it to be quiet a bit longer, just a little while more. A book that was actually holding me, when I thought I was the one with the hands.
This year wasn't supposed to go this way. I was planning on reading broad, not deep. I was going to let reading go for a while when I had to write and I was going to skip a night or two of writing when the endings of novels demanded to be reached and read. I wasn't supposed to give up half a month, a month's worth of writing, filling my head with the logic of memory and altered time until my brain felt full and my pillows seemed incapable of supporting the weight of so much mentally consumed mass. I wasn't supposed to put one book down with one hand while picking up one other book with one other hand.
But here I am, and here you are, and here is where we're at. And you're wondering what the big deal is.
The deal is this: Steve Erickson writes dream-knots of thistles and thorns, knots that tie into each other--knots, themselves, become the string from which dreams are tied. A tangle of ideas and memories, connections improbable and unlikely prose made harmonic. You put the mass in your hands. Your fingers are compelled to untie. But you're untangling nothing. You're only transferring, from the knots, to your mind.
It's said that Steve Erickson's books are unclassifiable. But. From Wikipedia:
The term post-rock was coined by Simon Reynolds in issue 123 of The Wire (May 1994) to describe a sort of music "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords."
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As with many musical genres, the term is arguably inadequate: it is used for the music of Tortoise as well as that of Mogwai, two bands who have very little in common besides the fact that their music is largely instrumental.
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By the early 2000s, the term had started to fall out of favor. It became increasingly controversial as more critics outwardly condemned its use. Even the bands for whom the term was most frequently assigned (for example, Cul de Sac, Tortoise, and Mogwai) rejected the label that it placed on them. The wide range of styles covered by the term most likely robbed it of its usefulness.
That opening line of that article, I've had it stuck in my head for a while now, though the mind and time transformed it to something like: "the use of standard techniques to startling new purposes and effects".
Hold that thought. Now, from a Pitchfork review of an album by Explosions in the Sky (one of my favorite "post-rock" instrumental bands:
Most of us spend our lives sleepwalking through the daily routines, and sometimes it takes the "Jaws of Life" to rip open the perceptive confines that coincide with a life of ritualism. You awake one morning to the braying tone of your alarm clock and drowsily reach over to turn the damn thing off, only to find that the established procedure for doing so causes no reaction. You press the "Off" button two or three more times to make sure you haven't made an error in judgment as your senses become more acute and your emotions inflame. Something has usurped the authority of logic, shattering your rationalizations of many wildly complex and confounding variables, and schooling you in "possibility."
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"Greet Death" opens the album innocuously enough with inaudible strumming that surfaces just long enough to be devastated by seething drums and scathing, distorted guitars. Such previously foreign abrasiveness is an immediate indicator that Explosions have rewritten their aesthetic principles while leaving their ability to wield a stark melody virtually unimpaired. As the dust clears and the sonic damage is assessed, the remaining feedback segues into a sober slide guitar, denoting a major transition in the song's emotional appeal. The track ends as a burgeoning riff of apocalyptic proportions is suddenly and unexpectedly smeared across the audio spectrum with digital effects.
These structural inversions are a primary signifier of Those Who Tell the Truth's sound. Arrangements are introduced and then dismantled, as though they're vying with one another for the listener's attention. Mogwai's Young Team is an obvious reference point; both records feature similar instrumentation and soft/loud dynamics. But where Young Team was content to methodically construct its walls of jarring white noise, Those Who Tell the Truth builds more erratically and, upon first listen, illogically. But with every subsequent listen, the internal organization of each song becomes more inviting.
"Structural inversions"? "Usurped the authority of logic"? "Erratically...Illogically...Internal organization"? "Possibility"?
Yeah, I think you can guess where I'm going with this.
Steve Erickson writes post-rock literature. A literature that uses the instrumentation of writing to reach a new purpose: textures, timbres. Moments that shift and change before you. There's almost a (sound-)collage effort at work, the way movements are crammed together, the borders between them whisper-dream thin, like cold wars of ideas. His structures, seen from one angle: sloppy. His structures, seen from another angle: awesome, in the service of more of those moments in any single book than some writers might get over the course of their entire careers. Those moments that leave you staring at the page, a "Wow" left unspoken in your gut. (If I ever get to write something as heartbreaking as the loss of Banning Jainlight's family, remind me I've been blessed.) Steve Erickson's literature is ultimately one of possibility. He proves that writing is, foremost, an act of imagination. And in imagining beyond the bounds of more typical works, he reaches the otherwise ungraspable. (The ungraspable what, you ask? Keep asking.)
Oh, yeah. And he makes your head hurt. A lot.
In the good way, of course.
Of course, I say all this somewhat tongue in cheek. The term, yeah, is inadequate. (Any only shmoe could come along here and slap a couple words together and say it's the signifier of Erickson's signifieds, don't make it so.) And yet, I think there's something to it--Explosions in the Sky, and especially Godspeed You Black Emperor!, the musics these bands make seem like cousins to Erickson's books. In an alternate universe where someone tries to turn his novels into movies, I'd be on the phone in a second, asking these bands to soundtrack Erickson's post-rock lit dream-knots.
And for all that, why can't I say: read them all, read them all now? Because, really, I don't have to. You'll read one. And, then you're going to feel one of two things: the need to read another, or the need to never go back. I don't know you well enough to know which route you'll take.
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