Steven Wilson has performed with several bands, including Porcupine Tree (a favorite of mine), Blackfield, and No-Man. He has also recorded a number of albums under his own name: Insurgentes, Grace for Drowning, The Raven Who Refused to Sing, and Hand. Cannot. Erase. Early on, his music was under the influence of Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, and an assortment of psychedelic drugs. Just try Voyage 34 and On the Sunday of Life if you'd really like a taste. You'll soon find it's one not easily acquired. I don't mean to take away from the quality of his work, though. Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson began to shift their musical style into albums that featured more focused songwriting and tighter arrangements. That part of their catalogue starts with Stupid Dream, which is just excellent. The music gets only better from that point. It's my favorite point of their career, featuring brilliant albums like Lightbulb Sun, the quintessential breakup album, In Absentia, a story told from a kidnapping necrophiliac's point of view, Deadwing, which muses on the nature and many facets of death itself, Fear of a Blank Planet, a sort of twenty-first century coda to OK Computer, and The Incident, an epic in which a woman escapes from a poisonous, dangerous religious cult.
Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree, to me, are like a fusion of Radiohead and Rush. They've got Radiohead's particularly British pessimism about modern technological trends and Rush's complexity and thoughtfulness. When a close friend introduced me to them, I couldn't get enough. I breathed, ate, and slept Porcupine Tree albums for four solid months two years ago and now that I've met a girl who's a much bigger fan of them than I could ever hope to be, I'm doing it all over again.
Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a concept album based on the disappearance of Joyce Carol Vincent. Her family and friends loved her, but somehow, they managed not to miss her for three years in which she quite literally wasted away inside her apartment and died. This concept is perfect for Steven Wilson's lyrical and musical style as he is one of the artists who are the most effective at portraying intense loneliness. The album sees the character puttering about in her apartment and reminiscing about intensely emotional days long gone by. The most poignant song in that vein would have to be "Perfect Life," which shows her remembering a time when she spent a few months with a girl three years her senior. The lyrics are so haunting:
She was 3 years older than me,
But in no time we became friends.
We'd listen to her mix tapes,
Dead Can Dance, Felt, This Mortal Coil.
She introduced me to her favorite books,
Gave me clothes, and my first cigarette.
For a few months everything about our lives was perfect.
It was only us. We were inseparable
But gradually, she passed into another distant part of my memory,
Until I could no longer remember her face, her voice, even her name.
The way I enjoy music is that I make it a part of my life. Music, for me, becomes a conduit for me to remember how I felt at certain parts of my life. It's always a highly emotional experience for me. Put simply, music is my time machine, and it can take me anywhen I like. I've got playlists that take me back in time to the beautiful dreams and terrible nightmares from years ago and then playlists that fling me into the future. I don't often spend much time in the present when it comes to music. And, yes, it's something that I've been working on. I will argue, however, that we are our memories and our potential. I'm very in touch with my emotions in the past and the present.
So the way I'm connecting to Hand. Cannot. Erase. is through my healing from the damage Madeleine caused to my heart. Music has always been one of the strongest positive forces in my life for as long as I can remember. Film scores like those from Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Children of Dune helped me survive the cruel trials of high school and then Rush came along while I was in college and swept me away for good. Radiohead and Everclear took me by the hand and led me through the darkness while I was going to school in an alienating city far from home, and U2 never failed to remind me that it was going to be okay.
So, too, will Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson help me heal. And especially Hand. Cannot. Erase. in this case. "Perfect Life" doesn't exactly bring me back to the hazy summer I spent with Madeleine; it's more a part of my ongoing reflection of how those events unfolded and the way I feel about them now. She and I did share our favorite books. We talked endlessly and drank together on summer nights that were so full that it was exactly like getting far too much of a good thing. For those few months our lives were indeed perfect. We were practically inseparable. I thought I was living the perfect life.
My new friend, the girl who loves Porcupine Tree more than I, shared her feelings about what the phrase "hand cannot erase" means to her. It's stuck with me ever since that night. She said:
"A hand cannot erase many things. Love, hate, pain, happiness. Yet... It can contribute to
such feelings. The song is about lovers either covering up they don't truly care, or slowly
drifting apart...a hand can inspire such feelings, but never erase them."
I listened to the album a few more times after she said that, and the more I turned the phrase over in my head, the more I realized how right she was. Though I loved Madeleine for a long time before she touched my hand the night she wanted us to get closer to each other, the days when I could finally, fully express those feelings to her began at that very moment. Her hand inspired those feelings, but my hand cannot erase them.
Hand cannot erase this love.
Neither could she, despite how mightily she tried. There are very few things your hand can erase, like dry erase markings on a white board. Maybe some pencil markings on a surface. But love, if it's truly and intensely and honestly felt, can never be erased. A human hand is capable of starting and building a great many things and even destroying them, too. But it can never truly erase anything. "Hand Cannot Erase" just shows how weak a human being is in the throes of love, for better and for worse. Love is far more powerful than we'll ever truly understand. And that's what's still killing me. I'm getting better, but there's nothing I'll ever be able to do to erase the love I had for Madeleine completely from my heart and my life.
A love like this makes us strong.
That line has helped me realize that I don't regret giving her as much love as I did. Someone told me a long time ago that feeling guilty about having loved someone isn't right. You felt those feelings at the time and they were real and nothing and no one can ever take that away from you. Even though it hurts like a bitch, it's not wrong. I believe that's true because having loved and been burned from loving someone makes us deeper and stronger for the next person, who hopefully is far more deserving of our love.
Bruised and burned,
We won't lose heart
Just because
Life gets hard.
