Steve Erickson Quotes

a dream is only a memory of the future

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that a novel could be. . .art could be. . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off.

1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.

You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.

Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.

It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart's burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that's beneath love, not good enough for love.

Isn't it weird when that happens?' says Zazi. 'It's like the first time I heard the second Pete Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit--and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn't changed. The movie hasn't changed. It's still the same exact movie, but it's like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn't know you could understand, it's like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off--but when you don't it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that's been holding you back because when you hear a really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn't before, everything looks different, like what they say when you're in love or something--though I wouldn't know--but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.

He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free. Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.

That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious.

The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.

You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive.

America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?

This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.

Like all Americans, or like all Americans who are conscious of being American, Parker and Zema's father always believed he was his country. But lately he's come to realize that if he and his family didn't emerge unscathed from their American crisis, American faith in the early part of the twenty-first century didn't emerge at all. By the conclusion of the new century's first score of years, only those who have a stake in an American idea defined by wealth and power can still speak of that idea so shamelessly, since wealth and power is the only American idea left.

Lets say from the first moment of my life, everything's always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let's say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith--this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise...Let's say I'm faithlessness made flesh, the modern age's leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment of compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully.

But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder...

A glory that costs everything and means nothing.

The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are.

Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.

Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths.

I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails.

When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen – that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface – gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm – walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. “It astonished Adolphe that everyone failed to realize they were just figures on a tapestry, the shadows of something else. He was therefore amused by the conceit of women, for instance, who who admired the creamy color of their skin when in fact it was only the haze of some other woman behind the vast screen staring into a mirror. Adolphe could explain all of this to himself but he could not explain Janine: Janine wasn't the same as the others. Janine was like their mother; and Adolphe decided Lulu was from this place beyond the surface, and she had, perhaps when she was a little girl, slipped through. “Adolphe wondered why Lulu hadn't told them about this, and then realized she probably would when she thought they were old enough to understand it. He could see it wasn't something one would want to tell a child too soon.

Qualunque sia il caso, lei è sparita dalla mia vita. È il prezzo che ho dovuto pagare per aver flirtato romanticamente con l’apocalisse. Sono stato così sciocco da credere di poter giocare con il caos, mentre era il caos a giocare con me.

I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn’t an act of fury, fury isn’t part of it anymore. It’s more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation.

You keep looking around for who’s in fucking charge, and there’s just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell’s angry on Fifth Avenue, that’s what I want to know.

In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north.

One letter written on the backs f postcards, all of them numbered and sent one by one.

L.A. . . . is the old America of legend and distant memory . . . the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day.

By nature, memory is more monogamous than desire.

I am the moment in which explodes the Twentieth Century's great menage à trois between chaos and faith and memory.

A dream's only a memory of the future, right?

I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that's been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks.

I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code.

He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.

Identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it.

After her mother had disappeared, six-year-old Cutter began to have dreams. They were troubling dreams at first, inhabited by strange animals, tigers, jackals. Later dreams would seem like messengers with a single animal, a squirrel, a heron, creatures which did not bring terror into the night with them. When she was in her teens Cutter spent a dime at a carnival to have her palm read. The turbaned gypsy, faux or no, stroked a long painted nail along a smooth-banked river flowing across the luxuriant landscape of Cutter's hand and predicted such visitations as had already intruded into the girl's life.

Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future.

Everything that's truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that's the most irrevocable thing of all.

The gravity of authority versus the entropy of freedom, the human race's opposing impulses devouring each other.

The obscure discovery of a reclusive mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten.

There it was . . . a missing day that lay between the thirty-first of December 1999, and the first of January 2000.

America had . . . become a country of nomads, who wandered the hallways of the American soul not sure if they were in a funhouse or a cancer ward.

One of those random acts of vandalism that metaphors commit now and then.

Springsteen . . . was completely relevant and utterly anomalous at once, by way of a passion on the one hand that matched the punk moment, and a romanticism on the other hand that defied the postmodern moment.

In the sexual shadowland of the Nineties, commentary converges with confession.

He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward.

I got out late winter. I was off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which is not bad calculations. I made the decision when I went in to keep track of the days, for the simple reason that it was the intention of my jailers to jettison my sense of time and place. They brought you in a metal truck with no windows and took you out in the same truck or one damned similar. The rumor was that Bell Federal Penitentiary was somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. The sight from my cell would not have refuted this. The white of the snow and sky filled my eyes like the sheet pulled over the head of a dead man. If it was not Montana-Saskatchewan, then it was the North Pole, or the moon. It was a signal to anyone who's ever doubted the terror of an idea that almost all of us in this prison that had no time or place were utterly guiltless of a violent act, unless one counts the violence of tongues.