No Place

All of our cultural stories are stories of transformation. They’re stories of redemption. Books, movies, documentaries, children’s stories, even the tales we tell ourselves — they all end on a positive note. We demand a happy ending. If there isn’t one, well, that’s the hero’s fault. Nobody wants to read a book where the main character is still in pain at the end.

Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK

The narrative that author and therapist Megan Devine spun here isn’t absolute. Many of the best books I’ve read aren’t simply stories of triumph and redemption, and it’s the same with movies. Jan Schlictmann does not win against the giant corporations that poisoned employees and children in A Civil Action, and the act of staking his career on a David and Goliath sort of case defending innocent working-class people takes everything from him. In The Dispossessed, Shevek doesn’t bring social ecology and peace to Urras and the other civilized planets. He reckons with the transformation of his mind and beliefs, how they contradict or validate the principles of liberty he was taught as a child, and that he may be killed by his own brothers and sisters when he returns to the moon of Anarres.

The best stories, to me, smack of a kind of empathetic response. They pull me into emotions deeper and more varied than I experience in my daily life, and they force me to examine questions that are both larger than and intimately connected to myself.

The sort of stories I seek out now are the exceptions to the rule that Divine outlined, or its broader cousin in the literary “Hero’s Journey.” She takes the tact she does because her book is about loss and how it irreversibly changes the course of one’s life. She wrote It’s OK That You’re Not OK because her readers needed to hear that they need not instrumentalize their grief. She wrote the book because in her years as a clinician, she had not considered that her husband might suddenly be taken from her, that suddenly she would be expected to turn a life-breaking loss into a chance for growth.

When I sat in my Oldsmobile Alero in the parking lot of Century High School, sobbing, in 2013, I had not considered that my dad would, eight years later, take his own life. When he did, it didn’t matter that I had sought out narratives rich in inconsolable strains of emotion, perhaps to replace the things I learned never to let myself feel. When I began to come up for air in the months following, I felt an urge to reconstruct, to make myself something better considering what I learned about my family and myself.

That manifested itself as a kind of pressure that only made things worse. It’s not really a reasonable ask: to take care of the material fallout from such a loss while still learning to live with it, or to go even further and hold the idea that I would come out “stronger” or “more mature” or something. Hell, I think the fact that it takes up as much brain space as it does is literally hampering my ability to remember little things and be a responsible friend. As if I’m truly going to be whatever I was in previous years plus some other shining quality — It’s probably worth settling for learning to bear grief on top of being the person I was proud to be before.

In reading Megan Devine’s book (thanks for the recommendation, Mom), I was reminded of something.

… in the stories we want told to us before we fall asleep, the heroes are ideals that never get reached and the villains are absolutely ordinary

And we are absolutely ordinary

And you stare back at me through the closet and into the world that I never really changed and ask me the only thing you want to know

“When we grow up, do we still get scared when the lights go out?”

A Lot Like Birds, “Myth of Lasting Sympathy”

It’s Cory Lockwood’s lines from the album No Place that I was crying about in 2013. Two years later, the man who wrote those lines lost his mother. I don’t think Lockwood read Devine’s book, but he understood in those words and probably understands with his mind and with his body now what it means to be fallible. I wrote to a friend about this album earlier today, describing it as a “juvenilia-tainted cross-section,” and I’m here to correct the record.

No Place is an album by progressive post-hardcore outfit A Lot Like Birds. It is a dynamic and tragic piece of art that bears the same kind of misfortune to befall many records from the post-2000s hardcore scene: trapped in an eternal vortex of cult nostalgia. The band is no longer around, and I have no faith that minor bands from this scene — with all their loud, slick, heavy production and bloodcurdling vocals — are going to have their day in the critical spotlight now. That melancholic disclaimer could go on a lot of albums I like, though, and what I say stands the test of time is always through my own tinted glasses.

There’s plenty to geek out about in No Place if you can get past the sound of the screams. It’s a concept album where each song represents a space in a house, with cheeky titles to guide the way; for example, “Connector” is a peeling hallway full of doors, wistful and pained with the wasted time of decision paralysis. The instrumentals rage and twist themselves into knots below the exchanges between Lockwood and Kurt Travis at times and gently tinkle or pulse contemplatively at others.

However, I’m not here to do an album review, and I’m not here to guide you to something past or under the style of No Place. The beauty isn’t there in spite of how it’s produced, or in spite of the hardcore style. This album gets its emotional weight from those things. That is a fact generally true for the genre and why it — unlike any other form — has the capability to bring me to my knees emotionally, over and over again. Why?

If you had stayed nearby, would you have taught me to vanish?

If so, then it’s all for the best

They say “like father, like son.”

Is that the reason that every time a person loves me I find it hard to love them back?

A Lot Like Birds, “No Nurture”

It’s one thing to write those lines. It’s another thing entirely to scream them with such conviction that a person you’ve never met can feel your pain as if it’s their own. This album is a testament to the stunted logics and mangled resolutions that harrowed emotions can spawn, and it’s in listening to this old favorite now that I’m forced to rethink my relationship to it.

Just like the quote from Devine’s book, I know that not all of what is said on No Place is true for me. They aren’t my experiences, but the loss, dread, paranoia, wistfulness, desperation, and pain spring on me from where they lie, coiled tightly in viscerally beautiful stanzas. Somehow, their lack of resolution makes me feel like there’s more than loneliness there. There’s something far more human than the supernatural stories of redemption in the face of tragedy. In the corridors of this album are resilience, expression, and catharsis.

So, with tears in my eyes, it’s time for another trip into this tangled house of emotions.