Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

By now, inside the cycle of my self-settling, the calming order of more structured thoughts giving my blood a space under which to calm, perhaps having fallen quick inside some quiet that seems toward the coming door, often by unseen slip of mind or in elaboration,63 the brain thoughts again will glow alive, beginning again at the beginning,64 if slightly deeper and set in its spinning,65 or maybe even worse, responding to an outside factor such as new sound, or any of the countless reasons for anything to go wrong — neighbors, cell phones, excess noise out in the street66—or an outside real-world brain eruption such as the sudden remembrance of something I need to remember about tomorrow,67 about tomorrow, about tomorrow, which I must get out of bed and write down for fear of losing, and the more I try to convince myself68 I will remember it without writing it69 down,70 the more sure I am that I will not actually remember, though I seem to always remember everything without looking at what I’ve written down and more it is just the fear, again, over anything else,71 of losing what I want the most while everything I could not care less about sticks to me in unending seething, no digestion, which reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny, 72 those words often repeating different hours in my head,73 words stung from another breathless dead one,74 another removed of blood,75 and yet with thoughts that still transmit through other bodies in the bull air, some nights, while the conduits of those remain, each year likely stemming smaller, and his dust done, and about what it must have been like inside his body near the end76 and how much food he ate during those last days and days before those and how it inflected in his head and what he smelled like before he died and in his coffin and how long it had been since he ate McDonald’s77 and how that might have changed him if he’d gone there once again and how long has it been since I ate78 McDonald’s79 and should I go now and god I’d really like one of those vanilla shakes and a twenty-pack Chicken80 McNuggets81 like when I was a child and overweight, or as my mother called it husky , those were the best days, I should let myself become fat again,82 resounding, crammed full of all those other doors, doors that as the flesh swells seem to serve to silence one another, in the warm flesh, how much harder I slept when under mounds, and probably I’m well83 on my way to larger since I didn’t get time to run today in midst of all the other crud compiling and nothing feels worse than when I do not run84 and I will have to run some extra85 now tomorrow86 to make up for that that I did not do, to make up for these extra sets of growing cells, which I can feel for certain on my body, heavy, I am getting heavier every minute, I can feel it, I can feel something crawling in my mouth, something silent and unending, and by now it is at least 4 AM,87 and I am still thinking here again, about my thinking, and about the thoughts inside the thinking that come gunned, and every thought has so many other thoughts strung on it, any thought could lead out any way, the head a box of batter and such screaming, and I am no better off than when I started trying again to go to bed,88 why did I even lay down at 2 AM89 to begin with if I was just going to lie here and roll around in damning bullshit fuckface party the way I always always do, the way the night curls like someone’s face skin just above me burning my skin silent and laughing up my balls, who am I here, unfurl, unfurl,90 all this time tonight unfurl I could have been using here to do something good or toward something else outside myself unfurl like write or read91 or if nothing else stare at more internet or the TV, any machine, any hour, any whorl, I could have been anywhere at all instead of lying here pretending I was going to sleep right or even quickly in white silence,92 a nightly prayer that hardly ever does come true, never except for maybe when I’m drunk or so exhausted days are nothing and there is hardly room to move to breathe, and I don’t feel either of those things tonight at all, and all this body, and fuck, now I have moved so much I’ve woken her up too, I watch her trip inside the black room moving heavy to lie down on the sofa, somewhere far way from me, once again because here again I can’t stop thinking unfurl 93 and now I’ve done this and her night is shit too and tomorrow her day will feel less full and of a throb and she and I will both be tired again and probably we’ll fight about something stupid and I’ll be stupid and in the end we’ll both have lost comfort in this house, unto the night that ends us daily getting thinner and more throbbing,94 and still here I am exactly in this dry and endless furled unfurling when, this when there waiting somewhere just above us and soon coming, always coming, nothing, something soft without a name,95 its thick face shitting in endless squirm-moves through silent tunnels hidden on the night, ripping hard and roared toward anywhere surrounding with the presence of a hammer to a fontanel, a blood spot in a rover, how any hour any every other could be oncoming and there would mostly be no way to know, no signal shot from silent objects scrying until there they are upon us or within us and still here I am again, again again,96 in the endless presence of coming letters, speakings, bills, of people moving in and out and around your own life, and the lives near to you, and theirs, and theirs, how any move in any one of countless mirrors could reconnect to yours in demolition, unabolition, detonation, and tomorrow it will only ever be that much harder here again, and now the new oncoming day is already just a sliver in the ass97 of the days of weeks98 of years unpeeling into tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow99 these days’ aggregating boltlines100 of black inertia swollen into each and every and again, as I will, I know, go through all of this again again again again again,101, 102 each time starting even further behind than already I have been, and appended with whatever extra crap there is to think about that hugs on that consequenceless103 and what from that I will uncover coming out, each time working worse in silent screaming ways of vast backlog until I unsee it, and I will never, so until there is something in me still, or at least unto when what will come for me inside the next day’s next day’s next day’s roar of hell of expectation in the time I have remaining in that light,104 and why can’t I just stop this, even in darkness, even naked nowhere on the bed, all of this repeating in bold silence, all of this said in never and not never not unbeing unsaid and unmine,105 on and on for hours, night in night, on, in cricking branches, until the light again, the night again,106 the shift between where every hour becomes pure shriek,107 becomes an edgeless, nameless silence permeating every inch of every hour come and here and coming, the louder the more you listen, in spheres of time unending and all end.

A Condensed History of Night

Until about the last 150 years, human comprehension of sleep had largely been blank science, lost in the trough of by what methods the end of our waking day comes on. We all know we lie down. We close our eyes, the blood slows with the breathing: the body letting go, unto a state of no time, walled with collages of words and images held deep. There must be, between these two spheres, some median of click-out: a point of A at which we are aboveground in our minds, and a point B at which we’ve entered somewhere gone.