Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

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Behind my locked door, among the several curtained windows, I learned alone to further spread beyond the house. My own machine lodged in my desk space with its wires and its screen allowed to access servers housed in other houses. I entered hubs of bodies spreading 01010101000 under secret handles, obtuse names. I would dial the network numbers into these locations after hours in our long house, my parents in their room a few doors down. I would log into these systems, create an ID, troll through nowhere. There would be cryptic messages, scrolling false file cabinets of photographs — women nude and fucking, famous women or unnamed ones, women also somewhere perhaps logged in online in this same maze. The labyrinth of the BBS file systems could be confusing. You often had to know where within you wanted to go. Other servers seemed to house nothing — a greeting screen, a blinking cursor, a black background, waiting for some command. Growing nowhere on the air. This presence would become the prevalent cause of insomnia among all bodies — all day, all night, its waiting, need. I would tell the machine I was twenty, twenty-seven, sixty. I would say I was a male or a female. Any ID made by arbitrary buttons. I was Richard, Logan, Bob. I was Marcy, Annette, Jo-jo. I had very many names, any of which could disappear or shift or be replaced. Locations across a globe of nowhere, all through late hours, replacing dreaming with compiled binary code. The language of these rooms sometimes seemed to act as extensions of the text the printer inside our house had ejected, again, again, again — in every house, then, too, that replicating sound, sound which when sent into sleeping bodies destructs the quality of their best sleep, even in leaving them unwaking, in no light. Some of the servers would require my own home’s phone number for the entry; some would then require you to allow them to dial in, verifying your location in the blank night. In the house then in sudden spurts the phone would ring, the squawk of the modem speaking through the wire briefly, unto new, connected silence.

These hours in front of boxes in the thick throes. Feeling out the hours others in years before had learned through bodies or through waiting, herein expressed in digits fed into our house by the phone line, the diffuse glow upon my skin at all hours of the night. One learns not to see the clock there on the desktop. One learns to click in common ways, as if entering, through a browser, into a house of the familiar. More hours typed than hours spoken. Weaning off the social days of digging among mud in sandboxes and games invented, flooding into space where space was mine. Was (h)ours, in goofy rhizome, regardless of how blank, using the signifier board of signifier buttons for signifier characters that build up into signifier words, or fragments of signifier words, approximations of new breathing or sex sounds, signifier speech to express and/or induce arousal through the wires relayed betweens machines, creating hyperlink connections over long air to induce a state of ecstasy via things further signified, translated from the machine to the meat brain in a causal stream of messages relayed in code, producing, perhaps, at least an increase of blood tone at one or both ends, perhaps orgasm, and for sure a surplus of zoning time, spent staring into light and pixels, hardly moving, while also at once likely absorbing further cells, further veiled information splurged into the brain cracks for cementing and manifestation of the mind into a state, where, after all, you are still sitting, silent, surrounded by your air of a conduit of body. Every hour looking for more holes and more ways in, where herein I would sit around and seethe with something that came from inside the machine, humming light. Suddenly, the palpable world seemed less and less to need to exist. The replicators varied. There were new screen names in the rooms. Such strange energy through the wires unto nowhere in a room alone, surrounded. New fields of text or doors of photos wobbling to the surface where I clicked and clicked. Words, in silence, rained. The machine asked me nothing, unless I asked it to ask me. I played games and banged at buttons. The sleep rooms for many masses became that much more partitioned, pre-reserved off, less distinguishable between day and night. My home held count of stuff, full hard drives and gone floppies and replicated CD-Rs in piles denoting further hours I will not remember, encoded in digits left to digitally, and eventually physically, decay.

Even in thinking and speaking all of this — in the awareness —I am no different here today — if anything, I’m worse — as now, the hysteria learned into me in my leanings through all these days, my inborn dependency for online realms remains so thick that often in temporary disconnection I cannot sit still. How now when the signal goes down, even for minutes, even just a particular wanted site taking its time loading in my cache — and it is always the site you need in hiding— need —each breath seems heavy, and my blood will tingle and fill with slowly rising heat — very much in the same way not sleeping does, I’m sick to realize — or as if whole sections of my home have been blocked off, some precious objects locked in rooms abandoned — the nameless, endless sections, nowhere but in there — without idea of when or where it will come back, if this time in crashing the browser will be off forever and those reams of rooms forever crushed into code and fed and wanting on and on and into me, reminding every instant that I am not endless, really, in time or dimension — how I too am failing — and yet the endless unfurl of selves shaking me awake every night — the true center of that unsleeping being not that I truly have no clear horizon, have no center, but instead that the me inside my body is always immediately right there, my bulk of thoughts as blank as anybody’s, stuck on e-mail, on repetition — human — dying — the very inches of me any instant all compounded, aging every instant no matter how I eat or breathe or move my head, no matter where I go in this long waking of the machines or the daylight, whether I ever sleep or not again.

Fear of Space

“Insomnia is not defined as a simple negation of the natural phenomenon of sleep,” wrote Emmanuel Levinas. “Sleep is always on the verge of waking up; it communicates with wakefulness, all the while attempting to escape it.” Insomnia, then, is also not simply a continuation of the self as Same, but the waking presence of the Other, “coring out” the self in conscious periods, the same way the Other works to core out the self inside of sleeping, while active defenses are down. There is a constant inner pressure of a presence there inside the self, pressed against another, outer pressure of what the self is not, beyond. Hegel refers to the Other as the alienation inherent between bodies, wherein “each consciousness pursues the death of the other,” complicating the waking state as constant vying, wrangling, definition in contexts of spheres of light. For Sartre, the Other is “the indispensable mediator between myself and me,” a feeling of shame erupted from the image of the self as we “ appear to the Other,” forming an at once symbiotic and friction-making system open on all ends, in all lights. Lacan goes on to credit this infernal feedback system as the site of creation of language and speaking, a generative engine carried in our blank: “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” For Levinas, this haunting of the surrounding selves within our own singular waking creates a spiritual location, something beyond the nexus of flesh and thinking. Insomnia does not demand, within the self, a form, and therefore “signifies the absolutely noncontained (or the infinite ).” It invokes “a soul that is ceaselessly woken up in its state, its state of soul .” Thus, through being forced to reckon with such forces that would normally be absorbed in dream or memory-removed ways, insomnia brings the self to face the coring selves and worms of Other there inside it, awakening, in distemper, something otherwise beyond.