Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

Inside the house there all around me here at all angles growing I see:

A WOMAN STANDING AT AN OVEN, PUTTING GREASE ONTO HER HANDS, HER BELLY HUGE

SEVEN DOGS CROWDED AROUND AN OBSCURE POINT ON A LAWN MADE OF ALL LAWNS

WATER FALLING IN REVERSE, DESTROYING COLOR

A CLOUD OF BLACK SMOKE CURLING THROUGH A FLOWER GARDEN

SEVEN GUNS, AIMED AT A HEAD WITH ITS FACE MISSING

BABIES, RASPING

THE LARGEST BIRTHDAY CAKE ANYONE HAS EVER MADE, BUT ALL TRANSLUCENT

Someone now is tapping on my shoulder, but I’m stuck there, the wet inside me turning around.

I see…

NUMBERS BARKING AT ONE ANOTHER ON FIELDS OF PAPER

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF WHITE ON WHITE

AN EXTREMELY FAMOUS OLDER PERSON WITH FACIAL FEATURES POURING PUTTY IN ALL DIRECTIONS IN THE COLOR OF THE SKY

BLUE MILK IN A WHITE URN ON A SOUNDSTAGE SUSURRATING

A POCKETWATCH MADE OF ASH

TIME IN SPINDLES OF GRAY SUNSHINE SHITTING FROM THE FACE OF THE POCKETWATCH GROWN LARGE AS A WHOLE MALL AND WRAPPED IN LEAGUES AROUND MY BODY AND ALL BODIES

A GUMMY HALLWAY AND THE MAN STANDING INSIDE IT WITH HIS EYES CLOSED AND MOUTH SO WIDE, NO TEETH

OVAL PRISMS IN A BEDROOM GLEAMING LIKE A MOON DOES

YOUR FACE

Under each image I cannot stand up. I feel my legs farting underneath me, sinking into soil — into where the ground beneath us has bent gone, cut open with the holes eaten up all through it, yawning today for all the meat the ground could ever want — the bodies filling in around us, houses around us, fuzzy.

I see…

ME, WITH MY SKIN BACKWARD

ME, WITHOUT MY SKIN, THE SPAN REPLACED WITH BEES

YOU INSIDE A WARDROBE, TURNED TO CLOTHING TO BE WORN BY SOMEONE YOUNG IN YEARS UNWRITTEN

MIRRORS SHATTERING IN EVERY HOUSE

A SNARE DRUM MADE OF SAND

A MUSIC FROM SAME SNARE DRUM, CLAWING AT THE SKY, MAKING HOLES WHERE LIGHT COMES RAINING, WHERE SOMEONE SAYS…

NO LIGHT

MOUNTAINS WHERE THE SOUND IS, RUMMAGING INTO A HOLE, A HOLE AROUND WHICH THE NO LIGHT IS ORGANIZING, SUCKING SMOKE OUT OF THE LAND, SUCKING THE CELLS INSIDE MY HEAD BACK TO A SMALL POINT THROUGH WHICH, WITHIN THE HOUSE, I FEEL A GREAT RELEASE, A LITTLE POCKET OF EXPLOSION, A RISING NIGHTTIME UNDER THE LAND, INTO…

A CHILD

A CHILD FOLDING INTO ITSELF INTO A CHILD AGAIN, INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN

A CHILD INSIDE A CHILD, INTO A CHILD INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN, REPEATING

INTO NOTHING

There I am looking all at none. The skin of the image in an instant gathered into one syllable, one frame, containing all prior images and what to come — a frame unglitched in its focus, put on pause — every instant all at once. I hear no bells — there is no sound or surface there beyond me, the me of no house or hole beyond my rind in itching freeze, a copied conduit of rooms in rooms and no one standing there inside them but spreading out from one point into a map of homes where homes had been before the homes here, a crushed museum: space removed of what it had contained — the living room where I would roll, perched on the carpet with the TV, repeating its speech— I can no longer remember what came in or out ; the kitchen where, the blood dripped the day my sister bumped open her head, spilling soft onto the tiles and years later I’d be paid in cents to scrape an error waxy lining off each square— but what beyond that, any hours that had surrounded these two small things clogged in years around an instant’s spine ; the hallway, longest of all rooms, and with the most bright light in the whole house— nothing seems to have ever gone on here beyond the walking back and forth, the passage from space to space for something always elsewhere ; the bedroom where the bed is, where from the ceiling the boulder rolled, and where I notice now there for the first time, mirrors of both sides — one making the long face of the closet, one, wider, in the bathroom, just across — a wide conduit between them over where, in those nights, I would be— no memory beyond the memory of doing nothing to preserve the instant in its passing, the passing acting as the instant in itself .

Where in the house here, here I am in here — here in here standing right beside me in the glow, the room around the room around the room so washed in silence I can’t bring myself to look beyond where each of these words go on ticking along inside the white — the white of white — another body — some skin shape seated in the light — a body like my body had been when it was in here — still here — made of me. I am parallel to my own body, fleshy mirror. I raise my arm to touch my arm — all of me there just before me, spread like paper — when I touch me, the room collapses in the light — the light collapses inside the room inside the light there underneath us into soil — the soil beneath us filling in around us in the house again beneath the house, packing in the holes with all our murmur.

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal

round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,

within I am awake

Frank Bidart, “The Third Hour of the Night”

God of Nothing

Days are what and what are days. Where. Days go on beyond the want. In silent corridors they go on building — a what around the what-space that sits with silence and does exactly what it is — which is just nothing — and therein must go on beyond however you might think you’d make it stop. Without sleep the aggregate aggregates its aggregating aggregations into something at once speeding up and slowing down — beating unseen walls over to find behind them more walls, darker, flatter — spaceless secrets — and so then what then— there you are .

“Almost all suicides, about ninety percent, say, are due to insomnia,” says E. M. Cioran. “I can’t prove that, but I’m convinced.” If nothing else, being awake too long surely could be seen as motivation for the mind state of the want for spilling one’s own blood, like a machine becoming overheated from extended usage, too many frictioning hours in too much light — gunk gathered on the gunk — the way skin changes over time in pictures, always worked upon instant to instant, any of them at once no longer yours, but given up unto something nameless.

Any night there is all night. Every hour seems to pass as if it were no hour, each instant ending as it begins, in mirror of all that came before. This slip can seem both timeless, in its oncoming, and destructive, looking backward, the ground beneath your body being eaten up. We keep busy often simply to seem still moving, covering up the sound of turning under, nodding out when at last exhausted, or when there seems nowhere else to go — or everywhere to go and no specific impetus, or how when there it appears in many ways like where we’d been — the internal urge for some destruction in the face of nothing turning inward, and again reflected. “A person who commits suicide,” writes Christian Gailly, “has only one idea in mind, to kill you.” You, the you that I am, the I that you are: selves reflecting selves and in recitation, forever leading on. The clog of worlds erupting into stigma and murder, even further manifested in the mad. Of being spun and spinning, of pushing along, each of us, through doors — a waking unto black light, unto holes our longest times can hold to, trace.

The ruin of not sleeping properly or at all has proven to result in damage, unto death. Bodies sleeping “less than four hours per night are three times more likely to die within the next six years.”166 The cause is related not only to the decrease in population and activity of white blood cells, but also to a decline in the body’s ability to convert sugar into energy, resulting in an increasing ream of fat. Physical and mental response times are lowered, creative impulses diminished, performance ability waned down to states of near disuse. In an extremely rare condition known as fatal familial insomnia, found in only fifty families ever, the intensity of the sleeplessness gradually increases over four stages in a period of six to eighteen months, during which the sufferers experience burgeoning panic and paranoia among their whole household, leading to rapid weight loss, dementia, a final state of unresponsive muteness and, eventually, their end.