Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

Further down along the browser, dragging, from the church there is the driveway where a nine-year-old girl once threatened me with a hammer. The house where during third-grade afternoons we imagined war with sticks, and concrete in the backyard of a kid I helped learn English from his Portuguese — he who since then, right after high school, drowned in his parents’ bathtub in Brazil with a girl. The cul-de-sac where some kid I’d never seen before and would never see again showed me the origami woman he’d folded into being, complete with vagina lips cut and pasted out of a dirty magazine — such moments somehow rendered in my nowhere, made of other people, less of me. Every hour of this caught inside here unremembered but by my temporary brain — a brain that can’t even catalog all of that it holds or has hid.

It seems I’ve hardly grown since all of when. Perhaps my mind has. Perhaps, in confabulation of the distances the world once held, and the amount it seems to hold now, packed full, the air indeed has been pushed in, the same way time as we get older seems to go faster despite its eternal measure, with each new second held that much slighter in contrast to the bulk of all the years. If time and space are not enough to fit my incidental reconnaissance to the Google Maps image I’ve so recently drawn up to write of herein, this night I will go running off into it in nothing but the rhythm of my breath and the sloppy smacking of my feet upon the pavement, perhaps in some pattern of repetition over where I’ve run before, the misted night above me abstruse with such glow and the hung bulbs here making the sky by now resemble one large silent box, of a silence I can’t help but think of as an image, of dimension, screaming silence, white on white in other air, which from underneath and right there seems as if somewhere above me it must come at any minute to sudden end, a day contained, a thing photographable from some distance, a thing contained. If I am asleep or awake right now, I can’t remember, and it hardly seems to matter.

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Today while trolling through various web results for deeper sleep cures, I find a man in a video titled “All Hypnosis Is Self Hypnosis”191 who offers to hypnotize me right now — through the machine, via recording. Underneath his up-close, centered, smiling head is the URL of his hypnosis vendor site, along with a message beneath it telling me to visit the site and relax even more. The Google-supplied ad over the message under his ad under his head says “Learn to Hypnotize Anyone,” and then it changes yet again. The man tells me to close my eyes. “Because there is nothing for you to see,” he says. He’s staring. I press pause and stare back into the pixilated lidded whites of his small head. The ads around him go on blinking. While he’s on pause, I get new e-mail — I see it appear as a number annotated in another open browser tab, and when I click over to read, as I now must, by impulse, I find a new automated message sent from Facebook, letting me know someone has commented on my latest status update: a Ben Marcus quote that appears also earlier in this book. The message says the comment says: I like that sentence, too. I delete the e-mail. I refresh the page and see nothing else. The paused video on the YouTube tab sits behind the fold of this tab waiting. In total I have six tabs on my browser open: Gmail with all the not yet archived but already read mail compiled;192 Facebook home with all the updates of the 894 friends I supposedly have;193 a Wikipedia page on the Ziggurat of Ur, which I can’t remember why I have open;194 a long essay on the rhizomatic riddle of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut a friend sent out on Twitter,195 for which I’d closed Twitter to have room to fit all the tabs comfortably on one screen and still be able to see when new e-mail arrived; one of countless pages today selling hypnosis CDs;196 and the video of the man — each of them in some way selling something, information however hidden197—and each waiting in their own silence, folded, to be again brought to front or dismissed.

Before going back to the video again, I open a new tab on my browser and load iGoogle, which holds my Google Reader, tracking the hundreds of RSS feeds that get continually updated and tracked and fed into me through the day. I see a friend has shared a link to an article on Gizmodo.com that claims how each year each American consumes 34 gigabytes of data (including internet, TV, radio, and reading), accumulating in a national sum of 3.6 zettabytes per year (a zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes, the article explains).198 Within this, per day, there are slightly more than one hundred thousand processed words, through movies, music, books, and TV, though the internet speech dominates them all.

At the far end of the house I hear, in my gaping, someone opening a door. Seconds later, my cell phone vibrates in my pocket, tickling the thigh flesh, radiating cells. Without taking out the handset, I press the button that makes the vibration stop, sending whoever is in there on the far end to a recording of my voice asking him or her to leave me a recording of his or her voice.

I go back to the video of the hypnotist and I press play. The man is again speaking, as if he’d never paused at all. His head is gloamed white and slurred with purple. He has eyes that sometimes roar, but held confined in this clunky, bitmapped image. A music comes on around him — the same blank synth spread through all the other hypno-wanting videos and mp3s and websites with embedded sound. He begins to speak into me, saying the same things all the others have, asking again that I relax, that I go deeper on into my softing, that I forget the whole rest of my whole life, my future, my glow of nowhere, that I turn on my unconscious mind, “because our unconscious minds know all of the things we have experienced in the past… all of the information from our past… perfectly acceptable for you in every way… and in a moment you might have a new idea. ..” The words do what they want coming at my head. I’m kind of glazing over, but not, I think, in the way he means — I’m fucking bored, but no more tired than I had been, or groggy, or wide open — at least I think.

The man ends the video then almost as quickly as he’d begun, with his website information repeated for the cause, followed by a slow fade to a whole black, but for the same URL writ on the screen, replication within replication, waiting for the next viewer in the queue to wake it up, open it on. I close the tab and go back to my e-mail, where there is nothing new, even when I hit refresh.

The sum message of this video and others like it is: You are comfortable. You are safe. You should slowly breathe in and out. There are many adverbs. You cannot hear the speaker breathe him- or herself. “Relax,” they say. “Relax.” The only thing we seem to need to know is it’s okay . “That’s right,” they say. “Thaaat’s right.” The lilt of the voice like some secret broadcast over America, in slow uncombing. “Everything is just okay. No matter what happens, you will be calm and you will feel better than you have ever felt before.” Many programs like to suggest you floating up into or with clouds out of your bed. You might be encouraged to see yourself in the bed soft below you, the room familiar. You exit your body and your home. You might be transported into the sky or, if you like, a beach. “Even if you do not fall asleep during this,” many mention, “you will feel more rested and relaxed as a result.” The product, then, we may imagine, might not necessarily be something immediate to feel, but instead a product that will open in us without warning. Many of the meta-commentary-type allusions that pepper the dream-speak are concerned with allaying any fears that you can err here, affirming there is no intended massive goal. The direction, they insist, is yours. Wherever you want to go, you can go there. Any choice you make is the right choice. Your imagination belongs to you. “So relaxed,” they say. “So comfortable,” as if the words themselves in transition to you then must immediately become true. Somehow even the most horridly produced versions of these videos on YouTube often have more than one hundred thousand views, with comment testimonials from users proclaiming the product’s virility. And of course, beyond the idea that these tapes are working because of the actual instructions and their effect, what these directives succeed in more so is allowing the mind to become distracted from itself — you are no longer fixated on the monologue or further scrying, but aimed at something designed to awake a blank. All of these ads and videos together — loops in looping — form a network, an endless hole in which to drown. Perhaps the strangest thing, and at the same time the most obvious, is that most people by now are so tuned out to this kind of influx that this video effectively does not to most people exist. We’re so used to the pyramid of input that most of the day, during countless hours trolling, we don’t even see these icons and their connectors any longer, at least not consciously, or pragmatically. It’s become as clear as not looking at messy spots in your apartment or gaudy billboards near your house — they are part of an environment — more, they are the environment itself: the scab woke on the skin. We are tuned in to tuning out. And yet, in surrounding, they are there. They are looking at you looking or not looking. You are taking this all in.