Acerca del autor

Blake Butler is the author of five books of fiction, including There Is No Year and Scorch Atlas; a work of hybrid nonfiction, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia; and two collaborative works, Anatomy Courses with Sean Kilpatrick and One with Vanessa Place and Christopher Higgs. He is the founding editor of HTMLGIANT, "the Internet literature magazine blog of the future," and maintains a weekly column covering literary art and fast food for Vice magazine. His other work has appeared widely, including in The Believer, the New York Times, Fence, Dazed and Confused, and The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He lives in Atlanta.

De la contraportada

One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.

Invoking scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gilles Deleuze, John Cage, Anton LaVey, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Eno, and Stephen King, Butler traces the tension between sleeping and conscious life. And he reaches deep into his own experience—from disturbing waking dreams, to his father’s struggles with dementia, to his own epic 129-hour bout of insomnia—to reveal the effect of sleeplessness on his imaginative landscape.

The result is an exhilarating exploration of dream and awareness, desperation and relief, consciousness and conscience—a fascinating maze-map of the borders between sleep and the waking world by one of today’s most talked-about writers.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

Nothing

A Portrait of InsomniaBy Blake Butler

Harper Perennial

Copyright © 2011 Blake Butler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061997389

Chapter One

THE HOLE INSIDE THE HOLE INSIDE THE HOUSE INSIDE THE HOUSE
Days
Into the version of the sky above my house one afternoon when
I was twelve, the nearby high school released a flood of pink balloons.
Maybe fifty head-sized shapes allowed to rise and flee inside
the light inside the day, until they landed popped by heat or puncture,
or, in time, lost their buoyancy with age. Each balloon had
a message tucked in its insides, I’d heard—handwritten dispatch
penned in private by whoever blew it up. Some touched down on
local lawns and in the streets around the school, though most
continued further—their latex bodies trailing out into the outlying air,
becoming anybody’s, gone.
One particular balloon, I later noticed, having found no others I
could claim, became caught in the high branches of a pine over my
family’s neighbors’ yard—too far to climb to or to lob a stick at.
No one else seemed to have noticed. I knew at once I needed this
as mine—that I had to read the words cribbed inside it—they were
for me—words no one else would ever see.
All that day I lay in wait. I watched the balloon above me watch
me watch it. Through binoculars it seemed somehow even farther
off. I held still in fervent patience. I do not remember any birds.
I felt no time go by until there was no longer light enough outside
to discern the tiny shape among the trees’ limbs, their mass a dark relief
on muted sky face pale with diffuse human glow. Even then I
stared into the outline—I had to be made to come inside and leave
my secret thing in the unseen.
I don’t remember anything that night about my sleep or dreaming.
The time between the day and day again is void. Most all nights up
late alone in homes seem shaped this way—unremembered beyond
a gloss that holds the darker hours all together, an edgeless orb.
The next morning the balloon had disappeared: popped against
the branch bark, perhaps, or blown off elsewhere, what direction.
The trees stood smug in morning calm. They knew and would not
speak—or anyway, I did not ask, and found no remnant on the
ground beneath them. The surrounding air and dirt went on so
far, among continually diminishing horizons. The words in my
balloon remained any words—sentences hid from me and sent
instead into another, or to no one—symbols eaten by the light.
What those words inside me could have said, I wonder—where or
what I would have gone or been today having them absorbed—
somehow ending up another person—smarter, further—this, gone
forever. And still, here I am. Now.
Such kind of aimless mental spin—all without answer—is the kind
so many nights that keeps me up long after I lay down, stuck in
inevitable fixation over nothing, pointless thinking—the day again
once come and gone and nothing new—each day passed the way
that days do—walls, windows, websites, faces, food—each repeating
in no obvious pattern, without pause. This thankless thinking
thinks itself, and begets in its wake only more frames in frames,
doors to nowhere, filling the days.
What’s worse is that I’m certain had I managed somehow to find a
way to get that balloon, unveil its letter, I wouldn’t now remember
it at all. Instead of words that changed my way they’d be more junk
among the whatever, a useless blip, in the make of every other hour
crammed in clicking by transfixed. Likely I wouldn’t even remember
the day of the release of the balloons either, or all my want
about that certain one, or how the sky since then seems at once that
much more flat and deep—so full with all the light and what it’s
sucked up that most nights it appears absent of all stars beyond the
biggest, framed with human-given names.
Beneath this shifting veil, like under eyelids, we people keep our
own shapeless array—a moving, needing human network without
center. Each day the numbers in the cities rise, bodies pushed from
bodies in the hours, screaming, new blood—our flesh mass rising
on the hour despite the other bodies becoming popped or shriveled
up with age like the balloons sent nowhere—the masked stars burning
out on their own gas—any of us nowhere, really, ever, among
it, except now and here—unless we trust the likewise rising mass of
relics of what we’ve seen and thought and felt and said, days
transcribed in shapes and symbols arranged and rearranged each in small
dementia among the same containing air of earth—a continuous,
insurmountable revision of what was and is and will be, of the dead.
And with each hour, more newborn people, babies, more bodies
having passed, unto the soil, twin tallies rising higher on both
sides, each new layer’s residue applied by act of simply passing in
time’s silence, under the replication of the image of our selves: the
films and the recordings and the buttons pressed and who when
where, the shed skin and hair and teeth, the sperm and egg, the
seas. Each in our own head our thoughts surround a me, each
mind the center of a version of a version of the world, surrounded,
packed in side by side in air and days. Each day more input, output,
from each body—the more awake the more confined—while the
volume of the earth’s air remains the same, each location grown
engorged with psychic fat—histories of happenings and gatherings
and births and deaths of heads, the names and limbs and
numbers—each in their own way become covered over, no one, a
further rung of what.
That same year as the balloons, as if in mourning, some day I hid
a white box under the ground. I’d gotten it in my head, maybe
from TV, to make a time capsule, something to hide and so
preserve, though I hadn’t yet begun to think of days as disappearing.
My selection of what went in was rather rash, selected from the
growing archives of crap collected in my closet—I could never
bring myself to not hold onto anything a day gave: ticket stubs,
postcards, used utensils, notes I wrote to myself inside my sleep.
Into the box I placed an address book full of names and numbers
of the people that I knew. I put in a softball signed by all the
players of my older cousin’s league, all of them strangers. I put
in a ream of dot matrix printer paper covered with error garble,
which the machine would eject in malfunction sometimes in the
night, and which I always found myself entranced by. I put in a
ring I’d bought from a garage sale that would open to expose a
little hidden space, in which for some reason there was a hunk of
resin. There were other things I buried, I am sure, though I can’t
remember. I think I thought I’d hide these objects underneath
the soil, leave them there for years and years, maybe for a future
version of me to dig up, or maybe I imagined I might die and this
would be my archive—this crap.
But I couldn’t wait that long. Maybe four months passed before
I went and unearthed the box myself. I found the plastic lid had
cracked. Grubs and dirt stunk in the folds of what I’d hidden, and
there was moisture. The stuff inside had grown a little mold.
Instead of joy the relics had turned nasty. I had to throw the whole
thing in the trash—except the ring. I think I kept the ring, the
one thing not mine, though I can’t today remember where it is. So
much I can’t remember, and can’t remember to wish that I remembered,
and you and yours, and all in all and on and on with each
day, repeating hours piling up unseen. It only grows.
Among this casual prolonged squashing, we learn to hide inside the
sound because we must. Today while bored looking through
websites about torture—my own blank often evoking an inert want to
see the worst—I notice how many common modern methods used
on captives often sound like hours in our cities, if re-framed: Forced
positions, Prolonged standing, Continuous exposure to bright light or
noise, Witnessing torture of others, Cold exposure, Solitary confinement,
Threats,1 each practice by now normalized to seem for the most part
simply part of the experience of urban life. It is a feature of our
survival via numbing, ignoring, contextualizing, counteracting this
silent blitzing—by sleeping, eating, drinking, laughing at the jokes—
that the more minor daily tortures are made common, incorporated,
even loved: skin of advertisements, entertainments, socializing, awe
of money, unique objects, motion, the expectation of the wish of
wanting more. With the internet now too we can at any hour access
electronic versions of anything all at once—speech feeds of the bored
or awake or paid or lonely or aspiring or horny or worshipful and
more; data-based images of explosions and sick and murder alongside
the shopping and the family albums and the free games; avatars of
family and strangers and friendly fronts of corporations; boundless
text and sound and image of what might have otherwise remained
covert—and each hour only growing, fed by countless bodies pressing
buttons at the flat face of millions of machines.
Over time, in such consumption, the body suffers—in aging, thinning,
breaking, building calluses, or bruise—each angle of which
serves to disrupt quality of sleep—our only temporary exit—and
thereby over time further emphasizes those distinctions through
exhaustion. Our attention feeds through totems toward the hole.
The product of prolonged lost rest in effect operates against the body
again like torture or dementia: Anxiety, Depression, Fear, Lability, Introversion,
Lethargy, Fatigue, Loss of memory, Inability to concentrate, Sleep difficulties,
Nightmares, Headaches, Visual disturbances, Vertigo, Paresthesias, Sexual disturbances.(2)
(1) From “The Most Commonly Used Torture Methods Applied to Victims
Seen at the Danish Centre for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims” (Roth, 1405).
(2) Ibid.
These ruptures gather in gross packets, one feeding another, causing one’s
defenses to become numb or dull while still aware, and opening the
flesh to sickness or predator, toward death. In the daily gush the
waking hours often may seem to feel more like one’s sleeping and
one’s sleeping held more shallow, ruined, awake.
It must come in, too, through the blood. There’s something inherent in our human
aspect that feeds the will to make and want and make and want and still need more—
that same gush that drives us among others to want something where there is nothing,
to want calm where there is noise. Often we become bored when the
familiar ways no longer seem to hold some unnamed magic—some
unconscious chance it might explode or shape shift right in our
hands—glee of the new—though this is also the kind of repetition
that makes us feel comforted, lets us rest. The further waking of the
wanting comes on often as a product of itself—a taste of the unknown or glee
or terror causing in the body the birth of a receptor that now requires it be fed—
or to be buried—lacing the familiar with something slippery and alien, driving—
the object filling out its name and not the other way around.
Often as an infant I would not recognize my mother in the night.
She would come to me there in my crib and see me screaming,
skulking from her as she stood. She’d reach to lift me up and I
would cower, a bright terror mirrored in my eyes. Other nights
she’d find me walking blank along the hallway, lit unconscious. In
the living room I’d stand and shriek, “I WANT MY MOMMY I
WANT MY MOMMY.” “I am your mommy”, my mom would say, in
a younger version of her current voice, and yet transfixed inside of
nowhere, she was no one to me at all. Other nights I’d wake to find
myself having moved inside my sleep to different rooms, or upside-
down or backward on the mattress, or underneath it, not knowing
what I’d done.
Today, when I ask my mother about my young sleep terror, she
reenacts me walking backward from her in the low light, her eyes
stretched wide, mimicking mine. My mother in recent years has
been getting shorter, her size sinking back into itself. Seeing her
perform the reenactment even now to me seems horrific—the idea
still vivid enough in her I can almost see who she was then in her
eyes. The years have not stuttered her recall. Her skin is paler, her
fingers thin. Her silver hair reflects all light. Her eyes are just the
same. In my asking how I’d been then, in my sleep trouble, she
describes the way I seemed unable to see her there before me, how I
seemed to not even see the house. “Terror was real to you and that
was it,” she says, her other self there just inside—the other selves of
all of us surrounding all of us, each of us at the center of our own
being, each aging in our own frame, sprawling forward into each
instant going, gone; every minute the most packed minute, the
furthest point along the curve.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Nothingby Blake Butler Copyright © 2011 by Blake Butler. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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