Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia – A Provocative and Wide-Ranging Exploration of Consciousness Through History, Art, and Science - Softcover

Butler, Blake

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061997382 ISBN 13: 9780061997389

Verlag: Harper Perennial, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn’t.” —Dennis Cooper

From Blake Butler, one of the most challenging young writers of our time and the acclaimed author of the novel There Is No Year, comes a thrillingly wide-ranging and provocative book about insomnia—from its role in history, art, and science through its unexpected consequences on Butler’s personal imagination, creative process, and perspective on reality. Fans of David Foster Wallace, David Shields, and Dennis Cooper will be captivated by Blake Butler’s darkly evocative prose and his daring exploration of the challenges of consciousness.

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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.

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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.

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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....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harper Perennial
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0061997382
• ISBN 13: 9780061997389
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: HarperCollins Publishers, Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland