Authors: Blake Butler
Though for some stretches I might find a long way out of this serial condition for weeks or months in passing—somehow slipped around the ledge into the lake of something if still not seamless, more at ease—it always seems at some point to return full bore within some stretch, as if at all times waiting just above me, falsely unprisoned—as if never fully gone.
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In the documentary
Derrida
, Jacques Derrida talks very specifically about the extreme terror he sometimes feels in the half-sleep between waking and sleeping, a space wherein his mind questions the aggressive or “new” things he has written during that day, challenging them as inadmissible, horrendous, offensive, despite the fact that when he is writing them he feels confident, capable of all. He explains this odd duality by saying he believes he is actually less conscious during the creation period, more asleep, and it is only when he is half asleep, toward the exit, that his panic, fear—what he refers to herein as
truth
—is stoked, manifested, revealed, screaming, “Stop everything! Burn your papers!” Thus this between area seems more public than the creative shell, more vulnerable, if also somehow more strongly connected to waking contexts, as if the writing itself is where the author, in want of speaking from the unknown, the nowhere, is channeling the deeper state, the lock of sleep. The self, in becoming aware of the self overridden by existing half in one consciousness, half in the other, begins hates the self for what it does not know about its other—hates its production, fears the new. This kind of inverse relation, in my own body, often leaves me feeling as if I am more truly awake when I am asleep, and more asleep when I’m awake—opening the question of who in me or through me is doing the writing, and who in me or not in me is the one to which other people speak.
In a series of examinations of the brain’s processes of control, D. M. Wegner outlined a bimodal system that is activated in the governing of thinking.
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As a person comes across a thought he wishes to control, as those that distract one from clean sleep, the brain’s regular, active
“operating” system
(OS) becomes activated, to carry out the control. A second, effortless
“monitoring” system
(MS) runs in complement to the OS in search of cognitions to funnel toward, a system of inherent, readied distraction. For an average, daily person, this process for the most part goes on easily, without blip—the function carries out itself in silence, under flesh. In a body of above-average stress, though, the OS can become overloaded, flush, placing further strain upon the locomotion of the camouflage maneuver. As well, the new thought provided by the MS, when the OS is under strain, may add further noise into the system, coagulating as in a river’s mouth with leaves and logs. The spark of anxiety feeds its own hole—altering the usual process of distraction within one’s self to one of accrual, crudding up—allowing the system to become further damaged, fatter and fatter, toward a hyper, opaque state. Thus the sleep period becomes a paradox—a state you want so bad you cannot have it, the effort of solution refreshing the problem, again, again. Quickly, in this accrual, one can begin to feel more awake, in wanting sleeping, than one does at waking up. The day beginning as it ends, and therefore, in continuation, ending as it begins.
Proust, perhaps the most notorious of all writing-based nonsleepers, does well to illuminate this throng of awakening within and further in. “Such grave uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is also the obscure country where it must seek and where all baggage will be nothing to it.”
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Thus, the self is both the creator of its terrain, and the holosphere around it, the atlas not the sum of all its pages but an object, a clog of maps, which perhaps in certain configurations, and in trolling the relief points and deeper sinkings, the wormholes in the flattest face, that something still unnamable and nowhere can be if not centered, pulled to closer focus, grown as pressure in the chest, “face-to-face with something that does not yet exist . . . this unknown state which brought with it no logical proof, but only the evidence of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence the other states of consciousness faded away.”
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At early or temporary periods of unsleeping it is this very clicking presence of dying time that keeps one going, ever-conscious of the counting-down clocks, the furor of the leak, but deeper in, as one resigns to scrying, it is the blank of time that feeds true heat—longer, wider, shapeless nothing—how knowing within in knowing that day and night time continues on and on, and that there in that is truer blank. “God channels this through me at night,” said Michael Jackson. “I can’t sleep because I’m so supercharged.” In the light, his waking body shifting beyond his control, photographed and malformed, filtered through recordings of his sound and bodies fainting as he walked into a room, which could be argued as a fuel for the spasms and gestures that comprised the dance-paroxysms that set him most distinctly in the flesh of his own flesh—looked at from afar in wonder, an entertainment, comprised of an unnameable fit-routine. “But the madness of an action was precisely determined by the fact that no reason could ever exhaust it,” writes Foucault. “The truth of madness was in an automatism that had no logic behind it, and the more an action was empty of reason, the greater the chances that it was solely the result of a determinism of madness, the truth of madness being in man the truth of all that was without reason, of all that resulted, as Pinel said, from ‘an unreflected determination, devoid of any concern for self-interest and any motivation.’ ”
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The self appearing in a blacking sphere around the brain, resigned to form the self again around the self again, of coagulating impetuses and blood tendencies and unconsciousness of pose. So that, with no point of cut out, no space or differentiating meat between kinds of minutes, a kind of borderline or wall of sorts thickens around the waking day and nodding night making each the same and that much more compressed into a faceless, flattened logic. Time for the unsleeper becomes one long going and going feed, wherein all is noise and light and all is sound, each welding to the self and turning the self outside the self at all. Even the dark at night becomes lit up; every silence screams.
By now, inside the cycle of my self-settling, the calming order of more structured thoughts giving my blood a space under which to calm, perhaps having fallen quick inside some quiet that seems toward the coming door, often by unseen slip of mind or in elaboration,
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the brain thoughts again will glow alive, beginning again at the beginning,
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if slightly deeper and set in its spinning,
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or maybe even worse, responding to an outside factor such as new sound, or any of the countless reasons for anything to go wrong—neighbors, cell phones, excess noise out in the street
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—or an outside real-world brain eruption such as the sudden remembrance of something I need to remember about tomorrow,
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about tomorrow, about tomorrow, which I must get out of bed and write down for fear of losing, and the more I try to convince myself
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I will remember it without writing it
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down,
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the more sure I am that I will not actually remember, though I seem to always remember everything without looking at what I’ve written down and more it is just the fear, again, over anything else,
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of losing what I want the most while everything I could not care less about sticks to me in unending seething, no digestion, which reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke,
Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny,
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those words often repeating different hours in my head,
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words stung from another breathless dead one,
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another removed of blood,
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and yet with thoughts that still transmit through other bodies in the bull air, some nights, while the conduits of those remain, each year likely stemming smaller, and his dust done, and about what it must have been like inside his body near the end
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and how much food he ate during those last days and days before those and how it inflected in his head and what he smelled like before he died and in his coffin and how long it had been since he ate McDonald’s
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and how that might have changed him if he’d gone there once again and how long has it been since I ate
78
McDonald’s
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and should I go now and god I’d really like one of those vanilla shakes and a twenty-pack Chicken
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McNuggets
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like when I was a child and overweight, or as my mother called it
husky
, those were the best days, I should let myself become fat again,
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resounding, crammed full of all those other doors, doors that as the flesh swells seem to serve to silence one another, in the warm flesh, how much harder I slept when under mounds, and probably I’m well
83
on my way to larger since I didn’t get time to run today in midst of all the other crud compiling and nothing feels worse than when I do not run
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and I will have to run some extra
85
now tomorrow
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to make up for that that I did not do, to make up for these extra sets of growing cells, which I can feel for certain on my body, heavy, I am getting heavier every minute, I can feel it, I can feel something crawling in my mouth, something silent and unending, and by now it is at least 4 AM,
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and I am still thinking here again, about my thinking, and about the thoughts inside the thinking that come gunned, and every thought has so many other thoughts strung on it, any thought could lead out any way, the head a box of batter and such screaming, and I am no better off than when I started trying again to go to bed,
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why did I even lay down at 2 AM
89
to begin with if I was just going to lie here and roll around in damning bullshit fuckface party the way I always always do, the way the night curls like someone’s face skin just above me burning my skin silent and laughing up my balls, who am I here, unfurl, unfurl,
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all this time tonight
unfurl
I could have been using here to do something good or toward something else outside myself
unfurl
like write or read
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or if nothing else stare at more internet or the TV, any machine, any hour, any whorl, I could have been anywhere at all instead of lying here pretending I was going to sleep right or even quickly in white silence,
92
a nightly prayer that hardly ever does come true, never except for maybe when I’m drunk or so exhausted days are nothing and there is hardly room to move to breathe, and I don’t feel either of those things tonight at all, and all this body, and fuck, now I have moved so much I’ve woken her up too, I watch her trip inside the black room moving heavy to lie down on the sofa, somewhere far way from me, once again because here again I can’t stop thinking
unfurl
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and now I’ve done this and her night is shit too and tomorrow her day will feel less full and of a throb and she and I will both be tired again and probably we’ll fight about something stupid and I’ll be stupid and in the end we’ll both have lost comfort in this house, unto the night that ends us daily getting thinner and more throbbing,
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and still here I am exactly in this dry and endless furled unfurling when, this when there waiting somewhere just above us and soon coming, always coming, nothing, something soft without a name,
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its thick face shitting in endless squirm-moves through silent tunnels hidden on the night, ripping hard and roared toward anywhere surrounding with the presence of a hammer to a fontanel, a blood spot in a rover, how any hour any every other could be oncoming and there would mostly be no way to know, no signal shot from silent objects scrying until there they are upon us or within us and still here I am again, again again,
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in the endless presence of coming letters, speakings, bills, of people moving in and out and around your own life, and the lives near to you, and theirs, and theirs, how any move in any one of countless mirrors could reconnect to yours in demolition, unabolition, detonation, and tomorrow it will only ever be that much harder here again, and now the new oncoming day is already just a sliver in the ass
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of the days of weeks
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of years unpeeling into tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
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these days’ aggregating boltlines
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of black inertia swollen into each and every and again, as I will, I know, go through all of this again again again again again,
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,
102
each time starting even further behind than already I have been, and appended with whatever extra crap there is to think about that hugs on that consequenceless
103
and what from that I will uncover coming out, each time working worse in silent screaming ways of vast backlog until I unsee it, and I will never, so until there is something in me still, or at least unto when what will come for me inside the next day’s next day’s next day’s roar of hell of expectation in the time I have remaining in that light,
104
and why can’t I just stop this, even in darkness, even naked nowhere on the bed, all of this repeating in bold silence, all of this said in never and not never not unbeing unsaid and unmine,
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on and on for hours, night in night, on, in cricking branches, until the light again, the night again,
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the shift between where every hour becomes pure shriek,
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becomes an edgeless, nameless silence permeating every inch of every hour come and here and coming, the louder the more you listen, in spheres of time unending and all end.