Transductions

I know a little about personal apocalypses. My parents told me I would never die. There were clauses of course, only god could be invulnerable. I might still be forgotten after all. The end of the world would come like a thief in the night. This is all true. I was always thinking the world was ending. When I stopped believing in God I became very afraid. I had always been afraid though then I realised the world could still end. The first time I doubted God’s existence I was six or seven. I drove my head repeatedly into the springs in my mattress. I exhausted myself trying to batter down the thought. I was red faced, hurt but I had given something up in myself. The thought was still there and my body was now its reflex.
I’ve been reading Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas.
Scorch Atlas feels like a deformed twin of some sort or a lost sibling of that very specific fear and emotion. This might explain the mixture of attraction and repulsion operating echoic, clattering in the lidded gap of my personal circuit break _/ _
I think the tabloid term is Genetic Sexual Attraction.
Scorch Atlas has been making me sick. Kathy Acker’s writing got me in a visceral way too. Except Kathy’s viscera was made tangible via the emotional and political and there was something transcendent to be gained by tearing the world through the body open.
Butler’s Scorch Atlas is transfiguration through sickness, the body out of control, full of growths, growths which are of course always a digging inwards, an inside job.
I can’t remember who said it, maybe Elizabeth Young (I am sorry I cannot remember), that the body in much modern American fiction represented the last van guard of the real. This is maybe changing. The body is now the site for radical experimentation. We’re frustrated with the limitations of our extension in space.
Scorch Atlas punches evolution in the kidneys. I think I might be projecting. I feel close to the writing. Maybe the writing is uncomfortably close to me, depressing my capillaries. This is an effect of its remorselessness. The work makes morsels of us all.
There is a lot going on in this writing. I’m only five stories in and I had to sit down and make some feverish notes. When something makes me sit down and take notes there’s something in it that I can’t approach. That’s what I look for.

Scorch Atlas is frightening and horrific. This is Horror the way Polanski’s Repulsion was horror, the way ‘the birds’ is horror. In fact what I find most fascinating stylistically, now that I can put a little distance between myself and it, is how Scorch Atlas organizes then slaloms around its influences like checkpoints on a down hill skiing race.
The way a crack will race across panes of glass.
I see Lynch via Hitchcock via Stephen King via Lutz via Cormac Mccarthy via the authors own controlled momentum.

But I’m digressing, making it safe. I’m going to finish the book and then burn it.

“…the office that the traditional novel once performed has not disappeared along with it. The ‘death of the novel’ (of that novel, at any rate) has really meant the explosion everywhere of the novelistic, no longer bound in three-deckers, but freely scattered across a far greater range of cultural experience.”

D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 1988, x