Blake Butler "Ever" -- Interview: Question 8

RK: I love coming up against and walking in minds that are very different from mine. I'm kind of primary colored. And hard-edged. I personally don't think there are questions at all. And I think one should write what one knows. But it's not so easy to know it properly or new-ly and say it so. I think, too, that there's a basic answer or two round which everything flows--and part of life is just fucking coming to grips with those damned headstone and footstone realities. You seem to have a billion questions, angles and these last two days I've been reading and re-reading "Ever" and it has been a pleasure. The piece on pg. 60 (which i'll call a prose poem) is by itself a masterpiece. I've read it a dozen times at least so far and it's magic hasn't faded. I'm going to record it and other passages and store on my Ipod:

[ The next room was melon yellow, zapped with lightning-- huge bananas-- bumblebees-- bees runned with honey-- their own honey-- bees eating bees-- up to my neck and in my knees. ]


...I think this is last question/comment of this interview. Please finish things off by knocking back up against or into what i've written above and anything else.....



BB: I mean, I think some things are known without being knowable and without having a way to say them as they are, because what they are is more than a mouth or hair or blood and the only way to say what you know is to say it in a mode that invokes the knowing that gets mad lodged way up in that neon gristle. I was going to make that sentence longer but stopped. I want to find the thing I did not know I knew and then throw it up out of me and eat it again and throw it up again in repetition until the house is full of me and I am full of the house. Maybe that's what the narrator of Ever does, and maybe that's why she makes sense to me in her unmaking.



(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Blake Butler, at the bottom of this post)