Life in the rear-view mirror

Life in the rear-view mirror

lørdag 10. november 2012

Imagination.... also Luster Sanatorium, third time

Black clouds
Black liquid is floating in the air.
Twisting and turning and shifting shape
Everything is too lucid and fast moving
Ever changing and reinventing itself
I just can’t get a grip on it
A grip on what to do about it
But it’s just in my head
Around me it’s dark and silent
A blank canvas for my imagination to paint in shades of black
The sun has been defeated
The birds are dead
The stars are watching from a safe distance
They’re out to see an ill matched fight

It’s night, and I’m all alone outside. This happened somewhere in February, when I first started walking in the dark. What was at first a massive challenge loaded with almost unmanageable fear has now become an enjoyable habit. I wouldn’t have anticipated it in a million years that it would become this easy. But I had to keep it up, didn’t I? So on the 20th of October, I have left the cool Norwegian autumn outside and I am in a dark basement. I’m back at Luster Sanatorium. It’s good for the nerves... in a weird, sort of backwards way. Even though we’ve just been let in by a guy who said he’d expected I'd return (I guess he most know something), there is a distinct feeling like we’re out of bounds here. I can’t really pinpoint that feeling, but it makes me all giddy and adrenaline spiked. I’m not much of an adrenalin junkie, but this is so much fun!



Last time I visited this place, I quite innocently suggested that Janne would walk ahead (not having to explain to her the level of discomfort dark enclosed spaces cause me) when we reached the basement, but she had had enough after being dragged around for a good 2 hours and wanted to leave. This time we start in the basement. This place feels relatively good I decide, and I keep reminding myself of it. I’m in a pitch black basement, and I feel relatively calm. Ramona is ahead of me with a small flashlight that just happened to be attached to my keys. I didn’t actually think to bring one and I even forgot to bring my flash. Just to top it all up on the photography side, I had had an ice-coffee on the way there, somehow enough to make my hands tremble. We wonder into the depths of the basement, Ramona blessedly calm, me with my fringed nerves, but somehow not very jumpy. This is new knowledge to me. I’m actually, weirdly, only scared to death by things that are not dangerous. And would you believe, it actually sort of makes sense. Dangerous stuff is usually quite easy to deal with unlike those unresolved moments when you’re just not sure what you’re faced with. The silence is the worst of it, the lack of input.



Sometimes we see moving, black forms, sometimes we see their faces. But it’s just people (unlike that supernaturally tall man out on a field the other night, who was just a bush). I don’t doubt it for a second. Once, in the dark depths of the basement, I see a lone person that I later came to wonder about, but I didn’t at the moment. When I turn around a moment later to see if the person has gone, I think I see a dark figure disappear behind a corner. I decide it must be my shadow moving in correspondence to the flashlight Ramona might have moved, and I turn back away from it, sealing the deal with my brain, though it might not be right. I learned this in traffic: look away from scary stuff you have no power over.



One room in the depths of the basement had me reverse out the door quite literally. “Do you smell that?” I had asked Ramona earlier, still outside the building. She didn’t, though I could smell it quite clearly even in the fresh, cold air outside. In that particular room it was so strong that I couldn’t stand it. It made me dizzy; made me feel like I couldn’t or shouldn’t breathe. Ramona could smell it too at this point, but she didn’t find it uncomfortable at all.




My imagination can be quite volatile. Once I read about Asperger Syndrome. I felt that I fit some of the characteristics... it would explain a lot... I like people a lot but I’m a total social misfit. So I wondered around for a few days, feeling how I would feel if I found out I had Aspergers. It was quite comforting in a way, but I also had the feeling a lot of people might judge me on something like that. That is unfair I decided! Why does everyone have to fit the mould? Then I started reading a book about psychopaths. I soon started to feel like I might be one. I started to imagine how I would feel if I was one. This is a way of learning and it’s quite effective. I cleared myself quickly and to anyone who knows me, the idea in itself is ridiculous. I’m overly sensitive if anything, which led me to consider Borderline Personality Disorder. Just the name makes me cringe and I do not have it... I think.



Then I decided to stop self-diagnosing and that it was time to befriend my imagination and put it to good use, instead of just hiding it away in my closet, where it had lived its life, a shapeless creature, only to come out at night to haunt me, allowing for only the really uncomfortable images to needle trough the filter. Ramona enjoyed this gleefully back in high school when she would tell me of pain and injury just to see the tortured look on my face. Now we hunted through the sanatorium for faces, and we found them everywhere. At first I needed to get most of them pointed out to me, but then I got better. I used to think I was crazy as shit, but I was stupid to restrain myself. It was real good fun. In one room we stood for a while, looking around at the walls and ceiling as they populated our minds in surprising quantities. We agreed that room was particularly fun. Someone else might not see it for the peeling paint, the mildew, the decay. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder they say. Beauty is in the brain, and my brain was alight with the chaos, the endless possibilities for the impressions to be puzzled together, to be filtered, to be understood and misunderstood. It’s all so ugly and so beautiful to so many. It’s hopelessness and despair to some, ideas, possibilities and unrealized potential to others. Some will undoubtedly see Jesus on the wall while others see the devil. It’s all bundled together in there and for good or bad, how it appears to you does say something about you. It’s just not always clear what. This is so confusing, and I love confusing stuff.



We walked through the basement, then the first floor, then we started to doubleing up on the basement. It had somehow gotten colder down there as we passed above on the first floor, making our breathing a traceable white in the air. I had taken the lead, checking to see if we had missed anything, but I quickly turned back as I hit a particularly cold spot that had me shiver violently. This had me thinking in terms of supernatural, but Ramona (rationality personified) thinks I’m an idiot. Oh well, I suppose I might be a little eager to add to my list of unexplained phenomena.



Despite the lack of appropriate gear, the 8 GB memory card I had bough specifically for this trip was filled to the brim with about 980 bundles of pixels, about 490 JPEGs with their accompanying massive, uncompressed RAWs.

I’m still feeling somewhat soft and impressionable from the shock of two car crashes, so I see this as a good time to see and experience new things. I need to keep the momentum. Quickly, but not too quickly, or else one might trip and fall through the floor and we wouldn’t want that, would we?



A while ago, I was back in the pacific blue Peugeot again. The one to which the second, more serious accident happened. We towed it back home a few weeks ago, and now my dad has patched it together... sort of. It runes nicely, the engine looks and feels and sounds on point. The soft, deep, smooth hum of diesel, just like always. The left headlight is a bit off. The dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree. ABS, ESP, air-bags. Nothing works it tells us, frantically. STOP. It blinks and beeps. It runs but I know the big red “STOP” means the computer can intervene and slow the engine to avoid damage to it. I read this in the manual a few years ago. The seatbelt on the driver’s side is sort of slow... the one on the other side is locked completely in place. There is an alarming sense like someone died in here. But no one did. We both lived to see another day. I though the panic, the shock, the adrenalin would stick to the interior, but it haven’t really. I feel somewhat tense, but it’s only a minor discomfort. The car smells funny, but it’s only from hanging around idly in the rain for too long.



So what am I trying to say? Fear is not set in stone. Nothing “is” scary. Fear happens in your head and only in your head and so does beauty ;)