BLACKOUT (entry & escape from the ghost world)
in which I have escaped
A collage photo essay, using words from "Critic, Sixteen" by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Don Bartlett) as well as clips from the Many Moons 2017 workbook.
I guess, like Karl, "I had it in me. I just had to let it out."
Full disclosure: while this excerpt of his, published in The Paris Review, has clearly resonated with me, I have not, nor do I plan to, read all 3,600 pages of his struggle. Yet I remain fascinated and grateful for his words on the "ghost world" of a blackout, especially from the teenage perspective.
I took liberties with the order and the specific lines I chose to scrawl in my notebook with the purpose of ripping them out and using for this collage, so please consider reading in full, here. Or at least, consider these first lines:
IÂ had experienced blackouts ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished tenth grade, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience; being drunk took me to places where I was free and did what I wanted while it raised me aloft and rendered everything around me wonderful. Only recalling bits and pieces afterward, isolated scenes brightly illuminated against a wall of darkness, through which I emerged and disappeared again, was the norm. And so it went on.
It feels fitting to share this on Friday the 13th, as experiencing blackouts, for me, truly had become "nothing less than a horror film." For a long time, I worried I had no control of this, of when or if they would occur; I felt, like Karl described, wild, "as if I had been let loose" and "surrounded by an ocean of darkness" for days after they would occur.
The ghost world: when I was inside, it went straight through me, and when I woke up from it there was little I could remember, a face here, a body there, a room, a staircase, a backyard, pale and shimmering, surrounded by an ocean of darkness.
It was nothing less than a horror film. Now and then I would remember the most peculiar details, like a rock at the bottom of a stream or a bottle of olive oil on a kitchen shelf, everyday items in themselves but symbols of a whole night’s mental activity, in fact all that was left of it, which was bizarre. What was it about that rock? What was it about that bottle? The first two times it happened I hadn’t been afraid, I registered it simply as a kind of objective fact. Then, when it happened again, there began to be something eerie about it because I was so out of control. No, nothing had happened and probably nothing was going to happen either, but the fact was, I had no control over my actions at all. If I was basically a nice person, that was how I would be then as well, but was I? Actually?
But I have escaped from the ghost world.
Since making my escape, I've had fits and starts. But mostly, I have finally let go of the deep shame I've carried since the first time I had a blackout, like Karl, at the age of 16. There is far more to it all than I am inclined to share, here and now, or maybe ever, but I do want to say, if you're currently starring unwillingly in your own genre of horror film: I believe you can find a way out, too. I hope that for you.
It happened. I forgive myself.
I'm safe. I'm free.