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Inforg Studio presents

Benedek Fliegauf's film

SPARKLE

It felt as if there was no air.

It was a strange experience that

there had been air and now there wasn't.

There are times when you can feel short of air and

your nose is blocked and you blow it

and do all kinds of things

and there was still no air.

None.

So I looked around ad saw the others could breathe.

So there hadn't been a nuclear attack.

What could it be? God only knows.

You know what it is because

there aren't that many options to choose from.

I guess it could have been a pulmonary embolism

that is another type of heart attack.

You know what the problem is

but you draw things out in case it isn't true and

it might be something else.

It was possibly the wine that saved me

and held me back in that split second from the deep

because red wine dilates the blood vessels.

But I did the opposite too and

I started to smoke because I hadn't lit one in a while

and that could be the problem

but then everything did go dark

because I really did run out of air for a while.

It didn't happen as I sucked on a cigarette

but everything got slowly darker

or rather as if there was a film on my eyes.

I went out to bathroom to see what it looked like on the outside.

I wanted to know

if I was experiencing something that could be seen on the outside.

I wanted to see if there was a sign of some sort.

And I saw a stranger's face staring back at me.

It was a face I had never seen before and I didn't know

though I was the one standing in front of the mirror.

This person had no colour and

I thought it must be the lighting.

There was a horrible neon light and

I thought it might me that.

But as I am a photographer,

I had to conclude that the light couldn't cause this.

There was something terribly wrong.

And so I tried to wash my face.

I could do everything perfectly well

but I was short of air,

sweating,

weak and in pain.

The pain was excruciating.

So I paid, jumped in a taxi, and went home.

I sat in the cab and thought

the fresh air from the window would make things better

but I still felt short of oxygen.

So I went home.

I got up to the first floor somehow.

It is an old building and there's no lift.

I was alone in the flat because

my wife was 210 kilometres away in Gombosszeg

and I wondered what I should do.

I managed to cross the road

but I hardly made it to the doctor's surgery on the other side.

I had to hold the wall and although there was a queue,

they let me in right away because I looked dreadful.

Then they whisked me into hospital.

They did what they had to do.

It looked what it seemed like an age

but they had given me something for the pain back at the surgery.

It was something like morphine

or a morphine derivative and

so I was pretty sedated.

The pain continued and it wasn't as strong

but everything hurt terribly behind a curtain of fog.

The pain wasn't as sharp.

I had my pain in my back, my arms, my elbow,

and mainly in my breastbone.

It wanted to explode and I could feel this in my back.

But it depends and it's different for everybody.

And then...

I had a feeling that

this was no longer life and it was a new phase.

It was another level, another floor.

I brought this to the attention of the staff.

But what I said was a lie.

This was the interesting thing.

I told them that I thought I was going to pass out

when I knew that I wasn't fainting but dying.

But I didn't want to scare them and

so I just made them aware that something was happening

Just thinking it and saying it

took up such a great amount of energy that

I died in the same minute.

The film stopped in that second.

It really was like a cut in a film and

the picture disappeared and

there was no doctor doing things,

no nurse putting down her notepad and running for help.

And there was no falling dip-stand

that someone caught in the last minute

otherwise it would have pulled the needle out.

So there was none of this but

what I can only call a cut in the film because

there was something to replace it in the next second and

it was completely familiar to me and terribly unfamiliar at the same time.

The two things at once and

I couldn't separate them and that was unknown to me.

You end up...

in a state before spoken language or words,

in fact in a state before images can be sensed.

So you find yourself in a word where

there are no pictures and

where words haven't even appeared on the horizon of the universe

because there has never been a horizon.

But you have the full contents of your consciousness.

So this is a darkness

in which we turn from somewhere to somewhere.

But I didn't know what this something was

and where I was coming from and where I was going

because this had never happened to me before.

And at the same time, the content of my consciousness,

all that came from my whole life stopped and

this is where the film of your life typically flashes before your eyes.

Nothing ran in front of my eyes.

It couldn't be compared to a film

but it was more like a very complex structure.

It was a very complicated system for stored data

in a form rather like a database on a computer.

It was in the state in which

pictures are recorded on he brain stem

before hey are evaluated and stored either

in the emotional or sensory parts of the brain

but both of these.

So information can go either here or there

as a result of how I understood them and what the became.

What became of it in this direction and what happened to it in that direction.

But anything can be accessed anytime

but there is no anything and there is no anytime.

Everything is present but in another dimension.

And this other dimension is stronger.

So it's crazy and this and this craziness has strength.

And this is the moment when you say to yourself that, yes, this is death.

This is the dimension of death, this has strength,

This is the whole of which I am a part or which I become a part.

But I had no idea when it came to how and why.

It was a completely protected and happy feeling

and the consciousness that I brought from my life recorded

how good this was and that I had been aiming for this

for my whole life in my love affairs and these became very concrete.

I have to add that

it isn't in the same way as when you define things

after you wake and not like in a dream

because names aren't attached.

The whole thing is made up of clusters of sensation.

If we want to be true to the story,

we should add that millions of years passed and in reality,

timelessness passed that can't in fact pass.

The next stage is often referred to as a cave

but for me it was more like the whole universe

and the light was the first thing to appear.

It was a light I had never seen before

I didn't know what it was.

But as a photographer, who has the mind of a photographer,

you not only know but you instantly have a frame of reference.

So it was a definite sort of light, an opal,

a filtered light, an artificially filtered light.

I saw the light behind a very peculiar form.

It was a dimension.

But the consciousness that experiences this doesn't know

because it is seeing it for the first time.

But neither does it know it is seeing it for the first time.

This is exactly what creates

the dimension of infinity or timelessness

as there is no point of reference.

There is only the process.

It turned and

started to move in a spiral towards the light

but I had the consciousness

that I brought from my life

and this theoretically doesn't contain

an image of the birth canal.

We cannot remember this but we have an experience that

can be recalled using various psychological techniques

and we also have a very virtual experience,

which we can convert physical sensations,

phenomena, and experiences into pictorial form.

Dreams wouldn't be possible in any other way and

we all have experienced that.

So if we carry a sensation inside ourselves from birth,

then there is a great possibility that

it can be translated into pictorial language,

its various stages can be translated into a pictorial language.

And so, in the state when a person dies,

in order to protect himself

and to create the content of consciousness that is him,

and the whole, the complete whole

that is the life of a being, a living being,

the last experience is also the first.

And the two experiences turn into one another