The first time I felt the horror of "seizure" was at the age of four. It was in the spring of nineteen sixty-eight. Our family lived thirty kilometers from Kyiv in the village of Bucha. After the spring of 2022, the name of my hometown became known all over the world. But then it was an unremarkable village near the capital of Ukraine.
I remember it was warm and joyful. Mom put a pom-pom beret on me because I had to be beautiful. My god-uncle Vitya came to us with a camera to take pictures of me for a family photo album.
I was placed under the white wall of our hut next to the window. I looked at Uncle Vitya, saw a camera in his hands, and a feeling of horror seized me. I was sure that now Uncle Vitya would press the button, the camera would click, and I would be inside him. I'll be transported into this little box with a lens and a button, and I'll disappear. And I won't be here anymore.
How could a four-year-old boy have such thoughts in his head? But they scared me and I burst into tears. I didn't want to be photographed - I didn't want to be in a box. My parents consoled me and tried to distract me with toys. Dad told me not to be afraid that I was big and wouldn't fit in a box. But Uncle Vitya still pressed the button, and the camera clicked. I'm not going anywhere. The world - our yard, house, garden, parents, grandfather and grandmother - remained with me. In fact, I stayed with them. Frightened, tearful, but not going anywhere.
This incident will be remembered for the rest of my life. The fear of "seizure" was my first existential shock.
The second shock of an existential nature overtook me ten years later. At school, at a labor lesson, I suddenly thought about death. I imagined the absence of my own consciousness so clearly that I felt sick. The feeling of "not being" was accompanied by a feeling of fear that paralyzes. I remember in that lesson we learned how to work on lathes. My classmate looked at me and was taken aback. He said I was "white as chalk"
Surprisingly, on that day, a camera was also present at this lesson. It was brought by one of my classmates. We took pictures in the workshop. Perhaps it brought back childhood memories. Children's horror before "seizure" was transformed into teenage thoughts about death, and into the fear of "not being"
Another ten years have passed. I studied philosophy and art theory. It was then that I learned what "existential horror" is, what the "ontological nature of photography" is, and why photographers are called "agents of death." And everything was clear to me. For me, this knowledge was not new. I remembered a frightened boy, pinned to the wall with a camera. He remembered his childhood fears and smiled.
And ten years later I came up with a script and wrote a book about a terrible Babai who takes away children. "He who takes the children" is known to children all over the world. He has many names. This is the Boogeyman, the Bonecutter, Ombre del Costal, Tek-Tek, Koko, the old woman Peg Pauler. In Ukraine, they scare children with Babai.
This is what happened in my life. Perhaps a book and a cartoon about Babai is a way to get rid of a child's fear of "seizure"?
