I've been in a fugue since yesterday afternoon. first came a sense of feverishness, tiredness, sore throat; then pain, feelings that I was universally rejected, unloved, unfit. I reached out for evidence to the contrary, calling a friend. i also turned to media in various forms, spending thirty sleepless hours playing videogames, eating only once a bit over twelve hours in, a single plum with some frozen pizza as I took a bath break between games. I could only eat half at that time, the other half six hours later. while high in the bath I had a frightening compulsive thought loop of reality as language, language as a virus, and llms as the true and essential torture of it, a background worry brought to the fore by reading the writings of a tech worker descending into ai mysticism. this kind of compulsive evil thought i haven't felt so strongly since I was young, and then as now think of as the devil, an ambiguously loved and trusted part of myself. but something that feels clear now (perhaps its aim was pedagogic) is that my sense of unreality which I feel to be so constitutive and defining of my self is a thing I maintain: it makes me feel less vulnerable. i have known this is part of my fugues but it feels graspable now in a way that I hope will be both useful to understanding both myself and others. what follows was written first, as a diary entry exploring my fugues as a practice of emotional safety.
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the fugue as a reckoning with grief, a way to feel a particular despair while also getting small enough to escape it, a way to mark time and make space in it, to confidently withdraw, demonstrating possession by neglect, a safe and self-defeating feast of compulsion, a hysterical retreat, a hermitting, an acceptable rupture.
the fugues are me working through something: there is labor involved, fixation on doing a simple thing: i work, in them, i seek work, and maintain a sense of progress as part of my shelter. i build a treaded tank from my attention and set it in a straight line, bulldozing the countryside in its passage. i am not in this tank looking for and shooting enemies; i am not letting myself be aware of my troubles; i am looking for rest and safety, sleeping at the wheel, confident in the armor of my thick neglect. my fugues are a form of painful rest, pains of a spontaneous suicidal asceticism: i do not want to eat or have a body. i want to live inside my fixation, fixed to it, fastened to my own fascination, attending only my attention, and enjoy the difficulty of doing this as my body complains, the discipline of it: look at me transcending weakness. as my mind dissolves in sleeplessness and starvation this ability to pull myself together, to continue improving at some game or code, is thrilling and soothing.
it is one of the few times I truly feel in control of my self, when i am confident i create my self; it is so clearly willful, an act of will, a presence, even in how it is poison to the social will and presence I generally value more. there is something the eye of the fugue wants, there is fierce desire in the center of the storm. is it that i cannot or ought not express that desire elsewhere that makes fugues feel so necessary? or that they let me lay down worries for a while in a ritual of self-flagellation? there is sweetness here that is sin and penance combined, devotional, perverse. I lust to be fixed fast, to be reduced to a straining stoicism but never humbled, a rambo masculinity, traumatized but powerful, able to break walls with my mind, or at least my thick head, and no one can tell me shit. rambo's eye is joyful too, lustful even, though with difficulties from the tender need to feel invulnerable.
this is clearly a practice of grief: in a fugue i am an inflamed wound, swollen with vulnerability and afraid of everyone, in a way that I think is true to me and deep, that I do not often enough let myself express. even though they are a well-developed practice the fugues are only a partial expression, acknowledging their hurt but keeping it on the margins of attention; making it impossible for me to not notice my grief but only resting thought on it briefly between missions.
i do not know how to acknowledge this grief better! today i will try to live in awareness of it, to bring it to language and sit with it even as i get tasks done. I've accepted already that these fixations are important to me, that i will not abandon them but rather care deeply to understand what is going on and how i can bring that part of me into more of life in collaboration with other parts, how i can let it out, show it off, let it hang. other parts have things they want that are at odds, but i think all agree a better bargain is possible. hopefully this way of seeing fugues as a practice of grief, a fierce attachment to joy, will help that conversation reach new stages of awareness, experimentation, play.