The Broken Compass

I broke my compass. I’d be walking one way and all the traffic – people traffic, actual traffic – would be coming towards me, and when I turned around and headed in the other direction all the traffic would still be head on. Someone was messing around with the street signs. I’d be in the wrong part of town when I wanted to be sober, and in the right part when I wanted to be drunk, which basically meant that wrong was right and right was wrong. Sometimes it would feel like I was in two places at once, the body here, the mind in an undisclosed location, or there was the feeling of being in transit, neither here nor there. The worst was just being holed up somewhere among the lost and found, with no recollection of arriving or having set off from elsewhere, just the feeling that you had been mugged and dumped.

Some non-sane states of mind come closer than others to describing these feelings, which is not to say they hit the mark. Sufferers of Dissociative Fugue, for example, may wake up many miles from where they last recall being with no idea of how they got there. During the temporary unconscious or extra-conscious state, which can last for hours or weeks, the wanderer may even don a new identity, start over, as it were, and then remember nothing when roused from the state in a new bed, in new clothes, or in a new town. Agatha Christie is alleged to have suffered from Dissociative Fugue, which is ironic: her disappearance and reappearance eleven days later in a faraway hotel and with an assumed name remains an Agatha Christie mystery.

A.C. Grayling summarizes the condition as follows:

“The victim sets off on a journey, seemingly purposeful and conscious, but actually in an altered, self-forgetful state of mind, travelling impulsively, and directionlessly, perhaps across whole continents – and then “wakes” in astonishment to find himself far from home, having in the meantime behaved very uncharacteristically. According to recent studies, there is no such thing as fugue considered as a separate mental disease; non-conscious wandering can be caused by brain injury and a variety of illnesses. But the majority view is that fugue is a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation, as if it wished to seek a better life.”

Indeed: a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation.