Longish post, with a lot of I, but not TMI, and is a real query. Thanks to intrepid readers–the query is about language.
First, an attempt at a description. It is not a normal mood state; rather, one that comes in a type of disconnection in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (these are what I am familiar with). Classics of description are in Styron’s Darkness Visible and scattered around many medical descriptions.
As some of you may know, I’m host to some severe mood disorders, so if I lapse into first person it is for simplicity’s sake. One symptom of depression is known as lack of affect (with an “a”): a flattened response to your world leads to your flattened expression–shallow breathing and speaking in an emotionally flat way, while your emotional state, but not necessarily your cognitive alertness, simply lies low, safely away from what is felt to be a swirly, rock strewn shoreline. (Please excuse the purple prose. :))
Now, consider this correlative. Again, this is well-recognized in psych land, and has a name which I can’t remember. Something locomotion. It’s difficult to describe, of course: at times, in a depressed state (or, with different emotional highlights, PTSD) you walk, only slightly slower in fact but feeling much slower, in a heightened state of deliberativeness. You take each step with full consciousness, you almost float, yet you are as if constrained in a liquid glass (in horrible severe depression the molten glass weighs and slows each step almost to stasis). To someone watching you–and this is not analogy–you are walking slowly and foot-by-foot exactly like a cautios blind man.
Here is the link of the affect-lack I mentioned first and this locomotion: the net result (or impetus, but it’s the same at the end) is an inwardness, a separation–as if through flowing thick glass or plexiglass–of you, your mood, your sense of self, and the passersby, the street, world, everything not-you.
During this time your cognitive mind is working just fine (I deliberated this post and the wording of it when I was walking this afternoon), but your emotional separation is striking, your relationship to the experienced external world set apart and cradled in a kind of delicately held state of walking as if you yourself are the plexiglass through which you observe what is around you. (Again, this is common in some severe mood states. One famous case is of a man who thought he was made of glass.)
So. Any suggestions for a noun for this mood/physical state which I’ve tried to hint at?
I’m not sure if there is a German word “Innig,” and of course I could check. But for the moment I won’t, because if there isn’t it’s the kind of word that’s just out of reach. (“I’m almosting it,” as Stephen Daedalus says in Ulysses when he’s just a tantalising distance from remembering last night’s dream.)
This is the sense I get with my (made up?) German: “…ig” attached to “in” gives the meaning of, being in a state of in-ness, and actively “in-ing.” (It’s funny I plucked something German as a solution. Perhaps I’ve read too much Rilke and Celan. Odd that nothing popped into my head from the Wake.)