Discontent – but why? Of course, a mood just happens; to seek reasons for it is to make the error of the critic who would seek an objective correlate to Hamlet’s vacillation – or criticises the play for the lack of one. But a mood comes, this is its bounty, and though you cast about for its cause, trying to bring it back into the purview of that conception of the human being as the cause all that affects it, it belongs to what is outside and arrives only as fate. It comes.
Is it because the worm of resentment has crawled into my heart. Oh, I think so. A new, petty voice in me says, why haven’t I been promoted? Crush that voice and crush the worm of ambition. Is it because I had too much caffeine yesterday? No doubt that, too, only one hour of decent work this morning, writing, rewriting my vague papers. One hour and then, resigned, I thought: I’d better go in even though my hacked computer is still not working, even though it was an hour before I could get my salad from the canteen (only twenty minutes now). Caffeine – but that, too is a rationalisation.
A mood arrives, better to ask, what can be made of it? How might it function? which is when I am relieved blogging exists. Mark it here, that mood. Mark it, and attest to what it brings. It is warm outside; late summer. A warm and soupy day, quite humid, waiting for storms. I would like the storms to come and experience outside me the correlate of what is within me, the worm in my breast, caffeine-tiredness. As though I lived only in the crossing point between fate and freedom, the inside and the outside. As though the chiasm between mood and world crossed at my heart, or that my heart was that crossing point.
But then I imagine myself as a plane with storm clouds above, and of a writing that would strike down from the clouds to that plane, discharging the tension, resolving the imbalance of negatively and positively charged ions (have I got that right?). Yes, that strike-writing that would like the swift mark of the calligrapher let speak the truth of my bad mood.
Lars Iyer's Blog 