Altogether too much of life is mood.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat
Too true. But what is mood? A psychosomatic weather system measurable by internal barometer, a mood can lift the heart and facial muscles, lightening and enlivening subtle internal energetics and brightening the visual display arrayed before one… or conspire with gravity and cloud cover to drag the body down and tinge the world with a gray valence of doom.
***
(Some lines of Thomas Hardy’s come to mind:
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….)
***
Mood, “a conscious state of mind or predominant emotion,” like many common monosyllables, has taken the same form in English since before the Norman Invasion, and before that, in its Old English form with a long o, mōd, it was defined as a more specific kind of state—“heart, frame of mind, spirit”—with a certain energy and emotion—“courage, arrogance, pride”—and associated with power, violence, and anger. Further back in history, mood/mōd was the Proto-Germanic moda: mind, courage, intention.
Moods can also be modes of power’s expression, however muted. On a return flight, I read 120 pages straight of Lisa Robertson’s vibrating new book, The Baudelaire Fractal (pausing only to pencil in marks of admiration) about Hazel Brown, a young woman in Paris who dreams of being a writer. Some sentences narrating her dawning realization that she can’t both inhabit beauty and express it—at least in the traditional forms canonical literary and art history have bestowed on us—casts moods in this way: “The man-poets scorned what they desired; their sadistic money was such that the object scorned was endowed with the shimmer of sex. How radiant we were in our gorgeous outfits and our bad moods!” (82). This powerful form of submission, however, must be subverted, though the longing for beauty is strong…
In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett tells us emotions are motivational states, which harkens back to the etymological link between mood and intention: emotions prepare the body for motion, for action based on the brain’s predictions of what will be needed in the next moment, which come from its rapid reading of context and comparing this with previous experience.
A mood, then, is a state of heart-mind that is the ground of intent, will, potential for action, as the phrase “in the mood,” originating circa 1580, conveys. At this time it also became the grammatical term for the way a verb expresses its relationship to action: “distinction of form or a particular set of inflectional forms of a verb to express whether the action or state it denotes is conceived as fact or in some other manner (such as command, possibility, or wish).” But this second sense was a conflation of mood with mode, which meant something closer to manner or form or expression. (Check out my post on the modal auxiliary, should.)
This conflation of a fired-up heart-mind state with the grammatical and musical mode or manner of expression may be why mood, now, has a vagueness to it. We say with some mystification we’re “in a good mood” or “in a bad mood” and that we sometimes experience “mood swings” characterized by light or darkness.
Sometimes one’s mood can shift as rapidly and seemingly without reason as wind over water. But we’re not powerless, though the darkness can seem to have weight and the power to engulf all we see in the gray tones of negativity.
Feldman Barrett offers guidance in dispelling a bad mood: home in on its origins and finer grains. If a mood is generalized feeling, a spell of ennui or tickle of irritability, it vanishes with the application of focus and analysis. She refers to this tool as emotional granularity. Ask yourself when you started feeling irritable; what was the trigger? Bore into the irritability itself. What are its contours? Is it really resentment, ambivalence or anger, or is there a shadow of shame? Emotional granularity can help us deconstruct the seeming solidity of a mood, revealing its ramparts to be repeated thoughts layering interpretations and self-referential narratives. Add to these acts of analysis embodied immediacy, in Bruce Tift’s phrase, by tuning in to the sensations of the affect—a tensed brow, contracted shoulders, or tight chest, maybe. “Affect,” says Feldman Barrett, “transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you” (188). So use emotional granularity and embodied immediacy to seize some control over affect, and vaporize that bad mood.
She also points out, wisely, that
it’s tricky to distinguish discomfort and suffering in the moment. Are you feeling irritated or just having caffeine withdrawal? If you are a woman, you probably have ambiguous physical symptoms related to your menstrual cycle or during menopause, and you may categorize the sensations as having emotional meaning when they do not. (188)
True, but in our patriarchal culture, women have also been conditioned to deny, suppress, and involute our anger, which itself can cause physical symptoms, so it’s important, too, to consider the context of the mood.
As Hazel Brown, in The Baudelaire Fractal, matures, she finds a way to hold both agency and beauty by considering context. In the midst of a diatribe against the conventional dynamics of desire and beauty in our culture (he who desires has the language and agency; beauty is mute and possessed; this is “the formal sexuality of lyric” (83)) she asks, what of a girl’s desire and a girl’s desire to express? Her answer returns to the root of mood:
I did not want to give up on beauty altogether, so gently I set it to the side, and with it the philosophical potency and freedom of the bad mood. Certainly I would return to beauty, I would return to the bad mood. I would arrive at anger. (83)
Quotes are from:
Adler, Renata, Speedboat, New York: The New York Review of Books, 1971.
Hardy, Thomas, “Neutral Tones,” 1867.
mood: Merriam-Webster and Online Etymology Dictionary.
Robertson, Lisa, The Baudelaire Fractal, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020.
Feldman Barrett, Lisa, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Tift, Bruce, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Boulder: Sounds True, 2015.