In the thick of a mood the sense of self becomes swollen but loses almost all transparency. How is this experienced? First as a colouring, as if the light of awareness has been suffused with a dark tint, nominally blue or brown, but the precise colour matters less than the fact that it is an affection of looking. If the way to loosen it is to 'get some perspective', then this is undermined since the contamination pervades, or seems to pervade the very organ of sight. Second as a heaviness, as if your ability to move has been weighed down, as if your feet have sunk into a mire, hence the metaphors of the slough or swamp. This is an affection of the will, a sense of constraint, a frustrated desire to get free. As if you keep pulling to get away but find your efforts resisted and overmatched. Then there is an intellectual pessimism in that the frame of understanding you had built up which had seemed to assign a place and boundaries to the negative, a healthy respect in effect, proves to be unable to prevail over larger frames which ironise all its certainties. Finally, the very 'I' is affected, with all its dimensions of freedom suspended it reflects in its heart only the will to this state, as if that were its choice, as if it were the very expression of its being. This is what one least wants to look at, to talk about, but it is essential to find out exactly what it is.