I will always associate the word ‘malaise’ with Mark Fisher, as I do with ‘disavowal.’
There’s a certain grief in blurred experience; experience limited to the confines of labels and the boundaries of language, the filter of capitalism we live through and the knowing that responsibility is easier passed on than assigned onto oneself. The perpetuality of this blur seems to loosen in pressure with mist. Maybe because the visually attested blurriness is representative of that which is felt within.
We dull it down, so far down, until discomfort is levelled with comfort. The nagging doesn’t surrender; it’s that you got an education in numbing the tension to the volume of complacency. I for one, am a capitalism baby. Not that I am for it, no, but when the dice roll, so that the game can start, they’re loaded, and I know it. The florescent skyline pulls on the inside of my hair follicles like insincere acupuncture–trained to see beauty in the apparent dis-regulation of melatonin and evolutionary etched bio-markers. Both cheeks sharing the same, sweaty bum.
It’s on dim and hazy nights like this–that pass on the forecast as rain–where you can smell the density of dust, and think it’s fresh. The fuzziness functions to caresses a certain visual stimulus, that signals a personified ‘malaise’ (the blurriness from earlier), in it’s sense of perceived unclarity and disturbance. Though this kind of mal-haze, of fog, subverts the etymology of it's ideological counterpart. Fog appears with a satisfying quality, an unmasking, a moodiness that is revoked of judgment and is collateral to the formation of clouds. It is a density that separates 'what is' with 'what is seen', that is, the density of water, the chemistry of your insides comforted with the encounter of itself. In the grief of this knowing, that access to certain experiences as consciousness grounded to the pull of a massive rock, but further constipated by capitalism's .... excretion, the simple experience of fog feels really good. It paradoxically authorises an efficacy in seen-ness.
the denominator or water.
The presentation of haze in an urban expanse, on the level of philosophical phenomenology, seemingly explores a natural system "taking over" man-made ones, presenting a perceived interruption or fragility of the program, and that kind of intervention strokes the intuitive, guttural core of ease. The water inside you and in the ‘thick’ communicate in their ancient code. Modern lights mediate the conversation in a way family can’t. And there I wonder, is the beauty of haze the haze itself, or the reflection of light through it? It passes. I’m cocooned nonetheless, possessing me with a friction. My dad would call it ugly weather. Maybe I’ve found a comfort in the unsettling and the disturbed, especially when it’s as justified as the uncertainty of weather–one can always be certain of that. Maybe that's why I see comfort in the suffocating ethereality of smoke from a machine at a club.