For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

punctuation and that peculiar syntax of the infirm that
threatens to collapse into gratuity and morbid self-pity
at any moment. As in: infirm syntax, poorly grammar.’
Then, after a PREGNANT PAUSE, he intones,
solemnly: ‘There is no undoing this process.
You cannot unread these words.’
Finally, and not without a certain tone of provocation:
‘You can, however, simply STOP READING and arrest its
development.’ At this, he snorts, and the recording is overwhelmed
by pink, fleshy noise (a sine curve as a sine wave as
a fat palm smearing).
He was, of course,
referring to this
text – the one
here, puny in your
hands, ever so
unassuming (your
stupid assump-
tions). Reading
it will summon
a tumour to the
slick walls of your
innards, spawning
there with no more
goading than the
reading of a sequence
of specific and insistent
words. Their insistence is beyond question: they will
summon a tumour. There is nothing equivocal here; success
– not necessarily your conception of success – is assured.
[…]
A bare bulb hanging from an olive-green strand of nerve – a
nerve-ending as fibre-optic light source, only more frail. A
BUTTER GLOW smeared over the upper aspect of the tumour,
oozing down its pulsating flank, pooling in those greypink
folds at its base. Light is hard to come by down here.