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

were going to SAY until you said it. The name ‘Greg’. ETC.
Each of these utterances echoes in such a way as to imply a
third aspect – something between your voice and the cavernous
echo. You describe it later as like double-tracking on your
voice, like a chorus addressing the audience with dramatic
irony (the audience skulking silently in the darkness, ahead
or behind; probably behind) – relating a truth CONCERN-
ING you but UNBEKNOWNST to you. This chorus gazes out
through your functionless eyes, and even goes so far as to use
your mouth to communicate – embedding their laws in that
slight trough between voice and echo. This cave, you think,
is a theatre. But I’m not an actor. At least, not in a traditional
sense. I merely suspect
I’m an actor. You whisper
something, apparent-
ly under your breath.
Something some-
thing something.
You picture your
breath before you,
hanging like prop-
er cloud in the air,
perhaps drifting
over the surface
of an audience
member silently
pacing backwards,
inches from your
face, not breathing,
not making a sound,
just observing you
– all-pupil, all-black
eyeballs swivelling maniacally in their ample sockets. Only
it’s too dark to make any of this out. Still, in absence of any
confirmatory sensation, this is all certainly true. Finally,
with a sharp inhalation, your loving hands find something;
a surface, perhaps the back wall of the cave. Simultaneously,
the acoustic changes to something more close – the deadened
air of a summer path somewhere at around about sea-level.
And underfoot it feels like moss. Or maybe industrial foam.
The SURFACE beneath your hands is something else, something
wetter. Wet moss, maybe. Or some of that slime that
musters orange on the side of an autumn tree. Clammy. Like
the way one might imagine the hands of the week-long dead.