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

Or remembering thinking: I used to have a favourite
dish, but now there’s a mosquito bite rising angrily between the
third and fourth knuckles of my right hand. And so, How did
that happen?
Or that you might begin by drawing a link between
the distended tummy of an undernourished child and that protuberant
bite. The mosquito here acting as a kind of intermediary
of metaphor and context. A meta-topology of pregnancy
in evidence here, also – the entry hole of the bite corresponding
to the navel; the hungry belly the anaphylactic swelling,
etc. Also, of course, the vaster, brute correspondents of famine,
pestilence, etc. – the APOCALYPSE!, dawning in huge, ebbing
clouds of dry desert horseflies, read tentatively as if a kind of
occult smoke signal or a flock of Scandinavian starlings. The
drone to drown out your pleas, perhaps. Or that single, angry,
red eye of Jupiter, repulsing everything, sick to death of the
sight of everything. Fucking hell! – I use the hardback edition
of ‘The Great Red Spot and Other Vortices’ as a makeshift
weapon whenever required.
Or those phenomenally black plumes of smoke that
suffuse the news – SUFFUSE everything. At night, I can’t even
see you.
Black smoke emanating from some genuine tragedy –
a terrible fissure in the rock. Later, a sandwich board near the
site of mourning declares: ‘The Gestation of a Cosmic Maggot!’
on one side – and simply, ‘OUT’ on the other. That easy, pub
pseudo-longhand – chalk pens with plenty of comic outline.
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