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

of fecklessness and animal despair... Then a disconsolate voice
from the mouth of the mine confuses the scale and petrifies
the trees.
[...]
An elegant hand, while caressing the head, lingers
too long at the crown. A finger delicately isolating, circling,
tracing the perimeter of the orifice (an idle game at first; an
infinitesimal sentence, tactilely signed quickly on your head;
you understand that those peculiar etymological roots common
to both ‘comfort’ and ‘vestigial’ are being discussed [...]
You understand more than you can speak). A tight black dot
only apprehended as an opening and not a mole or a fleck or a
biro-written full stop when you run your finger over it: a narrow
jet of sulphur-inflected air FORTHCOMING. An inhalation
to be taken for the alleviation of depravity; A geological
vent VENTING the gas generated as a by-product of the
process of maintaining the memories of forthcoming commitments;
A wind instrumentalised by the distinct corrugations
scoring the edge of the hole – the note, pitched in wasteland,
is a kind of harmonic overtone between two inaudible voices,
whispering down the precious, velvet network of a bat’s ear
(a tear welling in the bat’s right eye [...]); A damnable draft,
its true source remaining unknown despite your increasingly
desperate search about the walls of the flat – we must submit
to wearing an extra layer at all times; A stream of compressed
air delivered from a canister, intended for photographic
purposes but employed here to dislodge satisfying fragments
of STUFF from a gap between the staves that make up the tabletop;
An emergency TRACHEOTOMY – an incision made
using a paring knife, an old fashioned paper straw jostled into
the gash – precarious, gargling breaths drawn (praying that
the wetted, sagging straw will hold up till the paramedics get