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

like skull; your skull is more porous, somehow. Another kind,
perhaps. When I say ‘rock’, I think of something impenetrably
hard – a proverbial ‘rock’ rather than something distinctly
difficult to... Like, say, pumice. As in, ‘your pumice-like skull’,
describing the porousness of your skull – your uncanny absorbency
of, say, trivia. Or languages. Or ‘your pumice-like
skull’ describing the colour and texture of your head – like the
moon, all acne pitted and hollowed cheeks. With that texture,
pumice-like as it is, is it worth entertaining the thought of your
head applied to the Crow-crag of my heel? The memory of the
heel of a friend’s father, squashed and split in sandals, walking
before me. Gourd-like, somehow. Exoskeletal. Certainly too
late for him. No amount of scrubbing with your pumice-like
skull would remove that sarcophagus.
A family description of my head that I used to like was that it
was like a cannonball. ‘Cannonball-head’. I would take great
pride in apparently feeling nothing whatsoever whenever I
banged my head into things – the corner of the kitchen table,
for example. Now I can’t remember whether I actually felt no
pain whenever I took a blow to the head, or whether I just
feigned it to maintain the reputation. What a pathetic reputation
to maintain, you’re thinking; but actually you understand
perfectly the pride one can have in the immutability of some
part of your body. Do you or did you ever have any terms of
endearment for your head? Any other body part?
I no longer consider my head such a proud object, though it
is notably large when trying on someone else’s hat. And, when
shorn, looks pretty good.
Can you smell that? – The smell of Copydex or those particular
cyanide-scented gluesticks (Niceday? Pritt? Either way, fish and
almonds and infancy) reaching my nostrils, funnelled straight