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

piss-stream. The ones that hook-on or are laid-in. The ones that
replace! A SLEIGHT OF HAND. Whipping out your spleen and
replacing it with a spleen-shaped mollusc with one massive
blind eye. It performs the chores that would have been performed
by your spleen, only in a more sinister fashion, perhaps
oozing some substance of its own design into your splenetic
system, gradually – over a course of decades – poisoning you.
And, like Secretariat’s massive heart, the spleen-locum-monster
is only discovered in autopsy, too late to save you but still
alive! Mature and ready to lay its own spleen-locum-monster
hatchling. And someone says it looks just like you. Someone
said that, didn’t they. And how utterly ridiculous that you could
live a whole life ignorant of something like that clinging to you
innards, staring into your blackest internal cavities with that
milky, saucer-eye. Muttering its dastardly pitter-patter to our
9th, 10th, 11th and 12th thoracic ribs. Christ knows what it’s
saying. Perhaps something frighteningly important that, if you
were swift or patient enough with your stethoscope, you might
hear, jot down, and try to decipher.
Hear that rhythm building? The cadaver’s singing, I think. Or
its skin is singing. Or its bowels are singing; cooking, distending.
I don’t think that’s singing as communication or pleasure or any
kind of rehearsal for any kind of performance; I think it’s involuntarily.
Like an Aeolian harp played by that hallucinogenic
wind we’re lost in. Or played by some unembarrassed wind secreted
from a lifetime’s worth of ossified shit (is it only the sun
that bleaches shit white?) deposited in cavities as a symptom of
a particular diet that foretold this treacherous song. Can a song
stink? – This one does, I think, and not metaphorically.
Are you familiar with the smell of any one person’s farts? To