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

[…]
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
[W]hen I speak the word ‘smoke’, for example, there
certainly seem to be ways in which I might invoke a more
material sense of the word. Inside your brain, I mean.
As a haemorrhage of sorts, is how you might like to
think of it.
If I nurse the word in my mouth and on my lips and
with my throat – if I shape it, turn it in the right fashion with
my yellowing, allergenic tongue and my beak teeth – I might
manage to send the word spinning off more ‘smoke’ than if I
merely say it hidden amongst so many other words in some
banal sentence (there’s no smoke without fire, etc.) . T h a t
suctioned, backward stream of smoke from mouth to nostril.
I want to make you aware of my mouth. To map my
mouth comprehensively using the word ‘smoke’; to make the
word lap and plot the position of every surface in there. And,
so turned, carefully release the word, and the word fanning out
into the cool evening air, in the still gulf between my mouth
and your ear, coagulating as it goes; thickening, so that when it
arrives at your ear, it’s only just. Petrifying into matter, it barely
makes it on such hardening bakelite wings. Landing ominous
as a fat black beetle on your earlobe, just outside your vision
– its surprising weight understood as an earring. From there
it works its way in, dowsing lazily with its antennae. Then
purposeful. The word has been fashioned by me to fit perfectly
inside your convoluted ear – snugly: it’s a tailored word – every
surface of its ever-stouter body correlating with every surface
of your diminishing inner-ear – prodding, caressing purposefully,
in the way that one might communicate with the blessed
deaf-blind – the shape of my mouth mentioned; instructions
for the re-formation of the word ‘smoke’, which then convulses
up to your brain, then swerves left and down into your gorgeous