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

[…]
I’m sure you can picture as well as I those children that
seemingly licked their lips perpetually, to the point where their
lips were outlined clumsily with sore, red skin. Is that from the
acid content of your saliva? Why did you persist? Surely at the
first sign of your face eroding, you’d stop licking. A terrible,
narcissism, that – especially as evidenced in a child. Though
it is surely of interest that the child (you) would be addicted
to tasting their own lips, or the skin immediately surrounding
their lips. Perhaps the flavour improved the sorer the skin
became. I immediately think the taste would become more
metallic, but I could be wrong. Perhaps some flavour would
be revealed – somewhere between the fifth and sixth layer of
downy child’s skin – that defied analogy: an original flavour,
like Coke. Or metal. Metal-lick. Can you remember if those
children who licked their lips raw were the same children who
took a while to speak? Or that they mispronounced words? Or
that they swore shockingly and that no one – particularly the
parents – could work out where they might have heard such
appallingly coarse, biological language? Sandpapering off their
mouths with their rasping kitten tongues. Tongues for blowing
raspberries or for eking into the dint on raspberries or for
rolling as a demonstrable birth rite. Tongues for being pressed
down with the flat side of a wooden lolly stick, either for some
unknown examination or after the last bit of red slush.
[…]
Your tongue laps this way and that, gesturing, enacting
some convulsive spell to summon the body of the word while
simultaneously expunging its symbolic order. Your tongue
calling upon the word to shrug off its fears, its aspirations, its
fucking being! Your tongue the murderer. Sitting there in your