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

ody’s. Microscopic flakes of Leonardo Da Vinci (it’s always
Da Vinci) drifting about the place, breathed in, clogging your
lungs, fluttering around the mouth of the trachea, seeding your
capillaries. Notionally, you embody Da Vinci. And if you suck
up enough, he lines your innards, a shadow inside you, an
obverse-you, pressed python-close to your arterial walls, nose
bent, eyes bulging, tongue lolling – compressed as if against a
photocopier. Again, impossible to tell: you can see absolutely
and totally nothing in there. Inside you – inside me too, sorry
– an abandoned colour darkroom. […]
Or, drugs. The flavour of some drugs: summoning the
thought that perhaps you are in fact tasting yourself, stripped
and marinated by the drug. Swallow hard. And that the effect
of the drug is, in fact, a sub-functionary of yourself; a subcutaneous
seam of affect that was incised, prepared by the drug,
sure, but was IN FACT yourself. A regurgitating process.
[…] OUROBORIC […]
Whereby you ingest yourself in order to affect yourself.
Parts of yourself you had no idea existed. For instance,
there is a purple layer of skin somewhere in the middle of the
dermic sandwich that, if licked, summons frightening and
erotic visions of […] – That’s right. And, for instance, behind
your right eye is something like an otolith, only jet black and
mercurial, an obsidian slug murmuring something about
the woods. […] Or more likely you quaffing Oromorph with
impunity. The doctor said that was fine. Which was a little
worrying, really. Because the warnings on the bottle explicitly
contradicted that. It’s morphine, after all. So you might extrapolate
that you were in some way beyond or exempt from those
universal cautions; that you had entered a different phase, an
advanced phase, an inhuman phase where you MAY AS WELL
drink as much of the stuff as you like, as much as it takes to dull