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

a click, looks up towards the ossified arm and hand and tosses
the locket at it (a funereal gesture: the locket as meaningless
as a fistful of soil, now) and it lands beuatifully, perfectly – the
chain forming a cat’s cradle of angles, with the locket hanging
pendulous just above the upturned palm.
[...]
A lesson learnt, there. Something about the meanginglessness
of the material world; the inchaote power of nature;
something about memory, family, ‘some mother’s son’, etc.;
some sort of comeuppance for deserters, the desperate; something
about the accidence of beauty – the coincidence of geometry
– the golden spiral of quicksand, sucking clockwise; how
genre functions; how incredible it is that we don’t die, in the
face of the myriad traps set by the bland hand of nature, let
alone the connivances of MAN; how God is a fickle aesthete
with a penchant for the appearance of provenance; something
mourning the use of huge soundstages, the Coldwar orchestras,
the particular economy of certain montage – the exchange of
vistas for close-ups, of open spaces for edits – the imaginative
description of infinitely thick and teeming jungle using a few
hundred square feet of props, a comprehensive rig and a crew of
craftspeople: all that STUFF. Perhaps most accutely, a message
delivered concerning the physicalism of cinema. My memory
of that scene is certainly inaccurate and though I describe it
using the idiom of cinema, that use is to be understood as
interchangeable for the way in which my heavy brain functions.
As in, an analogue that is most fluent for me. Mere concidence
that I happen to be recollecting a sequence of cinema
here. Sex would be summoned similarly. As would illness,
the weather. Those infective ‘memories’ (suspended between
parentheses to connote a ambivalence, an insufficiency in the
word) that are indexed within some particularly wet, turd-like