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

chamber of my real, subterranean brain. – Not a chamber but a
soft, wet rock: no room. [...] Imagining all of the air in a given
space – your bedroom, for example; – replaced instantneously
with concrete. All the air, all the apparent space in the world
exchanged in a blink for concrete. Again: everything full, close,
cold, dead, dark. INSTANT DEATH. That’s how I’d like to go:
all the way from sensation, grounded in the comprehension
of greater or lesser distances between myself and everything
else – to abject insensation. Nothing but infinite, motionless
density. All those gaps in the cosmos; those unaccounted-for
spaces between everything and everything else – the infinitesimal
rifts between quarks; the vast drifting nothings between
galaxies; all of that suddenly filled-in with concrete.
[...]
[T]he shed skin of the word has drifted up to form
a lens over your eyes. Your ears are clogged with same;
ambient sound is translated, filtered. Compressed, chorused,
distorted, bit-crushed, reverbed, etc. – the euphoric acoustics
of a CATHEDRAL OF THE FUTURE. –And everything looks
too sharp, too crisp, too juicy. A lucidity to the visual world
that was not there before; everything is now too close, too
vivid, as if pressed against your eye – as if circumventing the
whole eye thing and lunging straight at the brain, groping and
pummelling its surface with unmediated bluntness. Everything
is gratuitously PRESENT. Sound describes itself excessively –
too many adjectives, superlatives – a thesaural superabundance
of descriptions, analogues – all the while osscillating wildly
between gut-wrenching sub-bass and piercing treble. Parenthetical
confusion! Grammatical and syntactical confusion,
also! – What the fuck to do with a semicolon? When to use
brackets, and when to use dashes? – In the sensory confusion,
none of this matters, and the response to use everything with