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

tating in mid-air – levitated by an off screen
magician (initiate of chaos) – as a gorgeous,
portentous burlesque of your fucking desktop.
1763You
carefully, quietly describe an alternative
kind of exchange: value being relative to
weight, to girth, height, wingspan, etc. – the
characteristics of material provenance being
shifted back towards some sort of fundamental
taxonomic schema where – truthfully, you
say – there is finally some sort of decency in
evidence. A democracy of objects based, not
upon their marketability, but upon a heady
combination of their volumetric aspect –
concerning their gravitational faculty (the
sun superseding mercury, for example; the
supermassive black hole tucked beneath and
beside Orion’s belt buckle superseding every
other item in the galaxy, for example) – and
their conceptual sphere of influence. Spheres
BOTH, you say – the spheroid a consequence
of an object’s gravitational lure upon itself,
its reflexive attraction. A kind of narcissistic
physics. Black holes forming as a consequence
of a superabundance of egotism, the
black hole’s self-love, it’s penetrative gaze being
gamely accommodated by its own gaping
and amply lubricated sockets; the result being
a perpetual bind of penetration and reception
– a field of movement, of narcissistic
gravitational heft so terrifically powerful that
nothing within its a field of influence can escape.
Hence, a deep, deep, deep melancholy