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

nally, the myriad knotted bodies of a nest
of polygonal, computer-generated snakes.
Or perhaps tapeworms. So, no hissing, no
perceptible movement, just wet muteness.
Mute and blind and deaf. Orally fixated, of
course. A devouring muteness. Here, in the
sacrosanct form of a reliquary, rendered in
smoothed brass. Brass buffed by the tender
touches of countless passing apologists to a
high, white-gold gleam. Fading to a Bruise-
Black (or Mars Black, or Lamp Black, or Ivory
Black, or maybe Paynes Grey, or Charcoal
Grey; perhaps the Parylene Black of Piano
Black) in the folds, the deep creases. Dumb
dark thoughts down there. A catalogue of
phrenological superstition: the most groped
areas being the seeming cerebellum and the
frontal lobe, roughly. All of this, spotlit in the
apse of a temple somewhere deep in the colonic
catacombs of Paris.
The year two I can think of nothing heavier than a human
thousandbrain, really. A human brain on a marble slab.
Or a human brain dawdling on an anvil before
a furnace. Gravity and the distinct lack
of a skull describing its slumped immensity.
Slimed, as if freshly birthed through a gaping
trepanation bordered with amniotic marmalade.
Or emerging instantaneously through a
trapdoor on the stage from some primordial
mire below. Hoving into view through a dissipating
cloud of theatrical smoke.
0 ADThe
relics of a system of capital that now