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

ness. I conjure the very medicine to this correlative lie by plucking
fruit from fucking Eden before anyone else arrives – and
turning and spitting out the pips into ashes.
O,
I depress
this flatness with my thumb or the heel of my hand or
my boot-heel. I bring it lower and I repeal its very condition.
And it’s not at all hard to say that I’m a black hole and
that I made a black hole and around which everything turns
and into which everything gazes. Not at all. The equivalence of
everything is that absolutely nothing matters and as it is with
metaphor.
And according to the eternal tragedies of irony,
I must and am depressed similarly.
And this thing is a self-annihilating nothing
and as am I and it strikes me as entirely possible to live
in suspension – in a truly ironic mode – when flatness and the
excited and falsified geology of the correlative are paradoxically
fused, turning and turning before our eyes in a performance
of precise metaphorical equivalence where flatness describes
a strata to include my depressed symptom; the coherent normalcy
above; the depressed condition repealed and flattened by
pharmacological agents; the depression function ing as a kind
of fucking earthmover, depressing the flat with its narcissistic
and misanthropic HIGH DRAMA – only downwards and to a
flat, subterranean sheet of volcanic black glass. Or a bottomless,