Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 (University of California Press, 1997)«Henri Michaux (1899-1984) defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "genius," and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "is without equal in the literature of our time." This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.»
«David Ball has assembled and translated a stunning selection of Michaux's works... We feel the fears, hysteria, and humor, and respond to the beauty and awe.» — Elizabeth T. Gray
«Many of the works in this anthology are prose poems, but this is essentially a collection of verse, one that requires continual reading the way a bag of peanuts requires continual eating. Observations on human interactions, as well as the life of the mind, abound.» - Francisca Goldsmith
«From the Introduction: "Henri Michaux died in 1984 at the age of eighty-five. He was the author of more than thirty books of poems, prose poems, narratives, essays, journals, and drawings. His place in world literature and art was secure, but difficult to define. Michaux stood alone.
When people who know his work try to relate Michaux to some movement or tradition, they don't come up with schools of poets, but with a range of great individual figures in literature and art: Kafka, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Swift, Paul Klee, Rabalais... His strangeness has occasionally led him to be classified with the Surrealists (some critics feel they have to put him somewhere), but he never used their techniques: no cadavre exquis, no free associations, no abstractly formulated attempt to destroy tradition and logic. A sentence like Breton's 'The color of fabulous salvations darkens even the slightest death-rattle: a calm of relative sighs' could never have been written by Michaux, who tries to render his dangerous, magical world as clearly and concretely as possible. Whether in poetry, prose, India ink, or paint, his weird visions are not the result of some theory about the nature of art: they are messages from his inner space. In a sense he inhabits the realm the Surrealists merely longed for.
No group, no label for him. John Ashbery defined him as 'hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience - the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living.' Wild and druggy enough to be venerated in the sixties by a poet like Allen Ginsberg (he called Michaux "master" and "genius"), and by the French rap star MC Solaar in the nineties, an inventor of fictions brilliant enough to be admired by Jorge Luis Borges ("his work is without equal in the literature of our time"), who was Henri Michaux? This fascinating anthology is the perfect place to start looking for an answer.»
«[Michaux] came ashore while his ship was in Piraeus, just in order to have a look at the Acropolis. And he told me on that occasion: 'You know, my dear, a man who has only one reader is not a writer. A man who has two readers is not a writer, either. But a man who has three readers' - and he pronounced "three readers" as though they were three million - 'that man is really a writer'.» - George Seferis
Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle, Translated by Louise VareseIntroduction by Octavio Paz (NYRB Classics, 2002)
«This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.»
«Anhedonic as ever, Michaux began his hallucinogenic experiments in anything but the spirit of what we now call 'recreational.' He was searching for the foreign territory within himself. And though he stated that 'a hand two hundred times more agile than the human hand would not be up to the task of following the speeding course of the inexhaustible spectacle' he discovered, it looks to me like he not only found that vast and endlessly transforming landscape, but claimed it... They don't evoke apparitions, but rather their opposite: vision ground down to its molecules.»— Barry Schwabsky
«Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.» — André Gide
«These psychedelic texts are among Michaux's most carefully crafted writings. He emerges as one of the most extraordinary voices of our (post)modernity, a true technician of the sacred and perhaps the century's most genuine Surrealist. — Richard Sieburth
«In Miserable Miracle, Henri Michaux describes his almost clinical experiments with mescaline (much as Aldous Huxley did in his drug-books). A visual artist, poet, and writer, he describes himself as "more the water-drinking type" than someone who casually or frequently indulges in any sort of intoxicants. But he's willing to explore, and he begins with the explanation:
This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored.
What is presented here is, as he admits, a text refashioned out of the original manuscript, written - or scribbled and drawn - while under the influence, "more tangible than legible." Numerous drawings and several of the written pages are, fortunately, reproduced, and they are among the most impressive things in the book, suggesting more than the almost neutral printed words can how his body and mind were affected.
The text offers descriptions of his drugged state, with marginal explanatory annotations. There are some interesting observations: the dominance of colour, for example, and with it a loss of sound: "Sensibility on one side calls for insensibility on the other" (though Michaux does not wonder whether it is because he is a visual artist (rather than, say, a musician) that this is his experience).
The drug is a powerful thing, but he is more disturbed by it than pleased, especially its unforgiving purity. In his case, he finds that the effects are "so wholly visual that they are vehicles of the purely mental, of the abstract" - which isn't his cup of tea at all. He condemns mescaline - though note that others might not find these to be faults:
Mescaline diminishes the imagination. It castrates, desensualizes the image. It makes images that are a hundred percent pure. Laboratory experiments.
As the reader may have guessed, Michaux finds: "this is not the drug for me." (The lingering effects also don't help.) Michaux wants something else: "My drug is myself, which Mescaline banishes."
After the mescaline experiments, Michaux describes trying hashish - for comparative purposes, of course. It's an effective contrast. Nevertheless, he tries mescaline again, though this time: "through an error of calculation I swallowed six times what is for me a sufficient dose." The megadose leads, along with some of the expected results, to unexpected ones as well. For one: "the miserable becomes the appalling miracle".
The experience is even more unsettling, and fairly well conveyed. Additional remarks, and the Addenda (from 1966-71) add to overall picture. Michaux moves along fairly quickly, not lingering tiresomely over some of these experiences - and conveying some of the frenzy and intensity he was confronted with. Again: the pictures (vibrating, often vaginal ink drawings) and the reproduced scrawled notes help give a very good idea of what he is talking about.
As far as drug-flights-of-fancy go, Michaux's book is fairly successful. Varied, not too long, sensibly critical (or at least suspicious), he's a decent guide (though that six-times-over dose is highly questionable). But here, as elsewhere, he's still more impressive as a visual artist than writer." - The Complete Review
Read it at: www.lycaeum.org/books/books/miserablemiracle/miserablemiracle.html
Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1986)«Henri Michaux was barely thirty when he travelled to Southern and Eastern Asia. Still, he was no wild-eyed tourist, and though he designates himself a barbarian in Asia he felt no qualms in airing his opinions. The book covers a wide swathe of Asia - India, the Himalayas, southern India, Ceylon, Malaya (from Malaysia to Bali), China, and Japan. French Indo-China is notably (and curiously) avoided.
In staccato style Michaux notes his impressions: there are long sections of paragraphs, each only a line in length. Elsewhere he digresses and discourses in a bit more detail. His eye and tongue are sharp. He does not insist on Western superiority, but acknowledges that through his Western eyes much seems unusual, odd, and inexplicable. The impression is often not a favourable one. Michaux's lens is certainly not rosily tinted.
Generalizations abound. Some are ridiculous, many are trenchant. The quick sequence of statements and claims makes for a powerful effect.
It is difficult to describe what Michaux does. Here a vaguely illustrative example, about the Japanese:
A people, in fact, devoid of wisdom, of simplicity and of depth, over-serious, though fond of toys and novelties, not easily amused, ambitious, superficial and obviously doomed to our evils and our civilization.
And over and over there are these penetrating glimpses of these foreign lands. It adds up convincingly, making for a remarkable though sometimes disturbing book.
Even Michaux seems to have understood that what he wrote was far from politically correct: he revised the book (in particular the part on Japan). The New Directions edition fortunately preserves the earlier (though already somewhat revised) version.
There is a wealth of material here. Much of it is unkind, but much is surprisingly astute and still valid. Strongly recommended - though natives of these lands might take offense.» - The Complete Review
Henri Michaux, Tent Posts (Green Integer, 1997 )«Tent Posts is an unusual little volume. Translator Lynn Hoggard calls the contents "poetic prose musings", which is as good a description as any. They are also: aphorisms, notes, instructions, stories.
The book is divided into five sections. The pieces themselves are generally only a few lines long, though they vary in length, up to a page or so.
Written by a man who was already over seventy Michaux seeks to impart his wisdom - or at least the lessons he has learnt. He admonishes the reader, suggesting how life can and should be lived and how much that is taken for granted should - or must - be approached. A typical entry states, in its entirety:
No, no, not gain. Travel to lose. That's what you need.
The "wisdom" he offers often sounds Eastern in its approach to life, the influence of Michaux's wide and varied travels making itself heard:
Some are dumb for having been too smart. Don't rush into adaptability.
Always hold inadaptability in reserve.
Some of the thoughts clearly are those of old age, of a man who has lived through a great deal:
If you manage to sleep, it's because you've had enough of the show, the presence of the real; you can't take it any more. (...)
Sleeping away the most steadfast of your disillusionments.
Throughout the book there is also a sense of frustration with the many missteps one takes, the misunderstandings that arise, the wrong way that people have of examining their own - and others' - lives. It extends to the literary, with Michaux exasperatedly writing:
Critics examine the most recurrent words in a book and count them!
Look instead for the words the author avoided, those he was close to or unmistakably far from, alien to, or fastidious about, whereas others are not.
The poet, writer, and artist also reflects on the path he himself has taken. Writing in the second person (the familiar tu) many of the pieces are clearly also addressed at that man he sees in the mirror:
The more you succeed at writing (if you write), the further you'll be from fulfilling the pure, strong, original desire - the fundamental thing - to leave no sign.
What satisfaction would be worth that ? Writer, you do just the opposite, laboriously opposite.
A poem closes the book, a short summing up that also speaks, as both description and warning, of:
Perpetual unending changing
steady path to extinction
Tent Posts is an odd collection, dense despite its small size. Michaux's vigorous prose and compact presentation - familiar from his other works - is well-suited for these brief pieces. It is a book to linger over, and peruse piecemeal - to dip into, contemplating the varied thoughts. Readers who like E. M. Cioran (a friend and admirer of Michaux) should enjoy this volume too, though Michaux's outlook and approach differ markedly from Cioran's.
The book may not be to everyone's taste, but it is well worth a try. It lends itself to intermittent perusal, and offers a refreshingly different tone from most self-help type books. Of course, whether these are the pieces of advice and the admonitions most people will want to hear is a different question... Recommended." - The Complete Review
Henri Michaux, Toward Totality, Translated by Louise Landes Levi (Shivastan Publishing, 2006)
«Henri Michaux's birth in a small Belgian village in 1899 belied nothing of his eventual rise to prominence in international literary and artistic circles. At his death in Paris in 1984 Michaux had become not only the renowned author of exploratory hallucinogenic works, but also a painter of revolutionary cosmic scratches - calligraphic disturbances on the visual cortex rendered onto paper and canvas.
Michaux's writings rest in the realm of dreams, fantasies, and phantasm in which he not only described psychological states through image, but also through the creation of invented landscapes, personas, species, and histories that demonstrate rather than describe the human muddle. He wrote from an interior void in which quantum contradictions comfortably coexisted. As he states in the poem 'Double Life', 'I have allowed my enemy to grow within me.' The photographer Brassai, who was a close friend, described Michaux as 'the powerful and solemn voice of a driven man, at ease with himself.'
Michaux's bold experiences with mescaline and other drugs made him a champion to the Beats, but he eschewed their path as he did that of the surrealists, a movement which also deemed some claim on him. Michaux's confrontation with the Other, with the unconscious, and the perils and revelations of dislocation and disassociation rely on different approaches than either group. Perhaps it is more truthful to say the depth of his work owes more to Buddhism, Vedanta, and a gentlemanly 'Asian' restraint, than to any western literary movement. In fact, Michaux used his explorations and his mind as objects to facilitate emptying himself, just as mindfulness meditation leads one to be in the world but not of it, and to be able to observe one's ego and self from a Gnostic distance. In the western tradition one can easily compare Michaux to outsiders and visionaries such as Kafka, Vallejo, Celan, Beckett, Inoesco, Andrade, Porchia, Rilke, and even Genet and Artaud; but never Breton, Aragon, Ginsberg, or Kerouac. His work embodies the poetic act in its purifying aspects. Antonio Porchia states it aptly, 'He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.'
Michaux liked the phrase 'monastery of the mind' by which Louise Landes Levi once described his work to him. Levi's translation of Vers La Complétude (Toward Totality), a selection of Michaux works personally compiled by Levi with input from Michaux, Claudio Rugafiori, and even his archivist Franck Lebovici, intends to illuminate his role as spiritual scientist, and even perhaps as master. It's important to note that Michaux, himself, would clearly have refuted any attempt to call himself a spiritual master, and Levi, in her writings, is careful never to give him that nomer. It's an elegant image to use, however, for one who could write in the poem 'Yantra', 'where the void itself is tied / where totality is tied / where time and undivided space is tied / and the Original Egg floating on the waves of / the Formless is tied.'
Whereas the surrealists and the Beats peered into the Other through a disordering of social mores and a rebellion against authority, Michaux romanced Chaos with the determined focus of an alchemist, and through a scientific and ordered study as conscious and applied as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Rudolf Steiner, Linnaeus, or the ancient Vedic sages. He strode confidently into the unknown, experimenting with the language of the psyche and alienation as explained in the preface to his collection Exorcisms:
For those who have understood, the poems at the beginning of this book are made not in precise hatred of this, or that, but to deliver myself from bondage, to keep in check the surrounding powers of a hostile world.
Sounding the fruits of his research, in 'We Others' Michaux affirms his role as metaphysical outsider and mystical hero-explorer: 'To take the void in one's hand /- To be stripped of everything, / To sweat one's own heart / Rejected in the desert.' After the death of his wife in a tragic fire, he plunged even more deeply into personal physical suffering and psychic displacement in order to grasp what he called in the poem 'On the Street of Death' 'the Opaque'.
Metaphysics and mysticism certainly occupy a place in the surrealist and Beat philosophies, but Ginsberg's or Breton's transcendence, born from a revolutionary aggressiveness uncharacteristic of Michaux, embraced the cult of personality - and the public enthusiasms propelling it. Their transcendence, born of overflow, contrasts with Michaux's, born of attrition and extraction. Aside from the Beat stream that gave birth to Snyder, Whalen, and Alan Watts, one is hard pressed to think of any surrealist or Beat in whom ego did not lustfully blaze. Perhaps Watts is the closest to Michaux among the Beats, but then Watts virtually became more of an eastern mystic than Beat psychologist.
Michaux's apotheosis, however, was discerningly self-aware, humane, humble, practically self-denying - even Buddha-like - in its confrontation with ego and inner light. Yet Michaux never did become solely eastern in his outlook, remaining quintessentially western. Notoriously protective of his privacy, Michaux's suffering is never a re-making of self, but rather a revelation of the I Am. In 'I Am Gong' he asserts, 'I have not, in fact, become hard but striped -/I am gong and cotton and snow-like song.' And in the poem 'In Truth', much like the Buddha he utters, 'I am the good road that turns back no one.' One realizes that these declarations are not braggadocio or grand-standing, bur rather sincere and forthright assessments of his personal ethics.
Levi's loving translation gives us a Michaux certainly under-acknowledged by most other translators and critics. One notable exception is L. A. Velinsky in From the Gloom of Today to New Greatness of Man (Vantage Press, 1977) which is perhaps the most complete work in English so far to attempt to understand and explicate Michaux's complete works, and gives credence to Levi's mystic Michaux. Velinsky sums up Michaux thusly:
Where does he take us from the dust of passivity, apathy, and mediocrity? - Toward the myth of a new man, who will emerge from the cruelties, absurdities, and mediocrities of our unhappy era. He dreams about a man pure and free of all vermin, strong in heart and dream - not only in brain and body – a man in harmony with nature, the earth, the universe, and himself… which he often sums up by the expression 'the essential.'
Levi met Michaux in the mid-1970s when he was 76 years old. She arrived at his door after an invitation in response to a letter she had written him. Neighbors, a friendship developed, and she eventually shared with him decades of accumulated translations, including many of his poems. He hired her as an English teacher while encouraging her in translating René Daumal and Mirabai - both which eventually brought recognition to her skills as poet and translator. They found a mutual ground in a love of Sanskrit and Pali (Theravada Buddhist) chant. He frequently asked her at the end of a visit to sing refuge chants (chants in which the supplicant seeks refuge in the Buddha or certain precepts of Buddhism).
During this time, too, he made additional suggestions of his poems for Levi to translate, including the choice of 'Yantra', using a complete selected works in French as a model. In a sort of unofficial introduction to Toward Totality, 'How I Came to Meet and Work with Henri Michaux', that appears in the online magazine Milk [www.milkmag.com] and was solicited by Nancy Peters of City Lights, Levi states, 'I translated Michaux with Michaux in his beautiful room on Avenue Suffren. Michaux and Claudio Rugafiori accepted me and transformed my eccentricity and sensibility into a pure literary concentration.' Michaux once said of her that, 'others bring knives to the house but you bring roses.' If not actually shepherding Levi through the translations of his works, he nevertheless advised and sometimes edited them over twice-weekly conversations. Over the years she continued to rework them. Her first publication of them, three days after his death in 1984, came too late for Michaux to enjoy. He had agreed with most of Levi's selections for the book, added others, while Levi retained some of the poems he had not selected. This edition of Toward Totality includes facsimiles of some of Michaux's handwritten corrections to Levi's translations.
There are some, I suspect, who won't appreciate, and might even take issue with Levi's Michaux in Toward Totality. But Michaux would, I think, have been the first to encourage as many views of his writings as possible - with insect eyes - so to speak. This fits with his dictum, as stated in the title poem, Michaux's great paean to non-duality and masterpiece of spiritual seeking, 'A space is given / when all spaces are withdrawn'.
Michaux's hermeticism, conceived in the dissonant recognitions of being, pulled from experimentation with drugs, through adventure and traveling in alien countries, formed diagrammic sentences of wonder. He ultimately considered his experiments with drugs as a dead end, stating in Miserable Miracle, 'My drug is myself, which mescaline banishes.'
Always attracted to the eastern intuitive sciences of consciousness, in the end he seemed most illuminated within its open calm of perennial silence and it-ness - while his surfaces continued to teem with the thousand things, the rack and discontinuous engorgement of the senses, and their dissection. Michaux exemplifies what we so much lack in American poetry or refuse to celebrate, infinity's embraceable you - the contradictions of dissolution and resurrection – cosmogony liberated by mind. From the poem 'Saint':
And circulating in my cursed body, I came upon a region where parts of my self were truly rare and where in order to live it was necessary to be a saint…/ I would have had the possibility, yes! But to be backed into it, that is unbearable to me.
Michaux's work is singularly without theatrical show or excess and contains an abundance of good-natured humility, self-deprecation, humor, and common sense even when he is inventing other worlds and beings. The poems' freshness is never deliberately obfuscating. His mysteries are the mysteries of a simple man, a primitive aesthete. However, his work is hard to explicate and must be discerned, as true with many spiritual texts, by a radical and intuitive opening of mind/body/heart. Thus the translator's job may lead to some puzzles, since Michaux's writing are so deliberately imagination-bound that they work, they reveal themselves, only personally through the reader and the reader's interpretation.
Levi sensitively conveys the cloudy edges of Michaux poems - their black holes, their opening into voids. The long title poem 'Toward Totality' although more abstract that much of Michaux's work, begins 'To receive / To receive / The enchantment of receiving / secretly without end / the Impalpable to receive / BIRTHDAY OF THE ILLUMINATION.' It closes declaring 'Omniscience in all consciousnesses / perceiving the perpetual.'
Toward Totality is a lovely little book, patterned after many other Shivastan publications, and designed to specifications agreed upon years ago with Michaux for an earlier failed planned edition. Craft-printed on handmade paper in Nepal, hand sewn, limited, and numbered, it feels modest and treasure-like. However there are a few production values that are troubling - some dates appear haphazardly given, and there are too many typos, dropped letters, extra spaces, and punctuation problems – all, I imagine, complicated by being printed in Nepal. But these quibbles seem minor compared to the contents therein. The frontispiece shows Michaux at about the age of ten with a toy hoop - the future sage holding the world circle in hand. The book includes facsimiles of Michaux's own corrections to some of the translations, and some drawings from the original French edition of Miserable Miracle.
The cover of Toward Totality quotes the poem 'Short Cut Ideas' and asks, 'Will we soon bomb the angels?' The later poems, such as 'Yantra' and 'The Days, The Days, The End of Days' are, as Levi acknowledges in her afterword, visionary and magnetizing; but I think the poem 'To Act I Am Coming' from the 1950s sums up the liberating impulse behind Michaux's oeuvre:
Like a deep chant
I come
This chant holds you
This chant lifts you
This chant is animated by many streams
This chant is nourished by a calmed Niagara
This chant is entirely for you
No more tongs
No more dark shadow
No more fears
There is no more trace of them
There are no more to be had
Where there was punishment, there is wading
Where there was dispersion, there is soldering
Where there was infection there is new blood
Where there were bolts is the open ocean
The carrier ocean and the fullness of yourself
Intact, like an ivory egg.
I have bathed the face of your future." - Jeffery Beam
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