Passing Acquaintances 1
A Shiver in the Workshop of the Brain
Henri Michaux
First encounters with Henri Michaux – especially for Americans, who aren’t used to writers like him – tend to produce befuddlement. Whatever is he going on about ? No narrative arc, no discernable forms, none of the healthy jive of someone trying to put one over on you for the sake of their career. Pure observation under apparently difficult or even wretched conditions. He comes across as the love child of perennial loser Tom Waits and Busby Berkeley on amphetamines. Michaux gets better as you get older. You realize how accurate he is.
Michaux – “hardly a painter, hardly even a writer,” according to John Ashbery – is also the man whose work is “without equal in the literature of our time” in Jorge Luis Borges’ words. Conundrums galore.
Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium in 1899. He’s an unusual child, anemic, otherworldly, hates food and is prone to “motionless dreams.” He is instead obsessed by language, art, religion – and insects – all of which provide a way out of ‘the misery of daily life.’ As a teenager he briefly considers the priesthood. A Barbarian in Asia, probably his best known work in English, has more than one riff on his country’s stifling confines. Before turning thirty he had traveled to North and South America, North Africa, Turkey, Italy.
“I always wanted to be a sailor when I was young,” he writes, “I tried it for a while, but I simply didn’t have the necessary physical strength. I had always thought I didn’t want to write, either. C’est excellent, il faut se tromper un peu.“ (It’s fine, you have to screw up a bit.)
Laid up with a heart condition in the early Twenties, he reads Lautremont and realizes with language, anything is possible. He doesn’t have to depict the external world at all. He moves to Paris and makes contact with writers and publishing houses.
He continues to write and travel, and over the course of a dozen years publishes the books – My Properties, Darkness Moves and Plume among them (in the first he has sex with a fly) – which make his reputation. From the outset Michaux’s writing focuses on what might be called the trials of consciousness – or as he titles a later book The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones. All of it “invented from my nerves.” You can understand his being a hard sell in get-up-early-and-get-at-it America. (Tell an American, Your thinking is a banal cliché, and expect to be met with howls of incomprehension and derision. How dare you. )
Under the low ceiling of my little bedroom is my night, a deep abyss.
Constantly hurled down to a depth of thousands of feet, with a gulf several times that big below me, I hang on to the rough spots with the greatest difficulty, dead tired, mechanically, helplessly, between disgust and perseverance...
(Darkness Moves, 1935)
Michaux began painting in the mid-1930s, “Partly as a result of a Klee show I saw, partly because of my trip to the Orient. I once asked a prostitute for directions in Osaka and she did a lovely drawing to show me.” He is tempted by music as well.
Whereas poetry attempts “to express some non-logical truth,“ he says, “Painting is different―there is no question of truth. I make rhythms in paintings just as I would dance. This is not a vérité.”
In 1954, after initial hesitations, Michaux accepts the invitation of friends to experiment with mescaline. Seeking to isolate himself and minimize random interference, Michaux checks into a hospital for the duration. Mescaline provides a direct route to the source of his lifelong preoccupations, as well as a real test of his psyche.
“I had come in full of confidence. That day, my nerves were churned, shaken, sabotaged, thrown into convulsions. They were caressed, then in the next second, ripped out. Mescaline wanted my total compliance.”
He writes and draws throughout the long trips, producing manuscripts where the writing is drawing and the drawing a kind of asemic script. Words seemed to bash him over the head. “ ‘Martyrsingably’ for example would come in again and again, full of meaning for me and I couldn’t get rid of it.”
Henri Michaux’s work is indelibly marked by the Christian tradition – hard to imagine it not being so. My King is a good example – Michaux’s shambling narrator tries desperately to get God to move out of his small room, picks a fight with him and gives up, goes to court with the King as his lawyer. The influence of mystics East and West is inevitable. Still, it’s impossible to read My King with a straight face. I ended up on the floor last night, cracking up at his antics. (“Fantastical figures, incongruously combined.”) Not an experience one associates with St John of the Cross or Dostoievsky.
“Hardly a painter, hardly even a writer,” says Ashbery, “But a conscience – the most sensitive subject yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living.”
Michaux is the eternal amateur, not a dilletante but perhaps the amateur – everything he does, painting and writing, is motivated by a boundless curiosity and the desire to find out what will happen if he tries this. He was tempted by music but put off by the rigorous requirements for mastering an instrument. He would have been a sensational flop. Instead, he’s become a kind of secular saint in a world denuded of belief – in itself. Everything he wrote functions as an act of conscience whose terms are not sin and redemption but awareness.
His work never develops, and yet, without being easily separable into those periods so beloved of academics, it delivers a conscientious lived reality novels hundreds of pages long do not. Like a good acid trip or a night of serious drinking, it has its peaks and vallies, but, like they say about drummers, listen to one of his phrases blindfolded and you know it’s him. Someone should write an essay investigating the parallel biographies of Henri Michaux and Benoît Mandelbrot.
After exposure to his work, especially the ludicrously dated, low-tech film he made with Sandoz in the ’60s, drugs are beside the point. During a brief morning stroll for a ‘confinement cigarette’ in the placid suburbs, the plants and bushes overtopping the discrete garden walls appear to be malveillant, menacing, intriguing, full of eyes, they’re staring at me as do the black road workers who are the guardians of another world. Ezra Pound said, Make it new. Michaux made it singular and strange and very, very weird, in all the best senses of the word. Nov 10, 2o2o
Sources and sites : Darkness Moves (University of California Press, 1997) David Ball editor and translator Henri Michaux & Claude Cahun :
https://lapetitemelancolie.net/2012/02/10/claude-cahun-henri-michaux-photographies-et-correspondance/
Images du monde visionaire, Henri Michaux 1964
https://cantankerousmoustache.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-king-by-henri-michaux.html
We met place Furstenberg contemplating the demise of a pawlonia.
Could you / would you care for a session at a polyglot toastmasters session in the 15th?