Henri Michaux (1899–1984)

The brain is not the mind.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., just shaking off the effects of ether, convinced that he had come across ‘the one great truth that underlies all human experience,’ staggered to his desk and wrote: ‘the smell of turpentine prevails throughout.’ Henri Michaux, repudiating omniscience in the aftermath of one of his mescaline trips, expressed irritation at the overmany shades of pink.

A superbly imaginative writer of preternatural psychological insight, Michaux show more initially maintains that he is separate from the drug and its effects, an objective witness of “the retinal circus,” the mad vibrating motions of cascading images. He is amused by the urge to make proclamations “about what I did not know or care.” But. Over the course of the journals both writer and reader are drawn nearer and nearer to “the insufferable winds of mind,” mental speed and rhythm accelerating beyond control. The self banished by the incessant mingling of tiny rivulets, swarmings, fractured barriers. Cats high up in the trees, the absurdity of Argentina. After inadvertantly dosing himself with six times the usual amount, he undergoes an “experiment in schizophrenia,” developing in his mind a fascination with the aberrant, the desire to shove a stranger off a great height, or to throw himself under a train just pulling in to the station. Four weeks later he is still recalibrating his mental equipment, recuperation hastened by drumming a rhythm on the wooden bedframe, and mountains. He feels himself as a fallen leaf, returning to the tree.

In a series of addenda written decades after his experience with mescaline, Michaux attempts an answer to the question of whether the effects ever really wear off. The kind of unconventional insight apparent in these pages suggests that the effects last a long strange time. show less

Michaux was a painter and a poet, so his travel journals are not really about itineraries or the procession of local charms. Instead, we get impressions, short notes, snippets of verse—

Between innocent houses and livid houses.
A slow traffic of blood clots.
And the pregnant, the police, these are the real lepers.

arranged in short sections, with headings

Suña, Friday, March 2 at dawn
5th hour
eating
17th hour
Guadalupe
the next day
a little later
somewhat later
a little later
in the show more pirogue suffering

He describes his writing as ‘an impossible bazaar, with no bread.’

He does not trust exoticism; it plays tricks on us. In Quito, the details all seem to be at work on their own without any concern for the whole. He notices most what is missing. There is no place to stand, no place to turn.

His horse seems to wonder if this is really his country, with this wind. Michaux takes ether. A bird in the jungle mimics the sound of a cork torn off a bottle of champagne. Michaux impossibly tries to keep his mind off of it.

Along the Rio Napo there are vampire bats. During the night drops of blood are falling from the hammock above. You must, whenever possible, go on to the stop ahead, no matter how silly it looks; don’t wait where you are. The tropics cannot be discussed matter-of-factly.

Michaux went to Ecuador in 1927 as ‘a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal.’ But he did write about his trip, if not in any conventional way, and there are pleasures in the reading of it. show less

"Il serait bien extraordinaire que des milliers d'événements qui surviennent chaque année résultât une harmonie parfaite. Il y en a toujours qui ne passent pas, et qu'on garde en soi, blessants. Une des choses à faire : l'exorcisme. Toute situation est dépendance et centaines de dépendances. Il serait inouï qu'il en résultât une satisfaction sans ombre ou qu'un homme pût, si actif fût-il, les combattre toutes efficacement, dans la réalité. Une des choses à faire : show more l'exorcisme. L'exorcisme, réaction en force, en attaque de bélier, est le véritable poème du prisonnier. Dans le lieu même de la souffrance et de l'idée fixe, on introduit une exaltation telle, une si magnifique violence, unies au martèlement des mots, que le mal progressivement dissous est remplacé par une boule aérienne et démoniaque - état merveilleux ! [...] Pour qui l'a compris, les poèmes du début de ce livre ne sont point précisément faits en haine de ceci, ou de cela, mais pour se délivrer d'emprises. La plupart des textes qui suivent sont en quelque sorte des exorcismes par ruse. Leur raison d'être : tenir en échec les puissances environnantes du monde hostile." Henri Michaux. show less

Really interesting collection of prose poems, poems, a play and thought pieces. Plume is an attractive character,his experiences are comic like Chaplin and nightmarish like Kafka as he is buffeted about on his travels. There's a constant sense of the absurd throughout and the Plume sections are the most accessible though I found most of it approachable bar the play 'Drama of the Constructors' which was fairly unintelligible. The 'Postface' with its musings on identity and 'self' was show more illuminating. Throughout his writing and his life he returns to the idea of living 'against' his environment, all that limits and constrains him. The reader should get a similar sense of liberation from the everyday in these pieces with their black humour and farce. show less