MISERABLE MIRACLE - Henri Michaux’s Mescaline Drawings & Writings. 1956. It’s always
MISERABLE MIRACLE - Henri Michaux’s Mescaline Drawings & Writings. 1956. It’s always been clear to me that literature of drug-possession, ought to belong in a category if not entwined with speculative fiction, adjacent to it. Michaux (1899-1984), a lifelong teetotaler, took up mescaline after losing his wife in an accident. The drawings and texts he created are - or should be - classed with fantastical literature. Miserable Miracle is the first of three (astonishingly) illustrated books about Michaux’s experiences. This piece may or may not relate to a section regarding browsing through a zoological text mid-hallucination in Miseable Miracle. There’s a wonderful bit about giraffes in there… This piece, about color, is pretty great too. “On one of my frontiers (I had at first called it my "Spitsberg”) an impossibly immense area of colored bulbs inundates me. Cessation. Not a single color. As if “It” no longer had the strength to be color. * * * It’s come back, it’s beginning again. The mechanism is once more running : Green! * * * Green. Did I see it? Too fugitively seen. I know that there is green, that there is going to be green, that there is an expectation of green, that there is green frantically straining toward existence, a green that couldn’t be greener. It does not exist, and there is any amount of it ( !). * * * Here it comes ! It has emerged. Completely. I am honeycombed with alveoli of green. Greens like bright dots on the back of a beetle. It is the zone in me that emits green. I am wrapped in green, immured. I end in green. (A kind of emerald green.)“ (…) "And "White” appears. Absolute white. White whiter than all whiteness. White of the advent of white. White without compromise, by exclusion, by the total eradication of non-white. White, mad, exasperated, shrieking with whiteness. Fanatical, furious, riddling the eyeball. White, atrociously electric, implacable, murderous. White in blasts of white. God of “white.” No, not a god, a howler monkey. (If only my cells don’t burst!) Cessation of white. I feel that for me, white will have something immoderate about it for a long time to come.“ - Henri Michaux, 1952, Gouache. The above is not one of pieces of art produced while Michaux was taking mescaline - or it is not, in theory, given the date on it - but it lives happily alongside the color passage from Miserable Miracle. The figures are like cartoons slammed into by speeding vehicles. (Nice large catalogue of Michaux, here.) Compare the above passage, for example, to a similar kaleidoscopic revelatory sequence from Arthur Machen’s 1904 novella, The White People, which is fantasy-horror lit: "All these are most secret secrets, and I am glad when I remember what they are, and how many wonderful languages I know, but there are some things that I call the secrets of the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of unless I am quite alone, and then I shut my eyes, and put my hands over them and whisper the word, and the Alala comes. I only do this at night in my room or in certain woods that I know, but I must not describe them, as they are secret woods. Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others–there are the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have done in other places. Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn’t understand anything about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things.” - Henri Michaux, 1961 And here, a beautiful, strange passage from Michaux. Actually the whole book is beautiful and strange. And so it was with me the last time I delivered my body to it; and the instrument that is called my mind. It was also the time of the gaping fracture, and gaping for a long time just as it may happen with a woman you have possessed but from whom you have nevertheless remaind detached, until one day, through a wave of tenderness, graver by far than love, you surrender yourself and she enters you with the swiftness of a torrent, never to leave again. And so that day was the day of the great opening. Forgetting the taudry images which as a matter of fact had disappeared, I gave up struggling and let myself be traversed by the fluid which, entering me through the furrow, seemed to be coming from the ends of the earth. .I myself was torrent, I was drowned man, I was navigation. My Hall of the Constitution, my Hall of the Ambassadors, my hall of gifts and of the interchange of gifts, where the stranger is introduced for a first inspection. - I had lost all my halls and my retainers. I was alone, tumultuously shaken like a dirty thread in an energetic wash. I shone, I was shattered, I shouted to the ends of the earth. I shivered, my shivering was a barking. I pressed forward, I rushed down, I plunged into transparency, I lived crystallinely. Sometimes a glass stairway, a stairway like a Jacob’s ladder, a stairway with more steps than I could climb in three entire lifetimes, a stairway with ten million steps, a stairway without landings, a stairway up to the sky, the maddest, most monstrous feat since the tower of Babel, rose into the absolute. Suddenly, I could not see it any longer. The stairway had vanished like the bubbles of champagne, and I continued my navigation, struggling not to roll, struggling against suctions and pullings, against infinitely small jumping things, against stretched webs, and arching claws. At times thousands of little ambulácral tentacles of a gigantic starfish fastened to me so compactly that I could not tell if I was becoming the starfish or if the starfish had become me. I shrank into myself, I made myself watertight and contracted, but everything here that contracts must promptly relax again, even the enemy dissolves like salt in water, and once more I was navigation, navigation first of all, shining with a pure white flame, responding to a thousand cascades, to foaming trenches and to gyratory gougings. What flows cannot inhabit. In 2011, choreographer Marie Chouinard made a 35-minute dance piece based on Michaux’s short book “Mouvements”, recreating his ink in flesh. I wish I’d seen it! Michaux’s ink pieces (especially the giraffe one above) remind me of modernist takes on one of my favorite things I’ve posted here: Charles Frederick Soehnee’s bewildering and glorious otherworldly watercolors. -- source link