—Translated from French by Gillian Conoley
Henri Michaux (1899–1984), known for his forays into human perception, published over thirty books of poems, narratives, essays, travelogues, journals, and drawings. Throughout the almost sixty years of his creative life, he explored the darker, shadowy realms of human consciousness while concurrently searching for an adequate tool or medium of communication—language, drawing, paint—up to the difficulty of his task. Within his work one can trace the struggle for, and his disappointment in not finding, a universal language through gesture, mark, sign, and the word.
Michaux gave himself over to adopted or induced consciousnesses that would wrest him from his own: travel, mescaline, imagined worlds full of creatures or beasts, Western and Eastern spirituality. This goal is relentlessly explored from his first book to his last, including the early My Properties (1929), the half-imaginary travel journals of A Barbarian in Asia (1933), the invented lands and mythical animals of Elsewhere (1948), and the multiple textual columns and dislocated drawings of Miserable Miracle (1956), written during Michaux’s eleven-year experiment with mescaline. A teetotaler until he was fifty-seven, Michaux had a neurologist friend who encouraged him to try the drug. Michaux was drawn to mescaline precisely for its capacity to enhance a division in consciousness he was already encountering in his art, an experience in which one part of the mind remained excruciatingly unillusioned and lucid during vision, fantasy, or hallucination.
Watchtowers on Targets (Vigies sur Cibles), the book from which this excerpt is taken, was written in 1959, two years after L’Infini Turbulent, and three years after Miserable Miracle. Considered one of Michaux’s mescaline texts, Watchtowers on Targets is unusual in his oeuvre, in that characters, beasts, and animals appear unannounced, and without the narrative link we usually see in Michaux.
Waking up, he felt a small belly in the palm of his hand. Whose belly? He didn’t want to disturb it. Reflect first. While reflecting, he fell asleep again. When he woke up, no more belly. No more anyone.
There, as a prime example, one of the many disadvantages of reflection.
*
Around the violated shelter, there was hurried activity. Everyone wanted to attend the apoplexy of the swan.
*
How sad it would be, filled with rage, with phlegm, with weakness, to suffocate, a twisted body, in the bottom of a gourd.
*
In the white of the cry, the crime betrayed itself, threw itself, terrible in the consciousness of all those living in the neighborhood. It was necessary to open the shutters, the eyes and the languishing rest of the almost finished day. The criminal himself, pierced by the cry, stops and does not make a move. The red liquid with the minute stammering, called “blood,” elsewhere blut, or blood, and even proudly sangre, the blade of the knife, the marks and the fingerprints will soon testify against he who now flees, but in whom, motionless, a vertical cathedral erected in one moment, the unexpected cry dwells and does not fade.
*
Coming from the forest, the flying larvae appear in spring. Large, larger than the largest birds, and in great numbers, they darken the sky, they darken the countryside and the villages, nestling together in the hollow of the small valleys, and wanting to nestle even more.
The counting of the monsters occurs once a year or every ninth moon. Fate is called to decide. Many perish, but enough survive so that the Haw monsters can monstrously gather again.
*
The fly is so well organized that it has been able to frequent man diligently for thousands of years, without being kicked out, or put to work. It has done all of this without interfering and without looking around stupidly like a cat pretending to be tamed. Going as far as to settle itself on the rim of one’s eyes and drawing out from the admirably salted tears the exact chloride missing from its diet. With the same ease it frequents the comforts of the biggest mammals’ eyes, no doubt dreaming of more perfect eyes yet, like saucers, sunken in rather than bulging out.
Here is the creature that every man should have studied in the slave era, instead of eagles, lions, horses, or … marshals who will never teach him what is most important: “How to live together without serving?”
*
“Me too, said Varisi, I would need sovereignty to cross countries and places, or at least to significantly settle there. But I do not have the bearing and height of the tree, I do not have the royalty and concentration of the tiger, I do not have the mass and the majesty of the mountain.
“What was the reason for this triple lack in my organism, I ask myself.”
*
Telepathy from one star to another. It’s on another planet that Christ would have been crucified! Ah! Ah! This would perhaps account for that which seemed so false, so true, so false …
*
By the hair of the soul, he held it while she waved herself in vain attempts of resistance, while she struggled in vain movements, in vain returns, in vain un-lacings, slipping despite it all, slipping almost entirely suspended, with no support above the pit of shared desire.
*
There is in me, Raha said, a worm-like movement. I would utter stupidities in wanting to situate it better and not touch it more. Many other movements, it’s still in me, holding me far from the action, far from the attention expected of me, and from which I could never become sober. Idiots who insist on inviting me. They do not know. Raha must be underground. How would he want to dig? … I have my borders near the center. I have to be quick, very quick, to ensure my confidence. One minute later and I’m abroad. But I know, I know in advance and guide myself according to its geography. Know its geography, Raha said …
*
“The mirror of the soul,” said Agrigibi, “sometimes sends me back as a dog, sometimes a crab, sometimes an ant, sometimes a spider, sometimes a weasel caught in a trap, sometimes a young hedgehog with soft prickles, sometimes a wounded mosquito with its wings torn off, in short my willingness is mocked, defeated like a creased note in a prostitute’s stocking.”
The jagged being, who then will speak in its name?
How many times does Agrigibi not meet tornadic beings! Strange? Hardly. It’s with a continual thunder of triumph that the healthy advance everywhere, brother of the lion and the steamroller. With force he throws, through his skin, through his eyes, a carousel of forks, to force, to pierce, to break weak points established tenuously themselves, which cannot bend the mechanism of the gust of wind that feels human and that is only spin, that whirlwind, that crushing, that persecution, that explosion, that ceaseless threat of explosion.
How to resist?
How to advance against the wall of trumpets?
*
So then, like a decoy greyhound, like a mad greyhound that begins to run inside itself, to run, to run in itself tirelessly, Agrigibi, helpless, animated by futile vibrations, “rushes backward,” getting lost with dizziness in the unending hallways of his being.
*
Here the hours of the Mna rule.
At the nth hour, the orders are centaurs, half thoughts, half on foot. How? Its impulses are between revolt and dream.
The complication arose with reveille. While the bugles sound, which is my camp? What is my territory? Behind me (or to the side) I begin my pursuit, object of excitement and delirium.
With such ardor I wait for the windows to burst open.
Desires and turgescence listen to the octaves climbing. The large migration of small boats has begun, however. An even larger one is being prepared. A very, very large one, in fact.
*
He who loves will be like the river. Is this, really, what he wanted? Is that right, tomorrow that drives him, tomorrow a building on the ground, tomorrow dazed, tomorrow like a crushed tomato?
*
The phases of the view are these: First, there are four gray zones where columns of a darker gray are formed and intertwined: It’s the morning of the eye, which may not coincide at all with the morning of the solar day, and can even happen at night.
Depending on the situation, there is a pleasing view, becoming more delightful little by little, or simply a small tickle can occur and will not be noticed.
Following next through flexible passages is a light that grows until the noon of the eye, after which there is a progressive darkening until the night of the eye.
The night of the eye doesn’t come every day. Some are set to have it just once a year at best. Others, although rare, have never known it at all. But if it ever comes to them, there will be an exhibition that lasts for months, and, they, clearly obliged, will come, previously hidden and drawn away, like the crippled and degraded.
Such is the eye that doesn’t follow life, such is the life that doesn’t follow the eye.
—1959