Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. 1504.
I first discovered Henri Michaux in the 80s, thanks again to Paul Auster’s anthology of 20th Century French Poetry. One of the truly magical writers of the last century, Michaux was blessed and cursed like Kafka with a sense of endless anxiety and dread and the comedic possibilities of both. He shared with Marianne Moore and the Magical Realists the ability to create surreal gardens with real frogs, but added serious warts on them all. He possessed the idiosyncratic and curmudgeonly qualities of E. M. Cioran, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhardt, along with the vivid, mischievous, almost mad imagination of Hieronymous Bosch. In short, no one was like him in the world of the arts, though many wanted to claim him for their own team. Especially the surrealists, whom he refused.
Michaux was a great poet, painter, aphorist and inventer of words and monsters. Born in Belgium, he wrote in French, and travelled the world, wanting, like so many before him, to break free of Western repressions. Like Rimbaud, he travelled to escape the West. But unlike Rimbaud, I think he found the East, loved it, was moved by it, embraced its art, philosophies, religions and disciplines. Like his elder contemporary, Victor Segalen, he wrote poetry, fiction and travelogues about his experiences. As far as we know, Rimbaud did not write creatively about his own travels.
Michaux also made many an internal, mystical voyage, experimented with mescaline, and studied the trip and the results .…
The Scream, by Edvard Munch. 1893
His aphorisms, as well as his poetry, can be riotously absurd:
From Slices of Knowledge:
“At the age of eight, I still dreamed of being granted plant status.”
and startling:
“Without answering, the Tibetan took out his storm-calling horn and we were thoroughly drenched under great flashes of lightning.”
and profoundly basic:
“He who hides his madman dies voiceless.”
In a smiliar vein:
“He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels.”
Michaux was a brilliant absurdist, wonderfully, comically violent …
From The Big Fight:
He grabowerates him and grabacks him to the ground;
He rads him and rabarts him to his drat;
He braddles him and lippucks him and prooks his bawdles;
He tackreds him and marmeens him
Mandles him rasp by rip and risp by rap.
And he deskinnibilizes him at the end.
But it is probably for the character of Plume that he will be best remembered. Plume, the man who couldn’t be bothered with staying awake after a train hit his house and killed his wife. A man who couldn’t be bothered with staying awake for his own last trial. Back in my university days, I wrote a truly brilliant and stunning essay about the connections and similarities between Michaux’s Plume and Camus’s Meursault. It was so brilliant and amazing it had to be lost. Oh, well. Perhaps I will always remain a stranger to my own best works, lost in the searing sun, asleep while the judge renders his or her final, absurd decision.
* All translations by David Ball, from his collection of Michaux’s work, Darkness Moves (1994).
I would just like to mention, in light of recent comments made on another Spinozablue article in which there is noted an affiliation by Tori Amos toward the French surrealist Henri Michaux, that the following event is taking place on Thursday, April 23 at 7:00 p.m.: “From the Dark Spring of Language: The Poetry and Prose of Unica Zürn”. It will be at The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York City. The announcement indicates that Ms. Zürn was acquainted with Henri Michaux, so I am presented with the possibility both of exploring Michaux and also considering Zürn as a potential addition to the “Tori Amos” subset of relations. I look forward to the event and the exhibition of Zürn’s artwork.
I also note that it looks like the stolen painting, Munch’s The Scream, shown in this essay, has been recovered, and this happened some time ago. I was very pleased to learn the other day that this painting by this major painter had been recovered.
Great that The Scream was recovered. Probably the very face of the people closest to it when they found it was stolen. Michaux, of course, was an artist himself. May do a post exclusively on that at a later date. Copyright issues, though, make it difficult at present.
The story is on line somewhere. Just type in a likely word string. It is interesting that the captured suspects did not in fact help with finding the stolen painting, and the authorities are not saying a lot about how they found the paintings (I think two were recovered).
By the way, an amusing thought that, the thieves being deterred by the painting itself. Well-envisioned!