Slatted Light presents … “He who leaves a trace, leaves a wound”: Henri Michaux Day *

* (restored)

 

“The Dung of this Air is Something No One can Breathe”: A Personal Appreciation*

Henri Michaux happened to me in the year my mind decided it had had enough of itself. Late into my fourth year of university, the wiring in my brain — poorly patched up on the run a number of times now — blew out already overworn circuits and rendered me pretty much ready for the junk yard. In between classes I had no choice but to keep attending, I suddenly found myself caught up in that tedious treadmill where strict pill regimens, intense pep talks and a general sense of personal and professional bafflement over your failure to improve all collide in a condition you get to call clinical depression. In some ways, I was lucky. I was never a happy kid at any point — the line of work I settled on for a sixth grade yearbook was ‘anything at all’ not thinking I was fit for much — but I’d managed to avoid becoming diagnosable until I was twenty-one. Up to this point, as Michaux writes, “There was pressure (tightening screws)” (‘Afterword’, 77) but no repercussions so large (as yet) that they couldn’t be limpingly absorbed. Now that the judgment of ‘SOMETHING WRONG’ had officially arrived from outside, it was a bitter relief in one way, a kind of pyrrhic confirmation of what I’d been telling myself for years: namely, that existence was above all a problem and I was a boringly fucked example of that premise. [1] But to be delivered the diagnosis was also the most violent blow because now it forced me to face the idea that this problem needed to be fixed. [2] It also put the proposition to me that, if it couldn’t be fixed, I was going to have to cope with a possible sixty more years of incapable life.

Months of incapacitation and mental torture followed. Suicide seemed like the best option but I was unqualified for everything, that most of all. [3] In the end, no one could find any really good reason for my depression. No traumatic deaths, no early horror in my home life, no real trouble at school where I floated about in an indifferent position, both accepted enough and unobtrusive enough not to be friendless or hated. So there was no smoking gun to be discovered, though there were plenty of Hitchcockian MacGuffins to keep my therapy sessions going. Sexuality was one — meeting and fucking and loving people being a vexed issue for me, mainly because it hardly ever happens. My therapist tugged at this thread, suggested I had problems with being gay. This was a repellent idea to me: I had better reasons to hate myself than over the fact I happened to like men. As I told him wearily, “Not being able to get or keep a date doesn’t mean I’m a self-hating homosexual, just a lonely one.” Another was my bookishness. “You intellualise everything,” my therapist charged, fairly. “You don’t know how to stop thinking sometimes and just let yourself live. Do you think people who go fishing are pondering the agony of the fish? No, they’re too busy catching them” “I was never any good at fishing,” I said back, which I thought explained everything about my relationship with the reality I just had to let myself live in. Eventually, I decided that what my dogged self-sickness came down to was no more than an implacable awareness of just how defectively put together this thing I was stuck with calling ‘me’ really was. I was so dysfunctional I didn’t even feel like a person at all. Michaux phrases it nicely: “There is no self. ME is only a position in equilibrium”. (77) I could not stop seeing this: a contradiction, for sure, that ‘I’ could not stop seeing myself as nothing, a not-self, a point in an equilibrium overwhelmed by everything else. But there it was: I was nothing and yet I refused to go away. Indeed, as Michaux goes on, “Each tendency in me had its own will, as each thought, as soon as it appears and is organized, has its own will” (77). So I was both a baffling absence and an intractable presence. Mind you, I act like this all passed at some point. I should say that none of this has gone away. All forecasts say it never will. As Michaux writes: “In an anthill, there is never any question of eagles”. (‘Everybody’s Little Problems’, 32) Still, my therapist liked to talk about eagles. He would tell me that we all have a sense of essential self-worth as he pensively tapped his pen on the arm of his chair and he would insist I needed to accept it and build on it. This went against every post-structuralist bone in my body. Even if this were granted, all I could think was that if a sense of self-worth could be ‘essential’, so also could a diseased ailing sense of self — pulsating right there at the core of me, amorphous and immovable. In high school, I used to liken my depressiveness to a tumour so integrated into my brain that to slice it out would take all the vital tissue too. Now it got worse and I started to understand that maybe the tumour was actually me all along, constitutive not invasive, growing on blank brain cells that at one time could have possibly generated a different and better self. The therapist said such thinking was counterproductive. I told him that was the point.

If you’re feeling a little sorry for my therapist, you’re right to. I was an unbudgeable and somewhat hostile patient. Not because I thought I had all the answers — I don’t think I reached that level of arrogance thankfully — but mainly because the answerlessness itself had become too obvious for me to ignore and too important not to aggressively defend. It was amidst all this that one night I happened to watch Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. This hallucinogenic ride through the dark night of the American West opens with a quotation from our man, Michaux. In a slightly antiquated white print set to a black backing, the poetic words came up: “It is preferable not to travel with a dead man”. Seeing as that felt exactly like what I was doing — travelling with a dead man — it was a lingering, luminous line. I decided to hunt the guy down. I did and almost immediately I fell in love. Browsing an anthology of his poems in English, I came across a short, devastating passage that seemed to capture my situation in every respect:

Standing in the middle of a perfectly empty arena, the suspect is questioned. Through magic.
—-In deep silence, but powerfully for him, the question resounds.
—-Reverberating through the rows of seats, it bounces off, returns, falls back and comes down on his head like a city collapsing in ruins.
—-Under those waves pressing him, comparable only to successive catastrophes, he loses all resistance and confesses to his crime. It is impossible for him not to.
—-Now a miserable, deafened wreck, with an aching, ringing head and the sensation of having ten thousand accusers, he leaves the arena, where the most absolute silence has reigned unbroken.

(‘In the Land of Magic’, 124)

It was like he’d shone a light inside my head, set the predicament out cold. I was doing an injustice to Michaux, of course: reading him way too personally. Still, that empty arena seemed to prefigure the absent arrangement of all the things I’d built my life up around, the unoccupied imperial seats (ideals, desires, hopes) that had now become my accusers. That confession appeared to anticipate the way I would plead over and over to myself — no, not just to myself, to the whole space-time nexus that bound my life — that I was a mess, a disgrace, a shameful stain. That magic question — I could almost hear it — that unwritten accusation would be: “how is it you live and by what right?” All said to a wider silence, a social silence, which would not ever allow such a question to be asked too openly. There is a lot of talk these days about a culture of death in Western nations (terminating foetuses being the litmus test of our apparent postmodern disaffection with everything) but even now the right to life is divided into innumerable categories of worthiness, and nobody really asks anyone else what right they have to exist in balance against the others, not overtly, not constantly. If we did ask that question honestly and urgently, we might have to face up to the lack of a creditable answer from any one of us — and be moved to do better. Instead, people suffer this question in ways they usually don’t fully understand (‘through magic’) and some implode surreptitiously and others explode dramatically and even more live on defeatedly — ‘leave the arena’ decimated, as it were — and still the silence reigns unbroken. The civic image of a city collapsing on the protagonist’s head seems to suggest what might happen if we all really started interrogating one another on this count. That same image also suggests what is already happening individual wreck by individual wreck. Michaux knows and he tells: Apocalypse is all too easy; it does not even need an open acknowledgement, just a quiet irresistible acquiescence, an inevitable succession of lone cave-ins.

I read on. Existential agonies found their outlet in Michaux — only to come home through him even harder. In one poem, he meets a monster on a set of stairs: “You could see he was vile immediately. But in what way — that was not at all certain. He seemed to carry lakes on his undefined mass, tiny lakes, or were they eyelids, enormous eyelids?” (“The Monster on the Stairs”, 92). An obvious vileness that could not be determined, an accumulation of minute oases that were also a monstrous surveillance: I could see myself in this creature. So too could Michaux who perceives in that which he encounters the things he is only inches away from becoming. In another piece, he talks of “Strange wounds, suffering on blank walls, that you come upon with embarrassment and nausea — (“In the Land of Magic “, 125) I don’t think I’d read a better way of describing my depression, bizarre lesions on the blank walls of reality itself, stomach-turning and humiliating, though the implications of the poem were much broader than any cooked-up classification: they were a stroll through the nightmare of being more generally. I was stunned. And even more depressed. Here was a man who knew it all and yet — as I read into his biography — still lived to eighty-five, despite crippling illness. I wondered (still wonder) if that was even possible. To see self and world for what it is in such nauseating honesty and to still go on, to do so poetically. The very idea of Michaux’s long life was exquisite despair for me and one of the keys to understanding his work, which is all about long life, the way in which each and every moment we live is long life, long because overlived, long because underlived, long because yet to be lived and long because lived in all ways lacking. Indeed, this is the crux of one of Michaux’s earliest (and one of my favourite) poems:

A Dog’s Life

I always go to bed very early, dead tired, and yet you couldn’t find any tiring work in the course of my day.
—-Maybe you couldn’t find any.
—-But what surprises me is that I can hang on till evening, and that I’m not forced to get into bed by four o’clock in the afternoon.
—-What tires me out are my continual interventions.
—-I’ve already said that in the street I fight with everybody; I slap some man, grab women’s breasts, and using my foot as a tentacle I sow panic in the cars of the Metro.
—-As for books, they harass me more than anything else. I just can’t leave a word with its original meaning or even its form.
—-I catch it and after a few tries I uproot it and lead it definitively away from the author’s flock.
—-There may be easily thousands of sentences in a chapter and I’ve got to sabotage every one of them. It is absolutely essential to me.
—-Occasionally, certain words remain like towers. I have to go about it a few times and then, when my demolition has already gone pretty far, all of a sudden, while passing by an idea, I can see that tower again. So, I hadn’t knocked it down enough, I have to go back and find the poison for it, and I spend an endless amount of time in this way.
—-And once the whole back has been read, I lament, for I haven’t understood a thing — naturally. Couldn’t enhance myself with anything. I stay thin, and all dried up.
—-I used to think that when I had destroyed everything, I would be well adjusted, right? Maybe. But it’s long in coming, it’s really long. (9)

Leaving aside the fact this piece seemed to faultlessly capture all the anxiety I’d ever had over my approach to literature or the exhausting, revolting nature of my “continual interventions” (which could be rewritten simply as my social interactions), the poem appeared to have it truly perfect at the end: the desire to adjust through demolition and yet to have to wait so long to completely get there. I felt like I’d been laid bare.

Simultaneous to this, I was reading a very different work: Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. [4] In this short, exceedingly brilliant text, the Italian theorist had devised the idea of ‘bare life’. For Agamben, the heart of Western politics lies in a ban on certain forms of life which are shut out from the polis and from the full stretch of social bonds coterminous with that political community. This, he insists, is the original political relation — the removal of certain categories of peoples from civic life. It goes back to ancient Rome where we find in law an obscure figure — the homo sacer, or sacred man — a deviant of sorts, a criminal, which was unable to be sacrificed in a religious ritual but was allowed to be killed by anyone in the community without incurring the guilt of committing murder. This inability to be sacrificed is crucial for Agamben because, in basic terms, a sacrifice is something that has sufficient value that its loss is counted as a loss. Think of Christ, for example, the entire power of his passion is based on the notion that his death was an irrevocable forfeit — one which humanity is forever indebted to — but, precisely because of this, also a redeeming one, a sacrifice which saved. Homo sacer, however, may be killed in a way that does not incur any sense of loss or martyrdom: the very inclusion of this figure into law was to announce the fact that it did not count. It was acknowledged only to say it could not be acknowledged. Agamben calls this phenomenon ‘bare life’: life which does not exist as a person in any true sense of that word but rather as a sort of biological minimum, a mammal stripped of its ontological status as a human subject, ever exposed to death, its every living breath beholden exclusively to the whim of a sovereign which holds no obligation to it. Agamben tells us that this arrangement emerges time and again in Western history: for instance, it is present in the treatment of the Jews of Europe, who were first stripped of their citizenship rights by the Nazis and legally ostracised — denied crucial communal status — long before they were sent to the concentration camps; and now too, in our attitude toward the civil non-entities that continue to breathe on in places like Guantanamo Bay. The real problem of the homo sacer, however, is not that it is simply an outcast but, rather, that it is an outcast within the law. For Agamben, this is the true catastrophe: the fact that the community actually legalises homo sacer’s lack of accountable significance, its losslessness. To be cast outside, made for an indifferent death — this is what makes bare life bare — but to be incorporated in its unimportance is what makes it sacred. The homo sacer is what enables society as we know it to exist. Its status as an exception to sacrifice tells us that any loss within the community itself would be a sacrifice; its meaninglessness makes the rule. Bare life thus lets us know there is, in fact, a society of which the rest of us are a part and of which our membership in can assure us, in some sense, that we are indispensable, our lives meaningful, our deaths mournful.

Reading all this, I saw a link to all the things I was learning about myself through Michaux. Now, I would not be so conceited as to cast myself among those suffering souls who have been branded bare life — as bad as things might become for me, I am not headed toward holocaust. Nor am I an outsider, not really. Happening to be gay is maybe a qualifier for outcast status, lacking all kinds of social grace could be another lesser criterion, but I also happen to be white and middle-class and able to string sentences together decently enough to scratch a career out in the academy (so far). All this places me quite clearly in the realm of the privileged. I could be pitched out at any moment, yes, but so could millions of other people and far faster. I do not deserve any special mantle. However, through Michaux, I’d taken to thinking of my own private relationship to myself as something like ‘un-bareable life’ — life written into the sovereign law of my own head negatively — recognised as criminal, unworthy, and so able to be killed without guilt — yet somehow at the same time unable to be made bare, a life that could not escape an impermissible sense of sacrifice if it were to end itself. I had been thinking about death a lot lately, about how it really seemed the only valid response to how far gone I was, but no matter how many good reasons I gave myself for committing suicide, I just wasn’t able to do it. In my head, I was prepared to die but I was powerless to carry it out � and for no other reason past the fact that it seemed too much of a loss to myself to do so. In other words, in the social set-up of my own mind, I possessed a sovereign that stubbornly refused to free or kill its homo sacer. Michaux understood this bind well. Take this passage from his poem ‘My King’ for instance:

In my night, I besiege my King, I get up little by little and I wring his neck.
—-He regains his strength, I come back at him, and wring his neck again.
—-I shake him again and again like an old plum tree, and his crown wobbles on his head.
—-And yet, he is my King, I know it and he knows it, and of course I’m at his service —
—-I boot him out of the room with kicks in the ass. I cover him with kitchen scraps and garbage. I break dishes on his legs. I cram low, well-aimed insults into his ears, hitting him deeply and shamefully with calumnies you might hear on the streets of Naples, particularly dirty and detailed, so that just to hear them is a stain you can’t get rid of, a revolting suit made to measure: the very dung of existence.
—-Well, I have to begin all over again the next day.
—-He has come back; he is there. He is always there. He can’t clear off for good. He absolutely has to impose his accursed royal presence on me, in my room — which is small enough already.

(“My King”, 27)

Michaux cannot rid himself of the hated sovereign that makes his life so miserable, the sovereign which is — in its turn — subject to great degradation, and yet which will not relinquish its reign. Just so my attitude toward the self which would not let me live but which I could not escape from either. I asked myself why this was, why I saw myself as fit to die on the one hand but was unable to act on that insight on the other. Michaux had an answer. Here he is writing on death, then life: “We could not recognise ourselves in the silence, we could not recognise ourselves in the screams, nor in our caverns, nor in the gestures of foreigners. Around us, the countryside is indifferent and the sky has no purpose.” (‘The Letter’, 87) Death, it seemed, was not compelling enough for me, I couldn’t see myself in its silence, nor was my horror at the world (the screams, the caverns) or my lack of deep relation to anything in it (the foreign gestures) enough to force me to death. This was the crux of my problem: I was stuck but not stuck enough, at wit’s end but not in a way that would release me, finally. Beyond that, no matter how much I tried to push myself to a state of desperation so great it would be able to override my insistence on seeing my death as a loss, it was the very grotesqueness of what was left that kept me clinging on:

That’s why my properties are always absolutely bare of everything, except for some living thing, or a series of living things, which only reinforces the general poverty and is like a monstrous, unbearable advertisement for the general desolation.
—-So I rub everything out, and only the swamps are left, without anything else, swamps that are my property and will drive me to despair.
—-And if I persist, I don’t really know why.” (My Properties, 6)

Written in negative or not, I could see I was doomed to live. And I loathed myself for thinking myself that entitled to life without any clear reason, without really knowing why. As Michaux says, ‘To breathe is already to be consenting” (‘Slices of Knowledge’, 177) and that was probably my worst offence. It was as if my therapist was right after all: it seems I did have an essential sense of self-worth. It’s what kept my lungs working and my wrists unslit. But that was not a gift. It was the most shameful truth I could imagine.

Does this seem like a sick line of reasoning to you? If so, well, I guess that’s the point. Sick, I can totally agree, but also banal, all too human and all too ordinary, shared I’m sure by others in their own way. And Michaux was showing me this, and strangely it was a comfort. It was as if a mind far greater than mine had trod through this exact same territory and knew just how bad it could get and still found ways to tread on. To be sure, Michaux is devastating but he is not only that. He can also be incredibly lyrical — “Only unfolding is important. The rest is merely epiphenomena” (123) — strangely soulful — “The heart of a sensitive person suffers too much to love” (177) — amusingly nihilistic — “Even if it’s true, it’s false” (175) — and unsettlingly eerie — “Inside the melon, a heart was beating” (172). His style is awe-inspiring. Modest even when it is being grandiose. Never didactic even though it’s always interrogating you and forever forcing you to face its aphorisms. Relieving even though it tears layer after layer from Michaux himself and you, his reader. It is also comical:

I would like to get up. No, I would like to lie down, no, I’d like to get up, right away, no, I’d like to lie down this very second, I want to get up, I’m going to make a phone call, no, I won’t call. Yes, I have to. No, I’m absolutely not going to call. Yes, I’ll call. No, I’ll lie down. So ten times, twenty times, fifty times in a few minutes, I decide something, decide the contrary, come back to the first decision, come back to the second decision, make my first resolution again, completely, fanatically carried away as if on a crusade, but the next second totally indifferent, uninterested, perfectly relaxed. (‘Miserable Miracle’, 200)

Shades of Beckett here, though the circular back and forth characterises Michaux’s style from a time far earlier than that great playwright went to work. Am I wrong in saying that it’s weirdly heartening to see your paralysis, then passion, then apathy played out with such pointed absurdity? Michaux courts terror but he taunts it. On the noise of a nearby school and (implicitly) on the pursuit of knowledge, he says: “You should avoid schools. Twenty years later, they can still stir up memories” (‘A Recommended Instrument: Apartment Thunder’, 148). On the clergy: “He was lucky — that bishop so sure of himself — to have lived at a time when they didn’t know how to question you thoroughly.” (‘Slices of Knowledge’, 177) On avoiding addiction to mescaline (which he took for almost a decade): “Drugs bore us with their paradises. Let them give us only a little knowledge instead. This is not a century for paradise.” (‘Knowledge Through the Abyss’, 211) On life itself: “Plume was having lunch at the restaurant when the headwaiter came over, looked at him severely and said to him in a low, mysterious voice: ‘What you have on your plate is not on the menu’.” (‘Plume at the Restaurant’, 62) And somehow amid all this, Michaux also finds the time to be uniquely inspiring:

Now I could understand the poets of times gone by, simple, sensitive, openhearted, the first to hear them and report back to the incredulous public; the whispers of these murmuring “nearvoices”, confidential, exhaled, hurried, moving, and calling. That undeniable call drawing us in, making us feel so strange; voices that other men, satisfied by their distractions, do not hear, voices so attractive that those poets, the real ones, who had heard them once, could not stop there. They couldn’t be satisfied with simply making a few rhymes about them, they could do nothing else but throw themselves into the water to join them in order to go on hearing their secret (for only an indecipherable fragment of it can be received from the banks) a secret from the depths of the heart, from the secret, mysterious heart of humble, swarming nature, trampled underfoot, powerless, countless. Yes, those presences whispering at your sides and rapidly whisking away the rest of their messages are attractive, unbelievably attractive. You have to struggle not to be carried away. Hearing those quick confidences whispered intensely to you, it’s as if you couldn’t help thinking that only by letting yourself go, by plunging into the water with those fleeing fairies, near them, in the heart of their people, would you hear them at last, completely, marvellously. (The Rhine Fairies, 341)

This is too beautiful, a way which insists you forward, a certain ambient sentience that whispers for you to press on, dive in, assures you there is some reward in keeping at it. But as the poem goes on, we also find these surround sounds are no easy answer either. Though we are open to these voices, Michaux later tells us, we mostly remain on the shore, and if we do follow them, it turns out soon enough we have to come back. The poet does not believe in exits knowing they are only entrances back to somewhere else, to places which are not all that different in their distortion from where we were to start off with. Still, he can feel the power of the call, and he wants you to know it. This emotion, this intense sense of feeling, is what makes me love Michaux most of all. Given that most of his work is utterly desolate, I can’t say exactly why you should find Michaux a comfort but I find I can’t help it. Admittedly, probably one of the worst ways you can read literature is for therapy but I have to confess when I turn to Michaux, I turn to him for treatment. It comes from that period where I needed some kind of support I couldn’t find in a capsule or a clinic. The thing is Michaux is not pleasant. He’s no John Ashbery for instance: Ashbery’s poetry faces the worst but it really reinvigorates you; on the other hand, you’re likely to come away from Michaux holding your head in your hands. So how is it he’s a comfort? One time, smoking substances on the northern end of the Sydney Harbour, the bridge less coathanger from where we sat than mangled marionette, a friend and I discussed Michaux. I asked her why it was that she found Michaux like I did, an assurance. My friend thought about it and eventually said: “I think reading Michaux is sort of like what you would feel if you came across another person, quietly distraught, after the apocalypse.” Yes, that was exactly it. To see anguish in the midst of general devastation and to realise that emotion still persists. The despair of coming across that, of discovering you are still able to be touched so deeply even after such destruction. The divinity of that feeling. I can’t thank my friend enough for her brilliance. This, for me, is Michaux.

Before I end, let me offer a few words on Michaux’s other works. He did not just write poems but travel texts too and he drew and painted. His travel writings are just as absorbing as his poems though they do smack of a certain sense of orientalism. A man in rebellion against Western philosophy, Michaux certainly wasn’t defying any imperial framework in seeking to use the East as an escape. He was a respectful disciple of the subcontinent and its many belief systems. Hinduism, tantric art and Zen Buddhism all turn up in interesting ways in his work. But in these books, there are lines to make any postcolonial theorist blanch — for instance, in A Barbarian in Asia, Michaux is drawn to say: “The Hindu is often ugly, with an ugliness that is vicious and poor. The sparkle in his eye may be deceiving at first. But he is generally ugly” (57). No matter what use he puts this too, such a statement isn’t really pardonable — not when it’s so seriously meant. For all this though, I think the quality of the reports from his travels does more to upset racist desire than to repair it. While they do yield to Eurocentrism, they can do so in challenging ways:

The European, after many an effort, has succeeded in belittling himself before God.
—-The Japanese not only belittles himself before God or before men, but even before the smallest waves, before the crumpled leaf of the reed, before distant bamboos that he can hardly see. Modesty, no doubt, reaps its own reward. For to no other people do the leaves and flowers appear with so much beauty and fraternity. (A Barbarian in Asia, 161)

It doesn’t stand to see the Japanese as one harmonious hum of life; even if it’s meant to be in their self-interest, it’s an exoticised fiction. Still, if the East is used here to service a point, is that point not a confronting one? I read this and am somewhat ashamed to belong to a less than humble enough West. (Is God the best we can do?) I’m pressed by an urgent need to acknowledge the vitality of another culture, to really listen to the other. And of course I’m set upon by the desire to belittle myself ever better, to make myself appropriately less before the world. I am not trying to excuse Michaux here but to engage him in his full complexity. He has his limits (a fact he’d be all too willing to admit) but it is too uninstructive to see him as just a well-intentioned bigot.

Then there’s the art. Poetry and prose were only one side of Michaux and not even the side he liked most. Language troubled him in its ability to be so dazzling. As the critic, David Ball, writes, “All Michaux’s work does not seem to aim at being fine art. He has a fundamental distrust of beautiful language, indeed of any language. His writing is not aesthetic (in his view) but performative.” (xi-xii) Strangely enough, however, for all this distrust, his artwork would seem to insist on a certain type of visual language of its own, a rewording through images. In inks and watercolours, Michaux was to make some of the most striking, idiosyncratic yet stridently coherent art of the last century. I don’t think they need my clumsy commentary to give over their striking beauty to you but I’ll say two things on two examples. Alongside his texts, Michaux often included a number of ink figures; in fact, these simple graphics actually often outweighed any writing in the later volumes he’d release. This is one case in point reproduced later as a print:

Composition 1956
Works on paper, (Indian) Ink on thick paper, h: 62 x w: 90 cm / h: 24.4 x w: 35.4 in

This lithograph reminds me of forms melting in a kind of perfectly plotted acid rain. Melting sublimely, if a little ferociously. It’s the kind of raw wound you’d never expect to see in dancing ink. If you look at the examples below, you’ll see that ink figures often become human-like figures with Michaux, though in a way that is never quite anthropomorphic enough to be utterly homo sapien. They waver. Much like we do. In its restless Rorschach quality, Michaux’s art is a message on look and life, on blot and being, the self in search of a script that will suit it and the scripted self that beleaguers us: all to a key chord which his drawings always capture: movement, a nomadic shuffle, a terrible, tremendous transformation. He dreams in one place of “signs that would enable us to be open to the world differently, creating and developing a different function in man, DISALIENATING HIM”. (xxiii) I think this is what’s behind Michaux’s art: that drive for disalienation, that search for signs. The hunt for a representation that can illustrate us ever better. When you view Michaux’s inkwork or watercolors, you search for form in haunting figuration. And you are often showered in agony. Showered until you shimmer. This last year, Michaux’s art happened to crop up in a class I was taking in European modernism. It was my first real exposure to it; I hadn’t delved into that side of him before this. This image below was one my lecturer presented to us and lauded with praise:

Par la vie des rythmes II 1974
Original lithograph on zinc (Zincograph), extracted from the book “Par la vie des rythmes”. Published by Ed. Fata Morgana, Montpellier.

I’ve had little training in art and it shows. At first, I couldn’t see why my professor saw so much in Michaux’s pictographs. Finally, in tutorial, I worked over enough anxiety at my denseness to have my say. Taking the sketch of the alligators, I said: “I do like Michaux’s poems but I’m lost on this. He just seems to offer you slightly sinister inkblots. It seems too — undone, like he expects profundity to leap out of dark dashes and skewed strokes. It’s neat but it’s undetailed.” Who knows what I really wanted here? I was mainly unhappy because I didn’t understand it. My professor saw this and showed me in his inimitable way that I really already had my answer: “Undone! Undetailed! Observe the teeth! See how little Michaux has to do to push you into representational danger? A few marks and yet you see how perilous. Just soft suggestions yet sharp as needles. His ‘inkblots’ are your every breath.” For me, that explanation continues to encapsulate Michaux in every sense. His short poems, his precise prose, his delicate, disturbing art: all of it only soft suggestions yet sharp as needles.

I came out of the worst of what I went through, I suppose, but that assessment depends on what moment you catch me in. Michaux is an expert on how nothing is ever really over, least of all the deflating understanding you can have about the difficulty of existence, the problem of being that wont go away unless you can somehow break the contract, unseat the sovereign. Even if you could, though, there are those who died before you to think about, the ones who you will join: “It is whispered about among the newly arrived dead that such unheard-of progress is being made by you, or is just about to be made, that you will soon be able to help us, really help us.” (‘In the Land of Magic ‘, 128) You don’t have to be religious to think of yourself among these legions, not at least for the living who will have to carry on after you, bearing the ever expanding burden. Against my better judgement, I can’t break my contract, enlist with those imploring dead. So I have to try to live. I guess it’s not a total loss. “The inhabitant of the disordered face is not giving up,” murmurs Michaux from his own grave. (‘Ravaged People’, 261) Such advice is as much hex as deliverance in Michaux’s world where resilience only carries weakness closer to death. But I believe he is trying to tell me that this is alright and I am trying to listen to him. I really am.

________________
* All page references in this introduction refer to David Ball’s translation, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994, excluding Sylvia Beach’s translation of A Barbarian in Asia, New York : New Directions, 1949.

[1] Michaux often wrote that he wanted an art that would work “to question, to auscultate, to approach the problem of being”. (327) Existence as both a question and a crisis is the recurring refrain in Michaux’s life and work and as this line suggests he feels it can only be verged upon, clinically listened to, not ever resolved. By the dictionary definition, the word “problem” has a number of sides to it: in its noun form, a problem is a subject introduced for discussion and resolution as well as a question involving doubt, uncertainty or difficulty. In that sense, it is a word which bends two ways: generated for a response, a problem emphasises the trouble of getting there. Etymologically, the word problem also relates to the Greek word prob�llein, meaning “to throw or lay before”. In Being and Time, Heidegger insisted that to exist is, in a sense, to be thrown into life: to be ‘delivered over’ to circumstance outside our control and to be limited in a certain set of possibilities over how we will live our lives. We can alter the arrangement we are thrown into, for instance, but even then we are being thrown into the limited ways in which we can alter the situation in which we are thrown. He also said that it was the way of being to continually surrender itself to the world and let the world ‘matter’ to it. Meaning then is a kind of involuntary resignation, a significance we submit to. Taken in this way, existence is most definitely a problem: as the preceding suggests, it is a situation we are thrown into and which we lay ourselves before. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, San Francisco Harper San Francisco, 1962, 175-8.
[2] Depression is fatalitistic, I think, but it isn’t fate. It feels too contingent and tailored by your own actions or lack of action ever to allow you the reprieve of consigning yourself over to it as something which has simply been ordained. It’s beyond you and yet it is nothing but you. Hence, the imperative to fix it, to constantly hector yourself to overcome its hold on you. Unlike advanced leukaemia, say, depression is an illness that won’t ever let you stop thinking you can do something about it. This is, of course, one of the secrets of its quite remarkable torture: to make you feel your mind as if it is being torn apart by factors outside your comprehension while, simultaneously, insisting that nothing but your own comprehension is responsible and can set it to rights.
[3] The best work on ‘the imperative to die’ that I’ve found (courtesy of JW Veldhoen’s recommendation on here) is Jean Amïry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, trans. John D. Barlow, Indiana University Press, 1999 . The obvious classical work on the subject is Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus — which is well worth the read — but I tend to disagree with it on a number of points, not least the notion that suicide is a revolt against the world that turns out to actually be an “acceptance [of it] at the extreme”. I don’t know what suicide is of course but terms like ‘revolt’ or ‘acceptance’ don’t seem to touch it. The induced chain reaction that sets off a nuclear device is not an act of rebellion or resignation; once it’s provoked, it is an indifferent, logical process. I see suicide as something like that. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien, New York: Vintage International, [1955] 1983, 54.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford , California: Stanford University Press, 1995.

—

Life:

‘Henri Michaux is hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience — the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living.”
— John Ashbery

“Henri Michaux was born May 24, 1899 in the small Belgian town of Namur, the second child of Octave Michaux, a shopkeeper, and his wife Jeanne. The family moved to Brussels when Henri was two years old. Henri attended a countryside boarding school where he was an indifferent student and felt alienated from the other students. Michaux had no interest in the typical amusements of children, which only increased his this sense of alienation. Food disgusted him and his feeling of personal shame only intensified, causing him to withdraw further during his harsh boarding school experience. He returned home to Brussels in 1910 to attend a Jesuit high school, where he studied Latin and developed an interest in Christian mystics. In his early adolescence, Michaux found consolation for his enduring sense of alienation in language, art and religion, each of which provided a way to transcend the misery of everyday existence. Henri attempted his first poem in high school, but quickly became reticent about writing, fearing that language distorted thought and would prevent him from grasping the essential in lived experience. Michaux enjoyed parody and participated, with a few likeminded friends, in scholarly farces and games. He also had passion for Chinese writing and the study of insects …”

Read more: http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/intro.php?ikey=19

Michaux’s life and a list of his written works: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi /hmichaux.htm

—

Work:
(In English)

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

Miserable Miracle

Stroke by Stroke

Selected Writings of Henri Michaux

A Barbarian in Asia

Ecuador

* Also check out Alibris for older, out-of-print volumes of some Michaux’s great work.

—

Text:

“Most of the following texts are in a sense exorcisms through subterfuge. Their reason for being: to ward off the surrounding powers of the hostile world.”
— Michaux, Preface to Ordeals, Exorcisms*

A Saint (1927)

While circulating through my accursed body, I came to a region where the parts of myself were few and far between; to live there, you had to be a saint. In times gone by, I had truly aspired to sainthood, but now that illness was forcing me to it, I struggled against it and I still struggle, and it’s obvious that I’m not going to survive like this.
—-If I had been given the opportunity, fine! but to be forced into it — no, I just can’t stand it.

 

from The Night Moves (1935)

You can say what you like, my darlings, but I do know how to have a good time. Only yesterday, I ripped an arm off a policeman. It may have been the striped arm of a sergeant. I’m not sure. I ripped it off energetically, and threw it out in the same way.
—-My sheets are just about never white. It’s a good thing blood dries fast. How could I sleep if it didn’t?
—-My arms go wandering all over, into bellies, into chests, into the organs called secret (secret to some people!).
—-My arms always bring something back, my fine drunken arms. I don’t always know what it is, a piece of liver, chunks of lungs, it’s all the same to me, as long as it’s warm, wet, and full of blood.
—-Actually what I would like is to fins some dew, very soft, truly soothing.
—-A white arm, fresh, carefully covered with satiny skin, isn’t a bad take. But my nails, my teeth, my insatiable curiosity, the trouble I have getting used to superficial things — Well, that’s the way it is. He who went for a kiss brought back a head.
—-Pray for him, he rages for you.

 

The Main Point (1935)

Man – his essential being – is only a point. It is this point alone that is swallowed up in Death. That’s why he must be careful not to be encircled.
—-One day, in a dream, I was surrounded by four dogs and a nasty little boy commanding them.
—-The trouble, the unbelievable difficulty I had in hitting him, I shall never, never forget. What an effort! No doubt I hit some sort of being, but whom? In any case, my opponents were defeated enough to disappear. Don’t think I was fooled by their appearance, though, they weren’t anything but points either – five points, but very strong ones.
—-And another thing: that’s how epilepsy begins. The points march on to you and eliminate you. They blow, and you’re invaded. How long can you put off your first fit, I really wonder?

 

Toward Serenity (1934)

He who does not accept the world builds no house in it. If he is cold, it is without being cold. He is hot without heat. If he chops down birches, it’s as if he were chopping down nothing at all, but there are the birches, on the ground, and he takes his agreed-upon wages, or else he only takes a few punches. He takes the punches like a gift without any particular meaning, and he goes on his way, without being surprised.

He drinks water without being thirsty, he sinks into the rock without harm.
Under a truck, with a broken leg, he looks just the same as usual and thinks of peace, of peace, of peace so hard to reach, so hard to keep, peace.

Although he has never gone out, the world is familiar to him. He knows the sea quite well. The sea is constantly beneath him, a sea without water, but not without waves, not without vastness. He knows the rivers. They run through him constantly, without water but not without languor, not without sudden rapids.
Hurricanes without air rage inside him. The immobility of Earth is also his. Roads, cars, flocks go through him endlessly, and a great tree without cellulose but quite hard ripens inside him like a bitter fruit, bitter often, sweet rarely.

Living thus at a distance, always alone at the rendezvous, without ever holding a hand in his hands, with a hook in his heart he thinks of peace, of that cursed throbbing peace, all his, and of the peace that is said to be above that peace.

 

Night of Inconveniences (1938)

There are few smiles in this universe.

He who moves through it has an infinite

number of encounters that wound him.

However, you don’t die in it.

If you die everything starts all over again.

 

Plows of white sugar or blown glass or china are an obstacle to traffic. So are spills of curdled milk when they come up to your knees.
—-If by chance each of us should fall into a cask, even if its bottom is gone and your feet are free, walking and moving around become difficult.
—-If, instead of barrels, they are small pavilions (joyful to other people, no doubt but…) walking is terribly tiring.
—-So is a world with old ladies’ backs for sidewalks.
—-Bundles of glass sticks hurt you, it’s unavoidable. Bundles of glass hurt, bundles of tibias are frightening instead.
—-Walls of rotten meat buckle and collapse, even if they are quite thick. I don’t think you could live in them without keeping an eye on them all the time.
—-When you notice fine veins of steel in your hand, it dampens your spirit considerably, your palm stops being a hollow: now it’s a small shirt taut with pus, an inconvenience; what can you do with your hands is kept to a strict minimum.
—-A crater in an adorable cheek opening under your kiss has very little charm. Its rotten lace is not seductive. You turn away.
—-Black lemons are frightful to see. A sweater of earthworms may provide warmth, but it provides it at the expense of many other feelings.
—-Men who fall, cut in half through the middle, human shards, those big shards of bone and flesh, hardly make good comparisons.
—-Heads that no longer communicate with the belly except through lianas, whether dry or moist – who would still dream of talking to them intimately, that is, without second thoughts, in a natural way? And with zinc lips, what affection is still possible? And what if the poor were given pies made of stewed ball-bearings? who would not boast of being rich?
—-When butter loses its balance on the knife and suddenly expands, falling like a tombstone – watch your lap!
—-And now there are octopus bodies on the pillow!
—-And what if your tire becomes flowing glue,
—-And your eye a blind sparsely-downed duckling, who will be killed by the first cold of winter,
—-And your bread turns into a bear demanding its share and ready to kill.
—-And what of the birds of prey who want to move from one part of the sky to the other, blinded by who knows what idea, from now on use your miraculously enlarged body as a path, clearing their way through the fibers of the large tissues; with their crooked beaks, they create useless damage and the claws of those cursed birds get clumsily caught up in the essential organs.
—-And as you seek safety in flight, what if your legs and your back split like stale bread and every movement breaks them more and more, more and more…How are you going to manage now? How can you manage?

 

Plume’s Finger Was Hurting Him from A Certain Plume (1930)

Plume’s finger was hurting a bit.
—-“You’d better see a doctor,” his wife said. ‘Often all it takes is a little ointment.”
—-And Plume went.
—-“One finger to cut off,” said the surgeon, ‘no problem at all. With anaesthesia, it takes six minutes at the most. Since you’re rich, you have no need for so many fingers. I’ll be delighted to perform this little operation for you. After that, I’ll show you several models of artificial fingers. Some of them are extremely graceful. A bit expensive no doubt. But naturally there’s no question of cutting corners. We’ll give you the best there is.”
—-Plume sadly looked at his finger and apologized.
—-“Doctor, it’s the index finger, you know, a most useful finger. In fact, I was just going to write my mother again. I always use my index finger when I write. My mother would be worried if I put off writing her any longer; I’ll come back in a few days. She’s a very sensitive woman, she gets upset so easily.”
—-“No problem,” the surgeon said, “here’s some paper, white paper, with no letterhead of course. A few heartfelt words from you will put her right.
—-“Meanwhile I’ll call the Hospital and tell them to set everything up, so all we’ll have to do is get out the sterilized instruments. I’ll be back in a minute…”
—-He was back in a flash.
—-“Everything’s perfect, they’re waiting for you.”
—-“So sorry, Doctor,” said Plume, “you see, my hand’s shaking, there’s nothing I can do about it…umm…”
—-“There, there,” said the surgeon, “you’re quite right, it would be better not to write. Women are terribly sharp, especially Mothers. When it’s their son, they can spot a bit of hesitation anywhere, and then make a mountain out of a molehill. For them, we’re just little children. Here’s your hat and your cane. The car is waiting for us.”
—-And they went into the operating room.
—-“Listen, Doctor. Really…”
—-“Oh!” said the surgeon, “don’t worry, you’re being over-scrupulous. We’ll write that letter together. I’ll think about it while I operate on you.”
And bringing the mask to his face, he put Plume to sleep.
—-“At least you could have asked my opinion,” said Plume’s wife to her husband.
—-“Don’t go thinking it’s so easy to find a lost finger once again
—-“I don’t much like the idea of a man with stumps. As soon as your hand gets a bit bare, you can just forget about me.
—-“Cripples are nasty, they become sadistic right away. But I haven’t been brought up the way I was brought up just to live with a sadist. You probably thought I’d volunteer to help you with those things. Well, you were wrong, and you should have thought before you…”
—-“Look,” said Plume, “don’t worry about the future. I still have nine fingers, and, besides, you may change.”

 

A Crowd Coming Out of the Dark (1982)

When I got there, I was driven out to a distant movie-theater, where they were giving a foreign film. – A big theater, I knew, one of the biggest ever built in this country.
—-Inside, it seemed phenomenally big to me, especially on one side (the left) which appeared to stretch out endlessly – an extraordinary effect.
The show had already started, we were in the middle of the action. Suspicious people were coming out of the darkness, conspirators, no doubt. They kept coming and coming, emerging from a kind of vast grotto, exceptionally vast, an uncertain space that I couldn’t manage to circumscribe.
—-They really gave the impression of coming out of “the mouth of nothingness”. It was unheard of. Ah, I said to myself, they’re really making progress in the movies nowadays.
—-To make the conspirators come so naturally out of the dark, a dense darkness that works on your emotions, full of mystery – this was something no one had ever accomplished to the present.
—-Now I could follow the action against a background of thoughts, of interpretations, of particular admiration, and still crowds kept coming out of the dark, from which they seemed to flow into reality. And those moving masses were only a part of a larger, deeper, more disturbing mass. A marvel, almost a miracle made perceptible: the infinite (on one side), in touch with the finite on the other, and flowing into it!
—-I was dumbfounded, as if I had found myself at the exact turning point of an era, changing before me: thanks to a new discovery (which had been kept secret till now), it was displaying the sign of its newness before my very eyes.
—-Meanwhile at the mouth of the cavern the procession was interminable. It, too, was extraordinary – I had never seen images anything like that. As attentive as I might be to those men passing by in fairly regular ranks, it seemed to me I could only see one leg, the one that came forward, and I could barely make out the half of their bodies that was vaguely hidden in some indefinable way.
—-Truly we were dealing with essential, typical conspirators. It would be impossible to dream up better ones: out of prudence and distrust (through an inspired expression of their distrust), even as they marched by they kept themselves partly hidden, literally emerging from emptiness.
—-A well-justified prudence, no doubt, but a most singular way of walking. Or perhaps not so singular, as after all this was a theatrical action, which tried to suggest that these were partisans, who by definition had to escape our gaze and our certainties.
—-I was burning to know the name of the amazing director. Not only had he invented the disguise by removal and partial dematerialization (as befits conspirators who intend to conceal themselves as long as possible), but he had another find: it consisted in maintaining, by means of some new technical mechanism, a certain purely mental vibration transmitted by a physical technique. Whatever it was, it communicated the impression of life itself, of life in danger.
—-Rapid variations of an unknown nature, hardly perceptible commotions, admirably rendered the apprehension of men in danger and those swings between daring and fear that a band of troops must feel as they get ready for a surprise attack – emotions that cannot be denied, that go right to your heart.
—-I was more than a spectator, I was there. Forcibly bound to them, I felt myself in those places, with them. I had never been so transported. All I lacked was the power to touch them, and even so! there were moments when I jumped back, so real did their movements feel to me.
—-Never had a performance rendered me so present, participating, engaged.
—-My life as a spectator had just found a spectacular new development. Without planning to, I had entered the next era. I marvelled and soliloquized.

Suddenly a shooting pain stopped me, and stopped my emotions, my participation, and soon would give quite a different answer to my previous questions.
—-Hemianopsia. Yes, it was an attack of hemianopsia that was happening to me; it had slipped in and subtly joined the performance! From it, the oscillations, the trembling vibrations, stronger on the left than the right…and the mysterious darkness, deep and vibrating – that was my hemianopsia, too.
—-The attack of ophthalmic migraine must have occurred when I walked into the theater, coinciding with the first images, provoked by the overly intense light of the dazzling luminous beam on the screen.
—-The spasms of the tiny cerebral arterioles had supplied the seemingly emotional vibrations, the partial obliteration of the bodies, the “magic” of the conspirators, their surprising dissimulation, their anxiety so admirably imitated with such physical depth. The elements combined in the drama came from my own trembling, an invasion of the theatrical by the physiological, a confusion of the spectacle with the visual ailment of the spectator.
—-The material becoming mental, that’s what was needed to produce that marvellous accuracy, otherwise unattainable.
—-As for the new era in film – well, we would just have to wait.

 

Reading (of a lithograph by Zao Wou-ki) (1950)

Busy trees looking
for their branches breaking
exploding
falling

trees frightened
hunted
trees like nervous systems dripping blood

But no human being in this terrible story

The modest man does not say “I am unhappy”
The modest man does not say “We are suffering
Our families are dying
Our people have no homes.”
He says, “Our trees are suffering.”

 

from A Barbarian in Asia.(published 1945/English: 1949: trans Sylvia Beach)

The poetry of a people is more deceptive than its dress; it is manufactured by esthetes, who are bored and who are only understood among themselves.
—-Plays are more truthful (at least in the way they are produced), for the public would not go regularly to performances that bored them.
—-I have seen plays of the Chinese, Koreans, Malayans, Tamils, Bengalis, Hindus, Turks, modern Greeks, Annamites, Hungarians, Spanish, Serbians etc.; films of the Chinese, Japanese, Bengalis, Hindus, and dances of the Javanese, Balinese, Hindus, Somalis, and of the South American Indians.
—-The subject is of no importance. Many of them are similar. Likewise, the history of races (everywhere similar) is of little importance. It is the manner, the style and not the facts that matter. A people about which one knows nothing and that has stolen everything from others – ideas, religions, institutions – has its own gestures, its accent, its physiognomy…its reflexes.
—-And each man has a face that betrays him, and his face at the same time, betrays his race, his family and his religion. Everyone is responsible for his face.
—-No one wears it undeservedly.
—-Will there be another war? Look at yourselves, Europeans, look at yourselves.
—-Nothing is peaceful in your faces.
—-All is struggle, desire, avidity.
—-Even peace you want violently.

 

from Grasp in Stroke by Stroke (published 1979/English: 2006: trans. Richard Siebarth)

To grasp while abstracting yourself ever more, to grasp the tendency, the accent, the pace, the space. To grasp the underlying.

Who could, wholly, escape from signs?

Grasp: translate. And everything is translation at every level, in every direction.

On ladders that climb, on ladders that fall but always climb again, ladders one grasps hold of, loses again…them, you, oneself, in space, in all of space.

Ignorances, diversions, aberrations

toward greater ungraspability

t o w a r d a c c o m p l i s h m e n t

* All translations taken from David Ball’s Darkness Moves unless otherwise indicated.

—
Art:

“There are no innocent gazes.”
— Michaux in Grasp

 

1. Par les traits V 1984
Original screenprint, with the artist’s monogram in pencil, extracted from the book “Par les traits”. Published by Ed. Fata Morgana, Montpellier.

 

2. Untitled 1960
Paintings, mixed media on canvas carton, h: 25 x w: 32.5 in/h: 63.5 x 82.6 cm

 

3. Par les traits VII 1984
Original screenprint, with the artist’s monogram in pencil, extracted from the book “Par les traits”. Published by Ed. Fata Morgana, Montpellier.

 

4. Untitled c. 1970
Black and colored indian inks on paper, 19 3/3 x 25 5/8 inches (50 x 65 cm.)

 

5. Untitled, 1956
Gouache, 50 cm x 32,5 cm

 

6. Untitled 1970
Watercolor on paper, h. 14.8 x w. 10.8 in./h. 37.6 x w. 27.4 cm

 

“Signs, symbols, impulses, falls, departures, relations, discords, everything is there to bounce up, to seek, for further on, for something else.
“Between them, without settling down, the author grew his life.
“Perhaps you could try, too?”
Michaux

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Yeah, I was super surprised to find that Grant Wood one too. Sounds like you’ve got your new place sorted. I moved into my current apartment years ago now, and I still haven’t unpacked a lot of the boxes. Me too, on the bookstore. I hear good things. It supposedly has a ‘transgressive’ bent. Have the best weekend you can under the happily dwindling circumstances. ** David, My grandfather on my dad’s side used to bite my ear whenever he saw me. Hard enough to leave teeth marks. One time I had to get stitches. Luckily my dad and he were estranged so I didn’t see him very often. Thanks so much about ‘LCTG’! I’m very happy you liked it. The boy in the snow/tent scene went on to become the big ‘it’ male model of the fashion world. I think he still might be. ‘PGL is even better, if I don’t say so myself. Groovy! ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, My pleasure, my friend(s). They were fun to gather. Me too on on the mansion. Maybe we can pool our resources. ** David Ehrenstein, Now there’s someone who nobody reads or talks about anymore: Harold Robbins. ** Misanthrope, I can only think of two. Hope you had a nice dinner. Ha ha, nice try putting his cuteness at the bottom of your list of his admirable qualities. I’m sure I’ve told you I’ve crossed paths on the sidewalk with Mr. Chalamet twice, both times in the Marais. Get this weekend under your belt, man. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jack! Oh, you’re welcome. David’s memoir … you read it? He can wield a silver tongue, that David. Yeah, have an extremely fine weekend. Oh, Sabrina said F&B Press is publishing her BB book. Luckily for us her tongue isn’t so silver. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, pal. I hope you guys had an excellent and very oasis-like dinner. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, maybe we should trade. Although I guess your eraser dust collection is long gone. Which chandelier? Mm, I would love to own a David Hammons, that’s for sure. I like the Le Bul ones, so maybe one of those. I also like the kind of classical but weirdly sinister Fred Wilson ones. One of that group. I’d flip a coin. Photo of a boy taken just after love announced that his skeleton had been turned into a chandelier, G. ** ryan / angusraze, Hey, ryan. I haven’t seen ‘Onibaba’, I’ll find it. I’m definitely not a Nihilist. I hate Nihilism. Um, well, because the war is something I have absolutely no power to change or control, I try to accept that fact, which leaves, yes, stress basically, and avoiding the loud mouthed know-nothing bullshitters and pontificators on social and other media as much as possible, and just trying to suss out the cold facts of the situation, and, yeah, stressing out because it is not going to end well and probably won’t end. Good weekend to you and yours! ** T, Hey, hey, T! I’m good. Things seem to be looking up on the film front, and that’s a potential huge relief. And hanging out, you know. You’re in Lyon. I like Lyon. I wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s kind of charming. Anything happening there of interest (to you)? Having eaten that miserable robot-made pizza the other day, I’ll take that weekend wish and even pay handsomely for it. I hope yours throws you a spontaneous ticker tape parade that traverses every major street in Lyon but doesn’t identify itself as a tribute to you so you won’t feel embarrassed. xo. ** Steve Erickson, I’m happy you got through the bout of worrying. Yeah, like said, I guess this Covid shit is one of those tenants that can fight its eviction tooth and nail. Better days ahead starting today! ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. Thanks, man. ‘Women in Love’, great. I’m a big fan of hers too. I saw her live onstage in London a million years ago in some play (maybe Shakespeare?) where her character died by some other character shoving his sword up her vagina to the hilt. Tough role. What’s your work, assuming it’s a job of some sort? Nothing hugely new with me since yesterday. Some maybe good news about the new film. Going to a supposedly great bookstore today (‘Librairie 1909’) and maybe seeing a friend and a film later. Do some writing. Did you see the Pasolini films or choose another option? Have a really good weekend either way! ** Okay. This weekend you get a restoration from a fairly long time ago. It’s a brilliant and very personal paean to the great Henri Michaux by the d.l. Slatted Light who is better known as the excellent writer and thinker David Rylance. It’s a lengthy but very powerful and informative piece of work, this post, and well worth the time you give it. I hope you do. See you Monday.