This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored.
This quote from the foreword of Michaux’s Miserable Miracle, his best-known work, a vivid account of several of his mescaline experiences, perfectly encapsulates the to-the-point tone with which he hoped to explore the subject. In the foreword, he describes the inherent difficulty of this endeavour, though, when the original writings/drawings themselves were created under the influence:
The original text [was] more tangible than legible, drawn rather than written…flung onto and across the paper…interrupted sentences, with syllables, flying off, frayed, petering out. Their tattered remnants would revive, bolt, and burst again. The letters ended in smoke or disappeared…their wings cut in flight by invisible scissors.
In his search for clarity and data, he did not so much uncover, but was more subjected to a series of discoveries that fundamentally challenged the nature of the self, reality and art itself. Suffice it to say, clarity was not easy to come by on mescaline.
His first overwhelming discovery was what he described as “insurmountable difficulties” stemming from the “incredible rapidity of the apparition, transformation, and disappearance of the visions.” The mescaline experience was defined by this seemingly unending velocity. He felt he was “swept headlong without ever turning back [at] unendurable speed.” This was torturous for an artist whose work was defined by careful contemplation. The “intolerable haste” he felt within rendered his usual artistic toolset utterly useless. How could he coherently explain a thought when it was immediately replaced by a thousand others? The unbridled speed, he felt, was not a creative energy, but a destructive force which demonstrated his utter powerlessness.
Flowing directly from this “unendurable speed” was his next realisation – a profound alteration of the self, itself. Psychedelic literature is rich with descriptions of “ego death”, typically seen as a transcendent dissolution into a greater whole. Not so for Henri Michaux. He did not gently dissolve; he was shattered and torn apart. He described a state in which his “calm was violated a thousand times by tongues of infinity,” concluding that “the thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shattering.” He felt an initial disconnect within himself, where he was forced to “watch like a stranger” his own seemingly mechanical movements. During the most intense period of the experience, he was no longer even a person in control at all but something “caught, not by anything human, but a frenzied mechanical agitator, a kneeder-crusher-crumbler, treated like metal in a steel mill”.
This was far from a spiritual union; he felt nothing but alienation from himself, the self, split apart against his will. This sets Michaux further apart from his contemporaries. In his attempt to relate his experiences as an observer, free of bias, he discovers an innate inability to do so. Post-war art and philosophy had reflected the idea of the self as free and responsible for its thoughts and actions. As a result of his mescaline experiences, Michaux now saw that this unified “self” was in fact a comforting fiction – a fragile and temporary construct.
Michaux’s third discovery concerned the fundamental nature of reality itself. When the initial onslaught of fractured images subsided, it was replaced by a universe now shorn of all meaning. Michaux watched reality melt away into a world of “unemotional character” and “mechanical appearance.” This was a world of unthinking movement alone, where “enormous plowshares plow without any reason for plowing.” Endless movement without meaning, where he was subject to the “torture of what is unstable…what is impermanent.” Once again, Michaux stands apart from his contemporaries; he did not join figures like Huxley in a divine, spiritual dimension. He was “caught and held prisoner in some workshop of the brain.”
This was the crux of it all. The true “misery” of the miracle. The realisation that beneath the realm of human perception lies this abyss of meaninglessness. Endless, undulating energy. It was this “prodigious vibration, multiple, delicate, polymorphous, appalling,” that he would attempt to draw to create a direct record of the experience, which words could not explain.
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