Henri Michaux
Passaggi

Among the many idiocies (disguised as important things) that plague daily life, there is an important thing (usually perceived as an idiocy) that instead ennobles it: digression.

I love to digress. I love to do it in every possible and imaginable way.

I love sitting at the bar with a friend and letting images, ideas, reflections, nonsense, and even bigger nonsense form a shapeless and inconclusive mass of cerebral vapors. I love writing my little pages here on DeB where, twisting on the pivot of a certain work, I can let myself be guided by neurons that approach, distance, limp, fall to the ground, and make faces.

More than anything else, I love to digress alone. In my thoughts.

It’s there that I squeeze out the purest essence of digression. It’s there that I overcome the hindrance of oral transmission and/or written word. There, the brain's electrical activity produces an alternating current whose sole purpose is to fuel itself, producing bubbles that go to your head like a sparkling white wine.

The greatest invention humanity should trouble itself to design and build would be a gadget capable of automatically noting all these directionless oscillations. Talking about them, writing about them, or even just pressing a button to record them produces only a bland transposition. The brain prepares to translate itself: in the end, it’s a kind of lie.

However, there are authors and books that have the power to bypass (or at least give the illusion of doing so) the rational act of writing to return to us the purity of newborn thought. Joyce or Woolf's stream of consciousness? Almost. The automatic writing of the surrealists? Perhaps. Let’s consider Michaux and his “Passages.”

This Henri Michaux is a bizarre figure. A poet, writer, essayist, and Belgian-born French painter, he traveled through the twentieth century with a sort of lucid alienation which was the true hallmark of his works. A great traveler and explorer, he wasn’t only one geographically: since 1955 he devoted himself, with the systematic approach of a scientist, to analyzing the transformations that LSD and mescaline operated on him, on his writing, on his consciousness (“Knowledge of the Abyss” is the result of these investigations. A careful and thorough essay on the use and effects of drugs compared to which Baudelaire's “Artificial Paradises” seems like the naive considerations of a 16-year-old stoner).

These “Passages” (which span a period from ’37 to ’63) are those of his mind wandering over the most disparate subjects. Short writings (sometimes very brief) where our author lingers on a news event, on technological progress, on poetry, on painting, on the memory of a journey, on the act of writing, on the act of living. He lingers, but doesn’t dwell too long.

Pieces that do bear the mark of incompleteness, of fragments, and of the moment, but that also have such precision and rigor that the words envelop the reader with the harmony and freshness of cotton sheets. Pages of impure writing that have the disjointed and intermittent sound of musical instruments trying to tune before the start of a concert. Orchestra rehearsals for a symphony that will never start and in which Michaux moves with ease from one synapse to another, being scrupulous (without being pedantic), light (without being approximate), humorous (without being crude), visionary (without being hallucinated).

One could almost say that Michaux's writing is imbued with a kind of surreal realism where many oxymorons merge and frolic around the few elements used to weave a reflection.

It is as if he achieved the impossible crossover between two other masters of the oxymoron: Apollinaire (with his concrete fantasies) and Valéry (with his mathematical lyricism). Impossible, because it’s difficult to imagine two more different authors than Apollinaire and Valéry.

If with Apollinaire he shares the taste for jokes and the attention to transformations of his present, in Michaux hilarity is always measured, contemporaneity always declined.

From Valéry, he takes that kind of detachment, of impersonal analysis towards everything surrounding him. But, while Valéry's tireless ruminations seek the secret (and infinite) concatenations of the things of the world, in Michaux creation often exhausts itself in two or three pages, in the single object (or idea or memory) that pricks his mind at that precise moment and that his mind transforms and transposes. Valéry is a scientist lent to poetry, Michaux is a poet (deeply poet) propelled by an analytical advance.

Moreover, the narrating self of Michaux (that self so little inclined to physical action, that self that seems like a recording device endowed with an inexhaustible archive where all the variables of life are stored) has some degree of kinship with that of Proust, but with a fundamental difference. If Proust seeks to extract from his memory, from his past-self, the answers, the reasons that justify the present-self and the way it approaches reality, Michaux investigates within himself just for the pleasure of investigating. He seems not to seek any meaning, or rather, the meaning is always relative, transitory, permeated by an apparent passivity and a melancholic awareness of its fleetingness.

Perhaps these “Passages” are Michaux’s “Spleen of Paris” (and not just because each piece, like in Baudelaire's masterpiece, is independent of the others). The existential pain, the spleen that Baudelaire experiences while wandering the streets of the French capital, seems in the end to be experienced by Michaux too in the alleyways, nooks, dead-ends of his mind. Yet, unlike Baudelaire, his is a melancholy purified of any self-indulgence and almost of any artistic pretension: an aseptic (and surgical) awareness of the senselessness of life.

Well, I would be done.

I have chattered, I have argued (perhaps), I have digressed. But what a difference compared to the things I had in my head and tried to put into writing! In short, I eagerly await that new invention. Not because I believe it would allow me to understand myself better (nor, much less, the world around me), but because I have the feeling that if I could reread my newly born thoughts, I would have a good laugh.