I love drug stories. I’m captivated by retellings of a k-hole or a night on meth, partially because I am terrified to do drugs myself. That makes me a perfect reader for Henri Michaux. In Miserable Miracle, for example, Michaux attempts to wrangle the boundaries of consciousness that are blown out during an experimental mescaline trip, not just into language, but into the constrictive format of a book, which results in an overspill of marginalia that appears how and when it wants to, as poetry, often without the anchoring punctuation or syntax of a sober state, and sometimes without an apparent relationship to the main text, though it is fun to conjecture. The splashiness feels sort of like a painting– a medium Michaux
also had great success in.
Michaux was a teetotaler, so it made sense for me to read Miserable Miracle during my attempt at going dry last January. I gulped it down like a proxy cocktail, urged onward by the awesome psychic landscape Michaux suffers through at the hands of mescaline, which reveals (and revelation becomes a subject itself) the distance between pain and pleasure, which collapses and reconstructs over and over again– the misery being so miraculous. One of the margin notes serves as a personal mantra I return to often: “in the midst of this unceasing earthquake, I am thinking at the same time of making hugely ascending declarations.”
-Mick Toma