Henri Michaux represents a particular type of problem that is woven into the fabric of this project. What is essentially at stake here in a project like this is that I will have a passing understanding of a lot of things and try as hard as I can to bring within myself the ability to know very little about a lot of things. This works for Abelard's letters which are as they state themselves to be. This works for the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong which is a straight forward retelling of the history of her country from a very speciifc experience. This approach does not work for Faulkner or what we have in front us now, Henri Michaux.
First the problem was what to read. As I may state often in this project, the effort itself took and continues to take a great deal of forethought to make sure what I am doing is even remotely worthwhile. So far I think that it is, but that isn't to say that there are no wrinkles in the rug so to speak. When I put together the big book list, I realized that if I only read what was on the list of the Big Book List, then I would never read poetry again. So out of that concern for my reading life, I developed the Small Works List.
I cobbled together from Penguin anthologies, the Norton anthology series (World, American, British, and any other), the Harvard Classics series, the Loeb Literary Classics lists and plently else just the names of authors mentioned in their table of contents. It is hard to know what work they referenced or even where any particular name comes from. I often want to go back and find the original work itself that was listed to see how hilariously off I am but that would take time that I would have to do from the pure pursuit of just finding the author themselves. Because I have no way of knowing what Penguin or Norton thought was significant about a particular writer, I have to find that context myself but I am in a race against time so that these introductory experiences do not color my perception of that author or more specifically that work. I want these works to speak for themselves.
Here is the problem at hand, I pulled the name Henri Michaux. Belgian/French poet (1899-1985). I look at the Wikipedia page just to get a sense of who the person is but I don't read every detail there. Often times what is included in the Wiki can be gossip, rumors, some deeply personal fact that perhaps will only color my impression of the person but not the work, these are complex issues about the art and the artist. I'd like to confront the work first and then the person should I continue to have questions. What I want to find is to read something of a completed work from these 'small works authors'. I want to have a full, self-contained expression of their work instead of a Collected Poems of theirs. With Amy Lowell, she is well known for a handful of poems, but instead of reading those 4 or 5 poems, I found an original volume of one of the books she published during her life time.
Michaux made even that pursuit difficult. He published a great deal during his life, and not much of it touched the rest of his work. He was a visual artist but even that seems difficult to say. He wrote poetry but this poetry is difficult to read. He wrote journals of his experience using mescaline which seem fascinating but again are difficult to read. He wrote some travel writing which I avoided but was probably the most coherent document he put together. I ultimately settled on a collection of writing which seemed to be the authoritative English language work which is called Darkness Moves. I know this violates what I was hoping to do with this project but I requested via I-Share three different books, paged through two of them and kept this volume. I did not read the whole thing, though I read quickly a majority of it. It was difficult to get a sense of, it was also not a place I wanted to spend a lot of time. Michaux seemed to be a troubled person, and his mind is a strange place to try to inhabit. I don't shy away from difficult territory, one of my favorite forms of music is grindcore/death metal/doom metal - I don't mind a difficult encounter, I usually thrive in them, but there was something that put me off of this work.
I watched a lecture given by a translator of Michaux's via Youtube which was fascinating and helped really open up this author to me, but it seemed that this work was really more about revealing the person and purpose to me than actually enjoying the work itself which is not what I set out to do with this project. From here, I decided that I had seen enough and moved on from Michaux. I never close the door to an author, I hope that all 1500 of the small works writers continue to live on in my mind and that of the project's life span throughout this very long work.
The one thing that I took from Michaux and I cannot even find a reliable image of this work online, seriously. It is probably riddled all over French Google, but I have no access to it here - he has a piece called 400 Christs on a Cross (I think) which from the translator's description sounds fascinating. Also, he has another piece called "Alphabet" which suggests the line between reading and viewing is blurred. From what I understand, the work consists of nearly alphabet looking writing is painted on a canvas but is deliberately not recognizable characters, but suggests our alphabet. Then as the list proceeds from left to right in orderly lines like the 26 character alphabet would look to the Western eye, the characters start to become humanoid like figures and so the question becomes what is the difference between reading "art" and viewing "art" where is the viewer in this, what skill, tradition, knowledge, or ability should the viewer have within themselves to be able to decode or view for enjoyment, meaning, whatever. I would love to have a print of this in my office at home but I cannot find a way to gain access to this print of this 'painting'. If you have any leads out there let me know please.
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