Recently unpublished papers found once
again, texts in Journals or brochures, but never recaptured by the author in his major published
journals, here are gathered together about 60 poems by Michaux, which had remained unknown unto this day or at least difficult to be
found. Twelve years after the author's death, a year before the publication of the first volume of a most awaited one for the Pleiade Collection, that work closes its editing trajectory and yet no other remains more open, mobile and calling out in poetry
today.
Micheline Phankim and Anne-Elisabeth Halpern edited these poems following the presumed chronological order of their composition. A trajectory delineates itself which leads from the 20's to the 80's, sweeping the totality of his
work. The most regular reader thus finds once more significant periods or edges marked by a thematics or by specific forms : verbal invention (« An encounter in the forest », « Speaking population language »), trial and exorcism of war (« In Memoriam »), the pain of a broken arm (« Doors overlooking on the fire »), writing in sketches (« A Universe of drawings »), imaginary creatures
(Tchimbou, Oulouba, Aribar, Mulal, Téké …), and so on. Nothing in
here, like in other miscellanies seems approximative, uncertain or unaccomplished as a few « dusty bottoms of drawers » might seem to
be. All these poems are vigorously determined by the very same constant concern to some close to « the problem of being ». They fall in with successive thrusts of writing come from the « space of the inside ». Yet it is also some kind of a working site since Michaux's
work, forever and at every single moment, was digging, excavating and erasing ceaselessly the lines of both language and face : « rasping in the
Muse/rasping in the heart of angels », « whining over gatherings », « verrucas on doctrines », «punches on anonymous voices » … That book, having reached us from beyond the grave, as if it were a posthumous
anthology, more or less chancy, is not the work of the author but rather his work's work whose echoes
propagate, whose paths are being followed and erased, thus reopening
manuscripts. That a few pages here and there should be missing or remain of some kind of unsure
reading, with corrections, variations, sometimes blanks
(at least the editors do warn us thus), here is what doesn't create a flaw but, on the
contrary, the opportunity to reach much closer the very task of writing and its multiplication of passages all over the place. « In the distance » shows the feverish
quest, questioning, searching for the right term, jibbing and protesting endlessly all along Henri Michaux's
work. Through its bent and own logic, it is indeed liable to become an
anthology, not a collection of chosen texts, but, rather, a multifariousness of
approaches. The author of « The space of the inside » insists that « literary genres are enemies who never miss the mark if you missed them on your first blow ». The only thing that matters is to preserve through writing the interlocution of the contradictory and the
uncertain, and reach, whenever possible, some kind of balance. The poetics of distance inflicted or cultivated in aggressive fictions or glossolalia of less recent
texts, gradually turns itself into a poetics of restraint enabling both weightlessness and nearness in the later
poems.
The itinerary thus delineated in this volume that looks as if it had been drawn from all the others
&endash; at least from their working sites and borderlines
&endash; thus moves forward through impulses, sequences and successive
cristallizations. Michaux is there again found deeply concerned with his decisive plan of coming closer to the « problem of being » and variegating to the extreme his speeds,
rhythms, forms and means. It is only a chancy editing project or due to necessity inherent to the logic of the « Work » if such a posthumous book, born of a gathering of pages written at very different
times, however seems altogether to offer a heart. The poem entitled « In the distance », located right at its center and giving its title to the whole (one should here give a complimentary tribute to its editing team) is also its most painful point. Published for the first time in « Le Disque Vert » in 1953, five years after the tragical death of Michaux's
wife, this poem is chronologically in the middle of the
anthology. Without speculating too much on the biographical circumstances that may have inspired his
writing, how can one eschew putting into perspective the posture of remoteness it delineates and the poetics of abuse enacted with the very task of mourning which was the author's lot ? Such a text seems to reverse pain into cruelty to try and exorcize it. Doesn't it precisely attempt at decisively putting in the distance the unbearable promiscuity of the pain of the bereavement inflicted and expressed in « Both of us, still » (a text not to be found in this volume), « Loitering from the world of passion to the world of horror », moving forward through a superimposition of anger to love, transforming affection into an economy of
hate, he manipulates feeling, exasperates mourning, takes care and thus comes even closer to the very distance which the loss of the loved one has
inflicted. A poem on distance or a poem at a distance, it could then serve as a
counter-tomb. It may only be a hypothesis but if it is the case, it would be one of those which Michaux's work entails one to make whenever violence becomes too
extreme, too systematic or too unfair but to lead to a
counter-reading, hearing it backwards as the unhappy expression of a lost
proximity. Even if it may appear as devoid of links with the 1948
loss, this text strengthens the power of exorcism specific to Michaux's poetic writing who makes such an effort in language to keep the environing powers of the hostile world in the distance.
Loitering in the distance, such is Michaux's
behaviour. He is at grip with space, exploring the « far-away insides », always moving the landmarks and
props, shuffling the orders, multiplying in writing both elipses a nd
short-circuits, tensed between lyricism and irony, praising the hiatus, vacancy and inadaptation against the fossilizing style and the regimentation of both signs and
knowledges. Nothing is worse to his eyes than conformity to a style : « a bad sign of unaltered distance ». Reading Michaux means thus « as if by surprise » from one figure to another and witness a vast array of
events. It means becoming the viewer of a fantasmagoria into which everyone is invited to watch himself and recognize his own self.
Even to a reader who has been long familiar to his
work, such a book brings quite a few huge surprises, such as that « Encounter in the forest » which is read as an erotic version of the « Big fight » : »
First, he spies her through the branches / from far, he breathes her in, in
Saligoron, in Nalais/ She, a dreamy fair creature a little vatte », or this long listed dirge entitled «
Somewhere, someone » stating a vast array of identities and ordinary or unseemly actions as if to go round humanity in 160 lines on the mode of the whatever or
whoever.
«
Somewhere, someone is a dog and barks to the moon
Someone is born a Chinese and she's now 17
Someone is is fair and her sister is vivacious and truly petulant
Someone her father is a highlander
Someone … and then it fell upon his kidneys and now it's
over, he says he'd rather die in the hospital
Someone he has big joists on his house
Someone, he wants some more cream but the other one, someone is being quibbled about by the existence of God (…) »
With Michaux, the subject is a crowd both countless and
nondescript. He is never alone in his own skin. He produces bodies and
antibodies. Nothing more plastic than identity nor more
delete. « Erected on an absent column », the ego never stops going out then coming back into the self. Multiplying the tos and
fros, it is however looking for a house, but it has to be a transparent one, built with only one joist and a few
beams, which everything comes through, even the very mud of the
path. Such an attempt to work out a space of personal backup open to all fluxes is declined all along the texts
and, for example, comes to uncover in children's drawings the pattern for a liable setting up at the very heart of a desire of
independence.
« Here an isolated
dwelling, rigid with silence
symmetrical,
orderly, intolerant
but therefrom surges some kind of light, a swift smoke that won't be
caught. »
Trying to catch the aerial disentanglement of such a smoke one can't catch, freed from the nets and admonitions of the earth that would be the ultimate pattern of his
writing, Michaux's poetry creates some unheard of by inventing new
names, striking syllables as if they were drums, doubling the
blows, fleeing in a flurry of feathers, waking itself fluid among
fluids, the brain of a dreaming child, the hoop of child at
play, a plain thread binding the void of being, a makeshift
arm, an unclosed shape endlessly reshapened.
To the structure that traps
it, it substitutes the axis of its own direction. to the absence of
standposts, it replies with the rhythms. To lost identity it replies with a fever of faces. In such a way that distance being such an antidote to promiscuity when all is said becomes the paradoxical mode of
proximity, the shape of some modesty, now oddly vehement but always
understanding. Restraint, dismissal, vacuum, all the several forms of distance and absence condition the access to what quite a few may call some kind of
presence, here called agreement. One of the unpublished poems inserted in this volume called « Murali » doesn't say anything else but this final approach to some kind of peace beyond cracks, to which Michaux's work ceaselessly tried to come close and which he allowed himself to reach by delving deep into the
folds, coils and recesses of the « problem of being » :
« Instantaneous Sunday, almost
a holiday on the spot
deaf to cries
to standstills all over
no more interceptions
and a long lasting ceaseless circuit
substracted to tearings off
a wide communion
where ? how ? nonody cares
a prerequisite here we are
a prerequisite to a wider communion
to a communion it will be impossible to stop
to hold in one way or
other, to lessen, to forget
enchanted restraint has become an echanted blooming
with no ceremony
no clapping
achievement of achievements
with agreement, total agreement
of the heart caught
again, found again, collected
and all around collected too
a resurrection of the capital
a slab, an endless
slab, sacred ( ?)
as if it were weightlessness
far from the barricades
of the frivolous
crossings,
ceilings, floors
and ended, dispelled
repulsions. »
