December 10, 2000
hanging with Michaux and the laundry
Selection by Henri Michaux:

"I am writing to you from a far-off country"

When you walk in the country, she further confided to him, you may chance to meet with substantial masses on your road. These are mountains and sooner or later you must bend the knee to them. Resisting will do no good, you could go no farther, even by hurting yourself.

I do not say this in order to wound. I could say other things if I really wanted to wound.



Paul Auster, Introduction to The Random House Book of Twentieth-Centry French Poetry:

"As with Artaud, there is an urgency of process in Michaux's writing, a sense of personal risk and necessity in the act of composition. In an early statement about his poetry, he declared:

'I write with transport and for myself.

a) sometimes to liberate myself from an intolerable tension or from a no less painful abandonment.

b) sometimes for an imaginary companion, for a kind of alter ego whom I would honestly like to keep up-to-date on an extraordinary transition in me, or in the world, which I, ordinarily forgetful, all at once believe I rediscover in, so to speak, its virginity.

c) deliberately to shake the congealed and established, to invent ...

Readers trouble me. I write, if you like, for the unknown reader.'"