#miserable miracle

[tri-ciclo]

“Reality always falls short of essence. Every child knows that.” ― Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle

[objetpetita]

“On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing... Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux martyrizing the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs, and lines, in the occultations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be re-distributed once more before me, with me, within me, drowned, and unendurably buffeted, my calm violated a thousand times by the tongues of infinity, oscillating, sinusoidally overrun by the multitude of liquid lines. enormous with a thousand folds, I was and I was not, I was caught, I was lost, I was in a state of complete ubiquity. The thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shatterings.”

― Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle

[thinkingimages]

MICHAUX. POÈME MESCALINIEN. 1 P. MANUSCRITE.

Sur cette page d'une grande beauté graphique, l'une des 48 que Michaux décidera de reproduire en fac-similé dans son recueil, on devine ces mots : "Ici un des personnages étaient [sic ?] exténué [? ...] je brûle d'un feu [...] tout entier je brûle j  e  b  r  û  l  e, j    e    b    r    u    l    e..."

[onlyhurtforaminute]

MITHRIDATIC-...FOR TERROR AND THE CROWD

[asctx]

An exploration or an encounter?

an encounter with our own selves, with the known-unknown. The double that wears our own face as its mask. The face that is gradually obliterated and transformed into an immense mocking grimace. The devil. The clown. This thing that I am not. This thing that I am. A martyrissible apparition. And when my own face reappears, there is nobody there. I too have left myself. Space, space, pure vibration.

a window through which we look out upon endless distances where nothing ever meets our eye but our own gaze. There is no I: there is space, vibration, perpetual animation. Battles, terrors, elation, panic, delight:

a confirmation

a testimony

The poet saw his inner space in outer space. The shift from the inside to the outside—an outside that is interiority itself, the heart of reality. A horrible, ineffable spectacle.

I left my life behind to catch a glimpse of life

It all begins with a vibration. An imperceptible movement that accelerates minute by minute. Wind, a long screeching whistle, a lashing hurricane, a torrent of faces, forms, lines. Everything falling, rushing forward, ascending, disappearing, reappearing. A dizzying evaporation and condensation. Bubbles, more bubbles, pebbles, little stones. Rocky cliffs of gas. Lines that cross, rivers meeting, endless bifurcations, meanders, deltas, deserts that walk, deserts that fly. Disintegrations, agglutinations, fragmentations, reconstitutions. Shattered words, the copulation of syllables, the fornication of meanings. Destruction of language.

A return to vibrations, a plunge into undulations.

Heterogeneity, a continuous eruption of fragments, particles, pieces. Furious series. Nothing is fixed. Avalanches, the kingdom of uncountable numbers, accursed proliferation. Gangrenous space, cancerous time. Is there no center? Battered by the gale

sucked up by the abstract whirlwind, the modern Westerner finds absolutely nothing to hold on to. He has forgotten the names, God is no longer called God. The Aztec or the Tarahumara had only to pronounce the name, and immediately the presence would descend, in all its infinite manifestations. Unity and plurality for the ancients. For us who lack gods: Pullulation and Time. We have lost the names. All we have left is “causes and effects, antecedents and consequences.” Space teeming with trivialities. Heterogeneity is repetition, an amorphous mass. Miserable miracle.

The endless production of colors, rhythms, and forms turns out in the end to be an awesome, absurd flood of cheap trinkets. We are millionaires with vast hoards of fairgrounds junk.

Subject to continuous physiological discharges and a pitiless psychic tension. Being split apart. The exploration

like a great fire or an earthquake, was devastating; all that remained intact was the essential, that which, being infinitely weak, is infinitely strong. What name can we give this faculty? Is it in fact a faculty, a power, or is it an absence of power, the total helplessness of man? I am inclined to believe it is the latter. This helplessness is our strength. At the last moment, when there is nothing left in us—when self is lost, when identity is lost—a fusion takes place, a fusion with something alien to us that nonetheless is ours, the only thing that is truly ours. The empty pit, the hole that we are fills to overflowing, and becomes a wellspring once again. When the drought is most severe, water gushes forth. Perhaps there is a point where the being of man and the being of the universe meet. Apart from this, nothing positive: a hole, an abyss, a turbulent infinite. A forsakenness, alienation, but not insanity. Madmen are imprisoned within their madness, which is an ontological error, so to speak: taking the part for the whole. Equidistant from sanity and insanity,

contemplation of the demoniacal and the divine—

—as an indivisible reality, as the ultimate reality. Of man or of the universe? I do not know. Perhaps of the man-universe. Man penetrated, conquered by the universe.

The demoniacal stage of the experiment was above all the revelation of a transhuman eroticism—and therefore infinitely perverted. A psychic rape, an insidious opening and extending and exhibiting of the most secret parts of being. Not at all sexual. An infinitely sensual universe, from which the human body and the human face had disappeared. Not the “triumph of matter” or that of the flesh, but the vision of the reverse side of the spirit. An abstract lasciviousness: “Dissolution—an apt word that I understood instantly. Delight in deliquescence.” Temptation, in the literal sense of the word,

The visible entrails, the reverse side of presence, chaos is the primordial stuff, the original disorder, and also the universal womb.

The vision of chaos is a sort of ritual bath, a regeneration through immersion in the original fountain, a return to the “life before.” Primitive tribes, the early Greeks, the Chinese, Taoists, and other peoples have had no fear of this awesome contact. The Western attitude is unwholesome. It is moral. Morality, the great isolator, the great separator, divides man in half. To return to the unity of the vision is to reconcile body, soul, and the world.

       Inaccessible to impregnations,        Touching everything like the wind,        Everything penetrating it like ether,        He enjoys all joys and nothing defiles him.

Amazement and gratitude. But before that: surges of whiteness. Whiteness everywhere, sonorous, resplendent.

the tranquil, delightful cascade of being did not cease. Admiration: “I cling to the divine perfection of the continuation of Being through time, a continuation that is so beautiful—so beautiful that I lose consciousness—

Trust, faith (in what? simply faith),

Nonvision: outside of actuality, history, purposes, calculations, hate, love, “beyond resolution and want of resolution, beyond preferences,” the poet journeys back to a perpetual birth and listens to “the endless poem, without rhymes, without music, without words, that the Universe ceaselessly recites.”

The words water, music, light, great open space, echoing and re-echoing, inevitably come to our lips. The self disappears, but no other self appears to occupy the empty space it has left.

No faith but rather the primordial feeling that sustains all faith, all hope.

Peace in the crater of the volcano, the reconciliation of man

man is not a mediocre creature. A part of oneself—a part walled in, obscured from the very beginning of the beginning—is open

The so-called human condition is a point of intersection with other forces. Perhaps our condition is not merely human.

[stuckstupor-blog]

I was the fireworks that despises the pyrotechnist, even when it can be proved that it is itself the pyrotechnist. I was being shoved about, I was being crumpled....I was distraught and tired of being distraught, with my eye at this microscope. What was there supernatural about all this? You scarcely got away from the human state at all. You felt as if you were caught and held prisoner in the same workshop of the brain.

Miserable Miracle, Henri Michaux

[kookenhaken]

Where religious practices elevate one gradually with the aid of spiritualising intermediaries, here the Spritual instantly overflows. … With supreme obviousness it becomes clear that the habitual state (which from this moment on seems nothing more than accidental and subsidiary) is, in fact, the prolonged loss of the Infinite, of the Immense, of the Absolute. In it, you can see it now, desertion, incessantly renewed throughout the course of life. You have the impression of a marvellous return … a return to what IS, what has been here in potential since the beginning. … Is it, as it would seem, the fact of “having” that maintains the EGO, HIC ET NUNC, that allows each of us to continue to be individuated?

[tri-ciclo]