Private Chinese

The worst criticism against Aristotle is still this: that he was definitively Aristotle. Before dying, one becomes all bone.

--Henri Michaux

Beatniks, Zen Buddhists, jazz musicians and most modern poets and painters are alike in fearing the bony tyrannies of logic and commitment. They prefer the dark, exuberant "wisdom of the blood," although blood must coil in confinement. To outsiders, the result of this preference is often heady obscurity.

Abstract expressionist painting, for example, remains an impressive enigma, a Venus entirely hidden in furs. Its most revered practitioners, such as Karel Appel, speak boomingly of what they do, but in riddles. In Paris last week a lesser figure in the movement was showing his art and defending it almost eloquently for a change. His eloquence came naturally, for Henri Michaux, 60, began as a poet.

Most of Michaux's life has been spent in travel, half inward and half outward. In youth he bummed gently about the world, dreamily explored the Amazon and the Orient. At 30 he was back in Paris, a gloomy, brilliant ghost of the cafes, pursuing inward journeys with the aid of ether, laudanum, hashish, mescaline, and finally hallucinogenic mushrooms. The first results were poems woven of discordant voices, a child's garden of reverses. They brought him fame, yet small satisfaction. "I am inhabited," he wrote uneasily. "I speak to who I was and who I was speaks to me," and turned away from poetry. Confesses Michaux: "It becomes ridiculous to keep writing I, I, I. People will accept a young man's expression of love, but if you're still harping on it at 50 or 60, they get fed up."

He turned to art with the express idea of making it less communicative than his poems: "I began with artificial handwriting, somewhat like pictographs, hoping by signs to reproduce emotions. Then for a while I did watercolors on black paper, all representing night. They showed clearly the trouble I was having to make something emerge. My art is a form of therapy, for overcoming phenomena. It liberates me and gives me pleasure. After all, in art one seeks pleasure more than in literature." Yet Michaux's art curiously resembles literature; it looks like poems written in a Chinese all his own.

In the exhibition catalogue, Michaux summed up his flight from the world of cause and effect to that of spontaneous imagery: "Can't you see that I paint in order to drop words, to stop the itching of how and why?"

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