Translator's Introduction
400 Men on the Cross
Watchtowers on Targets
Peace in the Breaking
Henri Michaux: One of the most influential French writers and
visual artists of the twentieth century, Belgian-born Henri Michaux
(1899-1984) was known for his continual journeys into perception
and consciousness. Throughout the almost sixty years of his
creative life, Michaux published over thirty books of poems,
narratives, essays, travelogues, journals and drawings. His visual
work was shown in central museums of Europe and the United States,
including the Guggenheim in New York and the National Museum in
Paris. In 1960 he was awarded the Einaud Prize at the Biennale in
Venice. Five years later, he refused the French Grand Prize for
Letters as a protest against the award culture in the arts.
Throughout both his visual and literary work, one can trace the
struggle for, and his disappointment in not finding, a universal
language through gesture, mark, sign, and the word.
Gillian Conoley: Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas. She is
the author of seven collections of poetry. Editor and founder of
Volt magazine, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma
State University. She lives with her family in a small town just
north of San Francisco.
"Michaux remains difficult to classify-he wrote verse and prose that is alternately Surrealist, essay-like, fantastical, fabulist, and psychedelic ... [Gillian] Conoley turns Michaux's French into alert, fluid English to match the enface French: it's both a puzzle, and a pleasure, to follow along."-Publishers Weekly "Thousand Times Broken is an inventive and aptly hallucinatory collection of texts and images that offers a glimpse into the astonishingly un-minimal oeuvre of one of the twentieth century's mysteriously obscure giants. Published alongside the French original text, Conoley's work is an act of devotion to this looming figure of international art and letters, and captures the uncanny and occasionally violent pilgrimage undertaken by the "rationalist mystic" artist ... [T]he intensity of Michaux's desire to truly say something causes Thousand Times Broken to radiate with a fierce and humorous humanity; it is a portrait of a flawed creature, seeking and sometimes hitting upon the edges of the secret that Michaux has spent a lifetime chasing after."-Music & Literature "In the mid-1950s the Belgian-born writer and artist Henri Michaux experimented with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. He continued taking it, on and off, for eleven years and wrote several books about it, describing, as accurately and objectively as possible, his experience of being on the drug, his heightened sense of awareness, but also his loss of selfhood. These themes were already apparent in Michaux's surrealistic, pre-mescaline writings, but mescaline confirmed his view that below our everyday perception a swirling chaos surrounds us at all times, could we but see it. He wanted us to see it, to share in this vision, and he used his considerable talents as an artist and poet to lay bare this hidden reality. Thousand Times Broken brings together three previously untranslated books composed during the period of Michaux's mescaline experiments; here skillfully translated by the poet Gillian Conoley and presented in a bilingual edition, with illustrations."-Ian Pindar, Times Literary Supplement "Henri Michaux's Thousand Times Broken: Three Books may be comprised of writing and art from 1956-1959 centered around his experimentation with mescaline, yet it easily exceeds initial expectations that fact might arouse ... Michaux's mescaline use takes a backseat to his greater subject: exploration of opening up the physical and mental confines of human consciousness as exemplified by visual art and written word ... Michaux's visual art serves as a guiding principle behind [Gillian] Conoley's organization of Thousand Times Broken ... Michaux's work provides a fascinating and unique glimpse of the inner workings of human consciousness yet somehow he himself manages remain at once outside of it. He's not alien, just other."-Patrick James Dunagan, Bookslut "The reader is asked to switch between seeing and reading, and the effect is to keep the mind alert to the shifting nature without letting any single image become too static ... [Gillian] Conoley has done a very important service to English students of literature and the drug-writing tradition by translating these works for the first time. A fantastic effort that, by displaying the original French as well, leaves the text as open as perhaps Michaux always intended his works to be."--Psychedelic Press UK "Henri Michaux's mescaline writings are celebrated for the freedoms they take, and rightly so. But the more one reads Michaux, the more he emerges as a poet who masters his essential difficulties, achieving not only ecstatic dissolutions but stabilities earned against the odds. His work comprises a protective strategy----a wavering sense of self-identity mitigates one's fear of others. At the same time, he spends himself. His claim on us-and he is not so selfless as to not stake a claim -- depends on our doing the same. Despite what we learned in Zoology 101, fight or flight are not the only alternatives. One can also take the drug and lie down before the beast."-Ron Slate, On the Seawall
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