It must have been ten years ago that someone gave me the little book Miserable Miracle (View PDF) by Henri Michaux. An exploration of his first mescaline trips by means of words, signs, and drawings. I couldn’t relate to it at the time, as the monochrome line drawings were too antithetical to what is generally expected of visionary art. Today, however, I agree with those who find his work to be amongst the most accurate descriptions of the psychedelic experience.
Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a Belgian-born French poet, writer, and painter, known for his exploration of the inner workings of the mind and the human experience. Michaux’s poetry and prose reflect a deep engagement with language’s capacity to convey the fluidity of thought and emotion, often defying conventional narrative structures. His visual art, particularly his ink drawings under the influence of mescaline and LSD (he began these experiments at the age of 55), resemble dancing hieroglyph emerging from the force field of the inexplicable.
Painter of poems, writer of spots, dancer of words… Michaux’s work blurs the boundaries between literature, art, and philosophy as self-experiment, making him a key figure in 20th-century avant-garde culture.
Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voixHe who hides his fool, dies speechless
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- Henri Michaux, 1983
