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Henri Michaux – Miserable Miracle Mescaline

Mescaline makes images with, or out of, feelings one is not aware of, and Mescaline reveals, ... ideas which one does not detect until later, in the same way it makes images out of music one does not know and out of rhythms one does not hear...........

..........Anyone who takes hashish as an experiment witness after taking mescaline leaves a racing automobile or a long distance electric locomotive for a pony.  A pony, however, is capable of surprises not to be looked for in a locomotive.........

......Hashish does not only make pictures.  It commits acts.  Its pictures themselves are not made up so much of the images suggested to it as of the desires with which you have unconsciously filled them, and by which, unknown to you, they are affected.  For unlike you, he dares, he acts, and what acts!

Acts that are not yours but which you cannot altogether disown either.  They come from you, as their elements prove.  They are just beyond the point where you halted through fear, not knowing it was through fear, not knowing you had halted.  Now you understand.  His act is invention.  To imagine is to offer a new solution.. he makes me commit the act. The devil has succeeded …....

I see a furrow.  A furrow with little hurried, transversal sweepings.  In it a fluid, its brightness mercurial, its behaviour torrential, its speed electric.  Seemingly elastic too.  Swish, swish, swish it rushes along showing innumerable little tremors.  I also see stripes.  Where is this furrow exactly?  It is just as though it were crossing my skull from my forehead to the occiput.  Yet I can see it.  A furrow without beginning or end, as tall as I am and whose average breadth is appreciably the same above and below, a furrow that I would say comes from one end of the earth, goes through me and on to the other end of the earth.  My body's envelope floats freely around the furrow (how can it!?), enormous balloon containing this little river, for this great furrow when I try to see my body at the same time is only a rivulet, but still lively, untamed, champagne and spitting cat.   An immense space between my body and the furrow, with the furrow running through the middle......... so then I contain the furrow, except at its extremities which disappear in the distance, and yet it is myself, each of my instants, one after the other, flowing in its crystalline flux...............

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 martyrising the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs and lines, in the occulations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be redistributed 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.....................

And white appears.  Absolute white.  White whiter than all whiteness.  White of the advent of white.  White without compromise, by exclusion, by the total eradication of non-white.  White, mad, exasperated, shrieking with whiteness.... white atrociously electric.... white in blasts of white.  God of white....

Himalayas all at once spring up higher than the highest mountain, sharply pointed; but false peaks, diagrams of mountains, though not less high for all that, inordinate triangles, with angles ever more acute, to the very edge of space, idiotic but immense.