Henri Michaux, Tent Posts

Having another language, another landscape and relation of one word to another, a faint impenetrability even when you're fluent, just the edge that language ideally has, being language after all, not life. If it has no edge you know you're drowned.

For just such uncertain observations, Henri Michaux is the thing. One of a number of writers who have remained fresh and testing from day one.

Il faut un obstacle nouveau pour un savoir nouveau. Veille périodiquement à te susciter des obstacles, 

A new obstacle requires new knowledge. See about periodically stirring up obstacles,

In the Green Integer edition of Tent Posts (Poteaux d'angle) of a humid evening, I veer about in french and in english. I would translate it the other way around.

For new knowledge you need a new obstacle. Make sure you stir up obstacles on a regular basis,

Maybe they are one and the same. Between the french and the english I get the gist. Ezra Pound thought poetry should be gists and piths. If you periodically skate between languages, gists and piths are your country and you will get on well with Henri Michaux. And Heraclitus. Lucretius. Short paragraphs that begin and end at the same time. Not so much lapidary as pulmonary. The breath of our attention to our life.

La vie, aussi vite que tu l'utilises, s'écroule, s'en va, longue seulement à qui sait errer, paresser.

Life, as quickly as you use it, melts away, disappears, long only to someone who knows how to drift, loaf. 

You can read any paragraph of Michaux and, if you can take all that syntax, you move on wonderfully in your head. In brittle times you need to keep agile. People are axing people in trains, knifing people, battering and ramming people in their rage. You have to be very agile in your responses. There is no safe place, even when listening to Alfred Brendel play Beethoven, Opus 31 number 2.

With a change in the weather and most of the leaves down from the big sycamore outside my window, in the aftermath of Central Asia and the soul tribe: Fragments by Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton.

The soul is undiscovered,
though explored forever
to a depth beyond report.

I used to say to students: read René Daumal's Le Mont Analogue in the light of Heraclitus.

The waking have one world
in common. Sleepers
meanwhile turn aside, each
into a darkness of his own.

Read Proust in the light, in the darkness, of Heraclitus.

Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.

Set Heraclitus as a gauge of whatever you read and see what that gives.

These translations of Heraclitus have lived for the last twelve years among the elite, heterogeneous books on my desk, beside Henri Michaux's Tent Posts and Journey to the Land of the Flies by Aldo Buzzi, to say nothing of the handbook on Cacti and Succulents I bought when I was about twelve, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

Of Heraclitus' writing we have only fragments, an attraction to anyone who wakes up each day feeling that something is missing. You can read them at speed and then go straight back and read again. Lectio divina. Vertical attention. Islands of words. I'm glad I don't know Greek. Though I do, or did, know Latin. Formative reading of Virgil, Catullus, then later Lucretius in English.

In our tired post-post society we're refreshed by ancient forms of language and thought: this much was said and no more.

Of all the words yet spoken,
none comes quite as far as wisdom,
which is the action of the mind
beyond all things that may be said.