Sens-Plastique Malcolm de Chazal

 

Introduction

The French writer, painter, and mystic thinker Malcolm de Chazal is little known outside his native island of Mauritius except for echoes of the clamor in Paris that greeted the Gallimard edition of his Sens-Plastique in 1948. This volume, his literary masterpiece, containing about two thousand unnumbered aphorisms, pensées, and longer reflections, was introduced by Jean Paulhan as an original work of genius, a poetry of rude supernatural precision. It was enthusiastically praised by André Breton for its revolutionary oracular truthfulness of statement and as a type of writing without historical precedent. A controversy ensued in the pages of Figaro, Combat, and other journals about whether Chazal’s aphorisms presented an occultist’s view or constituted a new form of surrealism, whether Chazal was writing poems or prose, whether his meanings were to be taken figura- tively or literally. After the Gallimard publication in 1949 of La Vie Filtrée, a collection of essays explaining the principal ideas of Sens-Plastique and elaborating on his methods of thinking and writing, Chazal continued to occupy the literary stage for a while.

Since the 1950s, however, although several later books of his have been published in Paris, most of his writings were issued only under a Madagascan or Mauritian imprint, and Chazal has been largely forgotten abroad.

Malcolm de Chazal comes from a French family that established itself on the island of Mauritius in the 18th century. He was born in Vacoas, Mauritius, in 1902, and except for six years at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where he received an engineering degree, he has remained most of the time in Mauritius. He worked as an engineer on sugar plantations and later for the Office of Telecommunications, retiring at the age of 55. By his own admission, an uneventful life, but teeming with ideas and images that began to take written form in 1940 with the publication in Mauritius of the first volume of his Pensées. In the next five years five more collections of Pensées appeared, consisting in all of almost 3000 numbered passages. In 1945 a seventh volume of Pensées appeared, bound with another collection of aphorisms entitled Sens-Plastique; and two years later a separate Sens-Plastique, volume II, appeared. It was this latter volume on which the Gallimard edition was based and that brought Chazal into prominence in France.

The Pensées and the Mauritian editions of Sens-Plastique have long been out of print. According to the Mauritian writer Camille de Rauville, who quotes from the Pensées in his Chazal des Antipodes, the passages are written for the most part in the moralist tradition of La Rochefoucauld, and it was only in the last two volumes of the Pensées that Chazal’s mind and style began to adopt the aphoristic mode of sensuous intuition that is fully distinctive of his greatest achievement, Sens-Plastique.* What struck Jean Paulhan and André Breton, Denis Saurat, Leopold Sedar-Senghor, and W. H. Auden as astonishing and unclassifiable about Sens-Plastique—to name some well-known literary figures who have written about it—can perhaps be illustrated by a few excerpts.

Half-opened petals give the flower an adenoidal look.

We know the halls of the eye like welcome visitors but we live in our mouth.

Any man who acts singly in the press of a mob will get trampled. Shifting into reverse while making love can kill you.

Immediately before it falls, water turns into a living being as if a person’s soul had just slipped into it: look at the way it bends and twists, writhing in desperation.
(What if you threw a not quite cold corpse out of an airplane—would the dead awaken?...)

Our surprise in reading these observations carries with it a certain uneasiness, a quizzical amazement at their meanings. If the author’s imagination and literary artistry are his prime movers here, then these are probably “poems”—but there is an inscrutable self-assurance in them that at the same time leads us away from their inventiveness and towards the objective world they describe. And this is where Chazal’s status as an illuminatus begins: he is telling us things that we can’t completely follow unless we decide to trust his revelations, trust them even when we fail to understand him completely. In the examples given above, the comparison between flower and face can be recognized wryly and then dismissed as a fanciful truth, on the level of a conceit.

The second comparison, however, merges analogy with identity, reminding us that we live “inside” our own bodies. In the third example, about crowds and sexual love, Chazal is making a more comprehensive statement about the self and otherness.

In the last one we are on the verge of comparison as a metaphysical method, no longer figurative only, a method based on some secret sense of animistic correspondences. When we consider that Sens-Plastique is made up of thousands of such comparisons, it seems likely that for all his strange sense of humor, Chazal intends to be taken seriously and means likeness to be understood as a form of identity: the adenoidal look of the half-opened petal is just as real as it is apparent.

One can make something too much of Chazal’s engineering training, but it should be kept in mind when we consider the kind of information Sens-Plastique contains. The uniqueness of its material and style seems more understandable if we consider the passages to be prose statements of fact, that is, “scientific” observations, rather than prose poems, as they are sometimes taken to be. They are also science fictions, extensions of present knowledge, visionary statements, verbal accounts of a sensory investigation of man and nature, mostly visual but frequently deriving from the other senses. Chazal thinks of his writing as a form of pic- turing in words that demonstrates what he perceives.

He has remarked that after Georges Braque read Sens-Plastique, he wrote to say that the book was “beyond literature,” essentially an album d’images, and that Chazal should take up painting.

He did not follow Braque’s suggestion until 1954. Since the 1960s he has had exhibitions in France and England. The afterword in Camille de Rauville’s commemorative volume represents the opening address by Léopold Sédar-Senghor at an exhibition of Chazal’s paintings, November 22, 1973, at the Musée Dynamique de Dakar. They are vivid, simplified renditions of the Mauritian landscape, especially its flora and fauna, seen as glowing metamorphic emblems.

The mental and spiritual energy that filled the pages of Sens- Plastique led in one direction towards painting and in another towards a number of books which systematized Chazal’s views as a mystical thinker.* A third direction led Chazal towards poetry proper, indicating that only as a colorful, sensuous, impassioned expression in words should Sens-Plastique be considered poetry.

Chazal did not find inappropriate W. H. Auden’s inclusion of excerpts from it in The Viking Book of Aphorisms. But the fact that he also wrote the gnomic verses of Sens Magique as a companion volume in title and subject matter showed his intention to distinguish the form of the aphorism from that of the poem.** The passages in Sens-Plastique consist of assertions about the ways in which all the elements in nature relate to each other, and the language is intended to be simply declarative. Chazal is an empiricist reporting on events in nature, noting correspondences for their own sakes. He recreates their essential unity by looking at “term” one through the eyes of “term” two, that is, by intuitively becoming the second term himself. He is not working with figurative language, metaphors, or similes, but with the things themselves. The writing reads like poetry because it enlarges our sense of possibility, but Chazal here keeps crossing the border between literature and prophecy, language and the ineffable, for the whole enterprise of Sens-Plastique is dedicated to descrying in nature’s oneness exactly how everything may be understood as everything else. Those of us who still find it literature—communicative as well as expressive and symbolic—can none the less think of it as factual writing because, often enough, its psychological truthfulness and accuracy of perception are so impressive. When we are not impressed there is often a doubt whether we haven’t understood rather than that Chazal has got his psychic optics or his arcane physics wrong.

Chazal developed this personal mode of perception slowly, after years of observing physical materials, colors, light effects, time relations, and situations in space, as well as nature in all its forms, notebook in hand as he walked the beaches, fields, and woods of Mauritius. The minute precision of his perceptions of phenomena gives him a semi-professional voice when his subject lies in astronomy, physics, physiology, ethology, horticulture, fashion design, or other supposedly circumscribed fields, in each of which, however, he sometimes speaks with the accents of a Goethe or a Rudolph Steiner: he will not be stopped from unifying science even at the risk of hermeticism. The biographical information that Chazal has never been reluctant to divulge, that one uncle was a Swedenborgian and another a friend of Claude de Saint-Martin, satisfies some of our curiosity about inherited influences.

And critics have of course long since noted that he has brought to some kind of fruition the speculative poetics of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, since Chazal has got closer than any other visionary man of letters to naming the connections between forces and forms, and in one example after another to defining the laws by which correspondences in nature are determined. He has, however, refused to be identified with any previous person or system. To the extent to which Chazal propounds his own system, which he has referred to as Unisme, in his writings of the past thirty years after the publication of Sens-Plastique, he claims to have received a unique revelation as the crowning result of the intuitive methods he pursued in the creation of his masterpiece.
The casual reader would refuse to give Sens-Plastsique a second glance if Chazal’s distinctiveness were merely a matter of his coining a new system—there are too many already—except that so many of his minted pieces look solid and ring sound.

High heels elongate the movement of legs toward the torso, so that the lower part of women’s bodies ends in a birdlike gait at the same time as the upper part of their bodies develops an elephantine waddle.

It is impossible to improve any part of the human body arti-ficially without detracting from the natural grace of some other part.

The scurrying snake sculls with his whole body— which gives him wings. The fish flopping in the grass sculls while running—which gives him legs. Rippling and rolling water flies higher in space.

With branches, stems, petals, flowers, and fruit, it is never a question of right or left because the plant world offers us no cardinal point of view. The only apparent direction is that every branch stands out like a left arm when it looks at us. If it were otherwise we wouldn't see space head-on as we do but in all directions at once whenever we turned its way. If nature gave us an immediate sense of right and left whenever we looked at it, space would simply lie askew to our open eyes.

According to Chazal’s scroll of pictures as it unrolls passage after passage in no predetermined order—observations of air, noses, sex, jewelry, insects, chronology, race, generations, flowers—the natural and the moral world are the same, one makes no sense without the other despite their conventions of distinctness. Sens-Plastique tells us that it is man’s incapacity to encompass the perception of both worlds in one view that creates absurdity and not any gap between the worlds. Sens-Plastique provides us with microscopic and telescopic, infra-red and ultra-violet camera glimpses of this essential unity; and Chazal’s genius lies in his choice of ambush for each view. Hence the form he chose for a collected display: a sequence of separate statements. Anyone can argue convincingly that reality lies behind appearance, but it is not our intellects that need convincing. Poetry, music, and painting argue even better by convincing our imaginations. But one still longs to perceive this reality and Sens-Plastique reports that it is indeed perceptible and flashes it before us.

The green of leaves at early dawn creates in us a sensation of mauve. The eye sees green but the soul sees mauve. The interior realities of colors are absolutely unrelated to their exterior realities. The spiritual body is color-blind to the physical body. If we actually saw vi blue in our soul at the same time as we saw blue in nature, the fusion would be so complete between mind and body that we would suffocate like the strangling man who must live on the pocket of air in his lungs.

We never feel that nature is excessive in anything because color and form are so completely connected: button and buttonhole adjusted by divine fingers. Only manufactured objects strike us as excessive in one way or another, and this arises from the fact that either the buttonhole is too tight or the button “swims” in its moorings.

Chazal is at the opposite extreme of certain dehumanizing and anti-humanist tendencies in modern thought. Instead of disinfecting the natural world to keep it free from human influence and pathetic fallacies, he endows it with the features of that most enig- matic evidence of total symbolism—the human face and form: and at the same time enlarges the human face and form to universal proportions.

A mountain is a mountain, an automobile is an automobile, space is space—we are usually content to regard them as irreducible data, though in dreams and poems they may take on eyes and noses. But to the same degree an eye or a nose is never other than itself either, and although we may sometimes liken eyes to lakes and noses to peaks or bridges, we feel we have failed to grasp their spiritual quality. We suspect that eyes and noses may really be creatures with their limbs tucked under. There is something discrete and discontinuous about them. We should like to give them proper names. We don’t really know the faces of people we know well, although from the gestures of their features we can begin to predict what they are likely to do. Everyone is also a poor amateur of the human face in general: the eyes express the soul, the nose expresses intelligence, the mouth, sensibility, and we leave it at that. The biographer analyzing the pictured representation of his subject in the frontispiece wastes his time; any reader can do as well after he finishes the book.

Chazal is the first of physiognomists because he has been able to trace the profile of each trait or feature by according it the dignity of a self, through a system of physiognomy treated as symbolic of vii the system of a universe in which everything is expressive of everything else. Each feature of the face and form modifies every other one; the human body itself is seen as a distributive form of the face, and each of the five senses is a symbol of the other. Chazal is so sensitive to the multiple implications of facial traits that he can read the personalities even of eyelashes more fluently than other physiognomists have been able to read the eyes and lips of personalities.

The eyelashes are the last of the features to grow old in man. Completely white eyelashes would deactivate the glance, and the eye itself would seem buried in the face just as the landscape seems to go underground after a snowfall. Only the mountain range of the nose would emerge in the heights of the face, an Alp in the naked plains and the featureless skies of the forehead.

Since the human face and form lie at the center of his thought, it is not surprising that Sens-Plastique emerges as the work of a Christian thinker. We are led by statements in passage after passage back to the Incarnation as God’s reminder to man that the correspondence between nature and man is complete, that all of nature is in the human face and form, polarized according to another scheme, and Christ a fusion of all things in time and space whom God exploded on the Cross.

Clothed as they are in gestures, our fingers hide their feelings. Our palms are as naked as light itself, com- municating with the core of the brain. Hence the re- markable truthfulness of the lines of the hand and the miraculous imposition of Christ’s hands—the palms leading to God—by which the Man-God works all his miracles. Do we not assign extraordinary importance to the gesture of blessing, to the total contact of the handshake, to the simple avowal of the hand raised in oath, to the useless washing of Pilate’s hands (the palm being incapable of lying), and to the exposure of the Divine Palm on the cross, a palm whose supreme death throes shine like a lighthouse in the night of God’s agony? Denude your gestures, your voice, and your step and you will feel yourself dressed in light.

Chazal wrote Sens Magique to put the reader into the experience of sensing and perceiving the world as if through the author’s own faculties rather than demonstrating and explaining the reality of it as he does in Sens-Plastique: the pithy verses of Sens Magique represent an existential version rather than an expository one. In Sens Magique the incident itself is presented as the magical moment embodied in verse, the laws of its occurrence are not discussed as they are in Sens-Plastique. It is the difference between

The white
crying
of the lilies
chilled space.
A red bird
flew nigh
and white burst its
vessels.
Summer was snowing.

and

Light-dazzle jacks up space, adding a second storey to our view of things. Indeed, space keeps piling up levels as the breadth of our look increases. Imagine what would happen otherwise: our eyes would tend to see any sudden brilliance of light from behind rather than in front, in a sort of fourth dimensional perspective that would turn us all into seers.

The difference between an aphorism or pensée and a poem is the difference between static and dynamic, an appeal to the reason to recognize and discriminate and one to the imagination to participate. An aphorism brings the subject to you, a poem takes you to it. What is confusing about Sens-Plastique is that it would seem to do both. We smile with pleasure at how Chazal has managed to super-realize his experiences but we still don’t believe that the features are really animals; that flowers have faces; that the senses constitute an interconnecting system; that color is a moral condition of the world; that the sameness of the sun’s light in physics, God’s grace in theology, and the human look in psychology is a fact; and so on. And that is why Chazal wrote Sens Magique: to demonstrate by simplification, having gone as far as he could in Sens-Plastique. By using the form of verse, albeit an open form, he will put you inside the rhetorical vehicle and trans- port you to his magic land of the Sixth Sense lyrically.

The present selective translation of Sens-Plastique is intended to represent Chazal’s great work by characteristic examples. It consists of the complete corrected text of my previous translation, Plastic Sense (1971), with numerous additions translated from the first half of Sens Plastique. It is hoped that the present volume will constitute the first installment of a complete translation of the original work. No attempt has been made to translate the original title, which the previous publisher’s rendering, Plastic Sense, misrepresented over my objections and to the author’s dismay. As Chazal himself has noted, he wanted sens to refer to the alchemy of the senses and plastique to call art into mind.

Although the reader may dip into Sens-Plastique at any point without missing the author’s purpose—for only rarely does a particular subject fill successive passages—it should be noted that the passages tend to become longer as the work progresses, and the translation follows the order of the original. I have tried my best to capture the imagistic exactness of each selection by searching for an idiomatic and structural equivalent in English without departing too far from Chazal’s stylistic intentions, and I have been greatly helped by the author’s encouragement. He has been kind enough to say that my English reads more forcefully than the French. I hope that any advantage I may give to the reader of this translation has not been gained at the expense of misconstruing the original.

I am indebted to the State University of New York Research Foundation for some of the financial support that enabled me to translate this work.

Irving Weiss Pine Bush, New York November, 1979

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

Our organs nurse at our veins like infants at the breast. Blood is cellular milk. In fact, adult or aged man, whether we suck, chew, or gulp our mixture, our entire life on earth is a physiological activity at the sucking bottle of ourselves. Organically we are our own mother-and-child; and in the infinity of things, in Absolute Allness, we suck from God Himself.

The act of love is a greyhound race of desire in which the pursuer collapses in front of the finish line, always short of his prey.

There is far north, yonder, far south, and here is the equator of words.

Every flower is a Mona Lisa following our glance whenever we look at it.

The flower is all woman: mouth, breasts and vagina—sex’s three-in-one.

Animals exemplify whatever is natural, except when domesticated.

Grey puts the mind to sleep as brown the nerves. Whenever you feel indolent, give your mind a jolt of red and your nerves a dash of yellow.

The mouth is the starting point of laughter, with the eye its destination. Long after the mouth is exhausted the eye continues to laugh.

Light is never dirty except in the human glance.

No matter how plain or common her other features, a superb look in her eyes will turn any woman into a queen.

The beams of the eye can develop a kind of psychic force as circus trainers certainly know, who make use of it to overpower wild animals. Once we come to understand the inner mechanism of this force we will be able to use it on infinitely more sensitive forms of life, such as flowers. The flower held in our penetrating glance will then be set in motion by the transfusion of this invisible charge until it obeys us on its stem, dipping and bowing like a robot plane.

Goodness is a civilizing force. Think of all the saints who were peasant girls to begin with and ended as grandes dames!

Adultery is a stimulant to men but a sedative to women.

Exercise develops all the muscles except those of the face which regulate the traction of the features. This is because the psychic forces controlling the face are completely unlike those that control the rest of the body and force the laws of physiology slightly out of orbit.

In prehistoric ages time was an idea of secondary importance in life. Man was so overly occupied then that he lived immersed in the present. Boredom invented the clock and the clock increased boredom. Idleness, which banished man from the present and uncoupled him from life, gave him a sense of time as something exterior to himself, like a person on the bank watching the river flow beneath his feet. Since those distant ages when time flowed freely within us it has fled our soul and become our own jailer.

Passion cannot survive without an audience. Romeo and Juliet as castaways would have set up petty housekeeping in no time.

A woman’s heart is her sex in slow motion; her sex is a thumping heart.

Dressed in fig leaves they looked more naked than ever. A flower is most naked amid its leaves. Without them it looks rather asexual.

What you hear in the voice of the seashell is the waves whispering in the wind’s ear.

The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it’s private property.

We can put up with our body twitching at night, but not our mind.

Goodness civilizes the intelligence.

A look of indifference is a perpetual goodbye.

Intelligent people laugh quickly and smile slowly. A slow mind lengthens the laugh and shortens the smile.

Well-being is quantitative for animals, as it is for all graceless sensualists.

The ideas of some men are mainly versions of their bodies, like animals of the same species.

An animal’s sense of time depends on whether he is famished or full. All animals react to time in the same way on an empty stomach but each according to his digestive rhythm after eating.

A woman’s girdle is like one of those highly decorated picture-boxes of chocolates that promises so much more than it has inside.
The imbecile writes his look in space with painstaking penmanship so that everyone may understand what his face intended. An intelligent man’s look is finely inscribed right in his own eye while it shapes vaguely symbolic linguistic characters in space as though to keep his intention to himself.

The eyes of an honest man are yoked together and in step. In the look of a hypocrite his face seems to veer this way and that as the eyes keep changing step, like two draught animals refusing to pull together.

The act of love is a mutual birth delivery between two carnal tombs in the desert cemetery of the spirit.

Copulating in love: one is unanimously and unitarily two.
Copulating without love: one is alone and three.

“Ah” is the shortest as “oh” is the longest of human cries. Man is born in an “ah” and dies in an “oh,” for birth is immediate and death is like an airplane taking off.

Where seduction is concerned man is the better strategist, woman the superior tactician.

Plenty of diplomats are better and more ingenious at telling lies than certain women—but there isn’t one who can do it faster.

The average man becomes insane when his mind gets “all mixed up.” The genius goes mad when his imagination expands to the point of blotting out reason and memory, loosening their ties to reality the way a sheet of air rising too high or too quickly consumes the air around it, creating a vacuum and digging its own grave in the wild column of the vortex.

A thousand today where there was only one yesterday—but there will be as many hopes and desires tomorrow as there are tomorrows.

Is there any worse misfortune than to feel the body aging long before the spirit? Torture equal to the anguish of the snail who suddenly realizes how imprisoned he is in his shell.

Two is civility, three is mediocrity, ten is vulgarity, and then the mob takes over, the more the uglier. The day we all become aristocrats will mean the end of aristocracy.

An anonymous crowd often intensifies our moral solitude but it has the tonic effect of making us feel more at home in our own bodies. Crowds are especially good for people who are physically dissatisfied with themselves. Women who lament the passing of their beauty should forget about cosmetics and milk baths and simply immerse themselves in crowds.

Once upon a time opinions amounted to no more than a local disease—in those happy days when communications were so poor that intellectual plagues never exhausted their own backyards.
But as soon as books began to circulate, the set opinions of any one place swarmed across the nearest frontiers everywhere and tidy little Eastern ideas headed West, passing on the way a crowd of tidy little Western ideas going East—the way the Near East and Europe exchanged diseases during the Crusades. Books are stepping stones for those who are intellectually agile but treacherous surfaces for the rest of mankind, who lose their critical footing easily and drown in a welter of ready-made ideas. Books are really useful only to people with a talent for thinking.

Animals wake up first facially and then bodily. Men’s bodies wake up before their faces do. For the animal sleeps inside his body, whereas man sleeps with his body in his mind.

The sexual act is a letter unanswered, a bottle forever adrift in the ocean. It is the only kind of one-way impact. The river never returned to its source. The only absolutely unrecapturable thrill in life.

Think of all those who turn religious because they’ve given up all hope of enjoying life—like a woman disappointed in love taking the first man that comes along just in order to settle down for good.

In committee meetings humor is more important than ideas.
The man who can make others laugh gets more votes behind a measure than a man who forces others to think.

Lovemaking is a single-dish banquet for a man, but all of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper for a woman.

The overreaching mind devours the senses and the senses too far indulged consume the mind. Philosophers end as emotional infants. Don Juan ends with the mind of a little boy.

Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.

The real criterion of intelligence is our individual capacity to define it.

The sweetening effect of goodness on the human face is so great that certain acts of goodness are better than a facial massage.

Like the sun, greatness needs no proof: everybody recognizes it.

Tears are an aphrodisiac only at twenty.

As soon as the Devil walks the earth as an imaginary being, religion is ready to collapse.

If we didn’t talk so much about what was wrong with everything, we wouldn’t be so conscious of defects. If you invoke the devil, you end up by finding him there before you.