Michaux - The Passion of the Exhaustive

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Michaux would take me regularly to the Grand Palais, where all sorts of scientific films were shown — some curious, others technical, impenetrable. To tell the truth, I was intrigued less by the projections than by the interest my friend took in them. I could not understand the motive behind so obstinate an attention. How, I kept wondering, did a mind so vehement, so oriented toward itself, in perpetual fervor or frenzy, manage to be attracted by demonstrations so meticulous, so scandalously impersonal? It was only later, brooding over his explorations of drugs, that I understood what excesses of objectivity and rigor Michaux could achieve. His scruples were to lead him to a fetishism of the infinitesimal, of the imperceptible nuance, as much psychological as verbal, endlessly recapitulated with a breathless insistence. To reach vertigo by investigation, that seemed to me the secret of his enterprise. Read, in L’Infini turbulent, the page where he describes himself as “pierced by white,” where everything is white, where “hesitation itself is white,” and “horripilation” no less. After that there is no more white: he has exhausted white, he has killed white. His obsession with the bottom of things makes him brutal: he liquidates appearance after appearance, not sparing one; he exterminates them by engulfing himself in them, by pursuing them precisely to their bottom — that bottom which is nonexistent, radically insignificant. . . . One English critic has found these soundings “terrifying.” For me, on the contrary, they are positive and exalting in their impatience to disintegrate and to pulverize — by which I mean to discover and to know, truth in anything being merely the consummation of a sapping operation.

Though he classified himself among those who are “born tired,” what has he ever done but flee delusion, excavate, search? Nothing, it is true, is so tiring as the effort toward lucidity, toward the vision without mercy. Apropos of a famous contemporary fascinated by that universal gangrene, History, he one day used a revealing expression: “spiritual blindness,” Michaux himself, on the contrary, is someone who has abused the imperative to see within and around himself, to get to the bottom not only of an idea (which is easier than one thinks) but of the merest experience or impression: has he not subjected each of his sensations to a scrutiny that includes everything — torture, jubilation, will-to-conquest? This passion to apprehend himself, this exhaustive coming-to-consciousness, leads to an ultimatum he ceaselessly addresses, a devastating incursion into the darkest zones of his being.

It is from such a given that we must envision his revolt against his dreams, and the need he feels, despite the hegemony of psychoanalysis, to minimize them, to denounce them, to lay them open to ridicule. Disappointed by them, he delights in punishing them and in proclaiming their emptiness. But the real reason for his fury is perhaps less their nullity than their total independence of him, the’ privilege they enjoy of escaping his censorship, of hiding, of mocking and humiliating him by their mediocrity. Mediocre, yes, but autonomous, sovereign. It is in the name of consciousness, of becoming conscious as an exigence and a duty, and also out of wounded pride, that Michaux inculpates and calumnies them, that he lodges an indictment against them, a veritable challenge to the enthusiasms of the period. By discrediting the performances of the unconscious, he rids himself of the most precious illusion in circulation for over half a century.

All interior violence is contagious; his more than any other. One never leaves his presence demoralized. And it is of little consequence after all whether one frequents him assiduously or only on occasion, from the moment when, in all essential circumstances, one tries to imagine his reaction or his remarks: solitary, omnipresent, he is always there . . . , forever inseparable from what counts in an existence. This long-distance intimacy is possible only with an obsessive who is capable of impartiality, an introvert who is open to everything and disposed to speak of everything (even of current affairs). His views on the international situation, his diagnoses of political matters, are remarkably just and often prophetic. To have so exact a perception of the external world and at the same time manage to apprehend delirium from within, to traverse its many forms, to appropriate them, so to speak — one can accept this anomaly, so captivating, so enviable, as just that, without seeking to understand it. Yet I am going to suggest a necessarily approximate explanation. Nothing is more agreeable, at least for me, than a conversation with Michaux about sickness. It is as if he had anticipated and feared all diseases, expected and fled them. . . . Any one of his books is a procession of symptoms, of threats glimpsed and in part made actual, infirmities pondered again and again. His sensibility to the diverse modalities of disequilibrium is prodigious. But politics, that sub-Promethean temptation, what is politics but a permanent and exasperated disequilibrium, the curse par excellence of a megalomaniac monkey? The least neutral mind, the least passive I know, could not help but be interested in politics, if only to wield his sagacity or his disgust. Writers in general, when they comment upon current events, display a laughable naïveté. It is important, it seems to me, to cite an exception. I believe I caught Michaux only once in flagrante delieto, not of naïveté (he is psychologically unfit for it) but of “good feelings,” of confidence, of abandon, of something I translated at the time into terms it may be useful to give here:

“I admired him for his aggressive clear-sightedness, for his denials and his phobias, for the sum of his aversions. Last night, in the little street where we had been talking for hours, he told me, with quite an unexpected touch of emotion, that the idea of man’s ultimate disappearance moved him. . . . Whereupon I left him, convinced I should never forgive him for that commiseration and that weakness.”

If I extract this unspeakably naive note from an undated diary, it is to show that at the time what I especially prized in him was his incisive, tense, “inhuman” aspect, his explosions and his sneers, his flaying humor, his vocation as a convulsionary and a gentleman. Indeed, it seemed secondary that he was a poet. One day he confessed, I remember, that he sometimes wondered whether he was one. That he is a poet is obvious, but it is conceivable that he might not have been one.

What he is, much more obviously, I understood when I realized that as a young man, contemplating entering the priesthood, he devoured the mystics, I assert as fact that had he not been one himself, he would never have launched himself so methodically, so desperately, in pursuit of extreme states. Extreme, this side of the absolute. His works on drugs proceeded from the dialogue with the mystic he originally was, a repressed and sabotaged mystic waiting to take his revenge. If we were to collect all the passages in which Michaux deals with ecstasy, and if we were to suppress all references in them to mescaline or any other hallucinogen, would we not have the impression of reading explicitly religious experiences, inspired and not provoked, and deserving to figure in a breviary of unique moments and dazzling heresies? The mystics aspire not to subside into God but to exceed Him, swept on as they are by something remote, by a delirium of the ultimate, which we encounter among all those who have been visited and submerged by trance states. Michaux joins the mystics through his “inner gusts,” his longing to attack the inconceivable, to force it, to break it open, to go beyond, without ever stopping, without retreating before any danger. Having neither the luck nor the misfortune to weigh anchor in the absolute, he creates his own abysses, provoking ever new ones, plunges into them and describes them. These abysses, it may be objected, are only states. No doubt. But for us everything is a state, and nothing but a state, consigned as we are to psychology ever since we were forbidden to wander in the Supreme. . . .

A true mystic, yet an unrealized one. We understand Michaux insofar as he has undertaken everything in order not to conclude, keeping his irony at the very extremities to which his researches have led him. When he has reached some limit-experience, an “impure absolute” where he vacillates, where he no longer knows where he has come out, he never fails to resort to a familiar or comical turn of phrase, in order to make it clear that he is still himself, that he remembers that he is experimenting, that he will never completely identify himself with any of the moments of his quest. In all of these simultaneous excesses cohabit the ecstatic outbursts of an Angela di Foligno and the sarcasms of a Swift.

It is admirable that a man so constituted to destroy himself should have lived for many years in full possession of his vitality. “I take out the old man . . . , his damn body that breaks down, to which he clings so, our one body for the two of us,” he writes in 1952, in Vents et Poussières. Always that interval between sensation and consciousness, always that superiority over what he is and over what he knows. . . . Thus he has managed, in his metaphysical perturbations — in his perturbations tout court — to remain, by the obsession of knowledge, external to himself. Whereas our contradictions and incompatibilities eventually subjugate and paralyze us, Michaux has succeeded in making himself the master of his, without slipping toward sagesse, without being swallowed up by it. All his life he has been tempted by India — merely tempted, fortunately, for if by some fatal metamorphosis he had ended by yielding to such enchantments, beclouded, he would have abdicated his prerogative of possessing more than one flaw that leads to wisdom and yet at the same time being fundamentally refractory to it. What a catastrophe had he taken to Vedanta, or to Buddhism! He would have left his gifts there, his faculty for excess. Deliverance would have annihilated him as a writer: no more “gusts/” no more torments, no more exploits. It is because he has not lowered himself to any formula of salvation, to any simulacrum of illumination, that frequenting him is so stimulating. He offers one nothing, he is-what he is, he has no recipe for serenity, he continues, he feels his way, as if he were beginning. And he accepts one, on condition that one offers him nothing, either. Once again, a non-sage, a non-sage on his own. It astonishes me that he has not succumbed to so much intensity. It is true that his intensity is not of that accidental, fluctuating kind which is manifested in fits and starts: constant, lawless, it resides in itself and relies upon itself, it is inexhaustible precariousness, “intensity of being,” an expression I borrow from the language of the theologians, the only one suitable to designate a success.

From: ANATHEMAS and ADMIRATIONS

BY E. M. CIORAN

Michaux or rare indeed are the madmen equal to madness

 The Waking Zone.

 The above observations of micro-operations* in rapid action, noticed and recorded as they are happening, require tremendous accuracy of perception. It is remarkable that, in spite of all the mental turbulence of the micro-operations, this wakefulness and precision is completely available during the second state. Michaux called this function of intelligence an “incorruptible observer”: “All is madly shaken. All or almost all, because at the same instant, a new, hitherto unknown watchfulness is there, installed, observing, reflecting . . . purely me, a separate me, irreducible me, beside the mistreated, fragmentary, intermittent one.”47  This acute awareness appears to function almost unaffected by mental speed and has an unshakable capacity to discriminate the micromoments of experience. It is on this “waking zone” that all recovery depends.

During the hallucinogenic experience there are moments, sometimes long moments, when there is a direct perception, a direct “knowing” of the waking zone. It happens most strikingly when there is a “slowing of associations,” as Michaux called it. Thoughts may entirely cease. It has been likened to entering a calm sea or the relaxation after the struggle of birth, of truly being on earth or in the true depths of oneself. It is sometimes described as being pristinely clear to the extent that the cause and effect of all activity happening in the realm of mind is illuminated. This experience is usually overlooked and ignored by everyone around the person having it. Professionals, especially, dismiss these experiences as having no value, of being only further “imaginings.” Yet the one who experiences the waking zone as being at the very core of existence feels it as a momentous event of life-changing and “spiritual” proportions.

A psychotic episode may contain within it the beginnings of a spiritual breakthrough. The spiritual qualities of extreme mental states are real and powerful, and they are part and parcel of the pain, confusion, and dangerous quality of madness. To devalue or negate these spiritual aspects is to devalue or negate the person who experiences them, for these qualities are inseparable from the person. That is the true definition of stigma—a devaluation or negation that marks as shameful those qualities that are in a person's heart. 48

It is almost impossible to chemically obliterate this awareness. But it can be obstructed. It can be clouded over, or made dysfunctional by a variety of conditions. For instance, there can be an extreme swing of the pendulum toward slowing down. Just as the speed of mind can be seem-ingly infinitely accelerated, so it can be decelerated, to the point of com-plete “numbness” or
total inertia. 49  Thus, the waking zone needs to be protected, supported, and strengthened during the turmoil of the micro-operations. Recognizing both the existence and the vulnerability of this waking zone is therefore of critical importance to an intelligent administration of powerful mind-altering “antipsychotic” medications.

What happens within the waking zone that makes it so indispensable to recovery? It precisely separates and distinguishes between the appearances of mental events. It is attentive without bias or distortion. It can recognize what is happening within the mind for what it is, whether sane or insane. It focuses particularly on a fundamental quality of mind, the impermanent nature of the field of consciousness.

During the speed of the second state, no phenomenon of mind is brought to as much painful realization as the impermanent flux, the continual arising and dissolving of mental worlds and apparitions. This impermanence is also responsible for the momentary breaks in what might otherwise be an unbearable intensity:

No matter what the spectacle you were watching in your vision . . . it will suffer a general overthrow. Another composition will take its place, will be developed, will be repeated until a new upheaval occurs and your attention will turn to the next sight. It is then that you give a low sigh, a sigh of extreme relief which is very moving to anyone who hears it and understands. But the new presentation will follow without delay. Here it comes: it emerges, grows distinct, is developed, is manipulated, changes, multiplies, then in turn, when its time has run out, it collapses and is not seen again.50

The shock-substance is not creating this spectacle of “change.” It simply allows what is ordinarily taking place to be unveiled in agonizing clarity. Many people who have not necessarily been in extreme mental states have spoken of the inherent and fundamental role of the impermanent nature of mind. It is crucial to early Greek philosophy, to the Hindu and Buddhist meditative traditions, to the philosophy of Nietzsche, and, in its most abstract form, to modern physics.51

In its most subjective form, impermanence is dazzling. It gives no quarter. Michaux called it the “torture of what is unstable,” and it is at the very center of the infinitizing machinery. This fundamental situation of chaos is itself represented, is itself theatricalized in hundreds of ways. A deluge of images dramatizes what is happening. Here is one of Michaux's “field notes,” called “The Razor of Impermanence”:

Dazzling scythes of light, scythes set in flashes of lightning, enormous, made to cut down whole forests, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, miraculously swift strokes which I am forced to accompany internally, painfully, at the same unendurable speed and up to the same impossible heights, then immediately after-wards down into the same abysmal depths, with the ruptures even more and more monstrous, dislocating, insane . . . and when it is going to end . ..if it is ever going to end? . . . Finished. It's finished.52

Impermanence in excess and the chaos of losing orientation are translated into bodily feelings of huge extension. The sense of the body loses its limits: transformed into another body, or into an abstracted body, one without restraint, or released from measure and restriction, in a delirium of vastness. The mental mechanism, following the body's delirium, is also repeatedly drawn to the infinite: “an impression familiar to dozens and hundreds of unsuspecting, dumbfounded mescaline experimenters, which has it equivalents in several mental illnesses and ranges far into unreality and megalomania.” 53 The razor of impermanence is the most cutting blade of all the micro-operations within the infinitizing machinery.

Overbearing metaphysical convictions abound. In the second state Michaux is in a chasm of reaching for divinity (a “theomania,” as he calls it) and he claims direct contact with a palpable infinite. Everything leads him to it:

a certain metaphysical banality consisting of the common human basis of thought that instantly transmutes itself into beliefs bearing on Immensity, Eternity, Immortality. The Absolute. Immanence. What is beyond Time, Space, the accidental, the phenomenal.54

It must never be forgotten, Michaux warns, that all these disorders occurring to someone in the second state are the results of “innumerable little internal ambushes,” which only later becomes visible to others. Even when he is delirious, said Michaux, “he creates and manifests a disorder much less acute than the multiple minute disorders that hack him, shake him, unbalance him from all sides.”55

Michaux expressed this further in his poetry:

Firing
Firing in the head
firing which doesn’t stop.

Collapse
Outside became too strong

A man standing in a corner of the room
suddenly there
suddenly disappeared

Sabotages
innumerable little sabotages56 

The critical factor for being able to protect one's mind during madness is the recognition of impermanence. Madness is a violent lesson in impermanence. The basic fact of the inevitable decay and death of every aspect of life is terrifyingly highlighted during the second state. If recognition of this is resisted, denied, or repressed, it causes tremendous psychological tension and a recurring escalation in the wildness of mind.57 A final chasm-situation might evolve: “The infinitization, the perpetuation, the atomization, the undifferentiated fragmentation, aggravated by the antagonistic and conflicting agitation which reduces everything to absurdity, permits nothing but ambivalence, reiterations, obstinacy, refusal, and an inhuman detachment.”58  Detachment may be the result, becoming “chronic” psychosis, the psychosis of arrest, where many simply “let go,” and live and mean to live on the “other side.”

One wonders how many sufferers are able to learn this. After all, said Michaux, “Rare indeed are the madmen equal to madness.” But it is possible, it has been done: “In the huge organism that a human being is, there always remains a waking zone, which collects, which amasses, which has learned, which now knows, which knows differently. “59

* The Infinitizing Machine

As the second state is entered, the ordinarily silent micro-operations begin to spring to life. Their “cover-up,” by the usual lumbering and meandering activity of forming a thought, is lifted. They compel and command attention.
It can feel like the micro-operations are slicing through the mind. In gigantic, razor-sharp “Zs” the undulations come, zig-zagging, severing, dissecting, disconnecting, and showing the molecu-lar structure beneath:

Everything in thought is somehow molecular. Tiny particles that appear and disappear. Particles in perpetual associations, dissociations, reassociations, swifter than swift, almost instantaneous 33

The Speed of Mind. The sense of energy, like a wind reaching gale force, is a common theme in the life of all who have lived in the second state. To them, a “speed,” of which they had no comprehension in their normal state, at first thrills them, and then dislocates them. This ubiquitous phenomenon of insane speed has been described in a number of different ways, but mostly in terms of its effects and consequences. Here, with Michaux, we are examining the nature of mind-speed itself. What is the origin of this speed, so infamous to every species of madness, and what are its characteristics?

First, the speed is already there. Anything that moves one into the functioning of the second state reveals it rather than creates it:

A speed now seen as much more considerable than previously supposed, an intensity which brings to perception the images (and micro-impulses) otherwise imperceptible, vague and remote. The drug makes the subject conscious of many other transitions and also of desires, which become sudden, violent, lightning-like impulsions.34

Man is composed of many different speeds happening simultaneously, but usually we are aware of only a narrow band of speeds, the ones we can comfortably attune to. The speed band of the micro-operations is beyond our everyday ability to observe. The ponderous speed of language—a summation of thousands of high-frequency thought processes that give birth to content and grammar—is hopelessly inadequate to describe the rapid conduction systems of the micro-operations. Meanwhile, for all of us, words and sentences calmly pass over abysses of speed: “Let us not be fooled by them. Man is a slow being, who is possible only as a result of fantastic speeds. His intelligence would have long since divined this, were it not for the very operation of intelligence.”35  For Michaux, perhaps not everyone is always so far from the real mental speed. He suggested that idiots savants and lightning calculators, those who are prodigious for their speed, somehow manage to take advantage of the ultramental speed—the fast circuit—and can enter into a direct relation with it.

The micro-operations are neither good nor bad, sane nor insane; they are simply the essential building blocks of our “macromind” abilities (of discrimination, of “holding in mind,” of following through, of imagination). We cannot function well without them. However, they are a potential problem, an enormous problem if one does not relate to them properly. Normally, they are ignored, taken for granted. In the drugged condition, they are forced into awareness; there is a direct confrontation with the reality and configurations of ultraspeed. The one who enters the second state has no choice, he must enter into some kind of relation with the speed, whether it be accurate or inaccurate. There is no reverse gear. How one relates to the micro-operations will tell a story of either health or illness. First, they need to be recognized.

Here we discuss the sequence that micro-operations appear in when someone is going mad. Sometimes they appear in a steadily advancing order, sometimes they are all happening at once. They are natural functions running amok, brush fires flamed by winds of psychosis, and moving.

Repetitions. Repetitions of ideas and images come in bursts and are related to the sensation of advancing waveforms, like a thought or an image suddenly caught reverberating in an echo chamber and becoming insistent, louder, accentuated.

Multiplication. Everything in mind is multiplying: cloning, branching off into endless varieties of itself, never tiring, producing a jungle of new species of thoughts, an insatiable evolution, filling the whole world.

Proliferation. The energy of proliferation has been let loose. Proliferation occurs in a dimension just behind the ordinary linking of thoughts. It is the energy that links thoughts together in what is ordinarily called “discursive thinking”: leaping out in any direction, generating an endless procession and what on the surface appears to be a continuous running on of thoughts. As fast as everyone knows such racing can sometimes be, it is slow motion compared to the speed of the micro-operations spinning thoughts together. The running on, or flight of ideas, happens in minute surges: First, the thought or image is “named,” then appropriated as “mine, my thought,” then judged pleasant or unpleasant and to be approached or avoided. That high-speed sequence produces a chain reaction of thoughts.

Proliferation increases as the speed increases. It loses inertia or resistance. All resistance to proliferation is swept aside as proliferation “runs over” every sense of pause, every gap in thinking, every moment of rest, becoming a wall-to-wall consciousness of thoughts. Along with this there is a gathering of suffering:

Thoughts, images, urges—everything comes at an excessive speed, disappears with the same speed, which no sentiment will influence. It thinks, it doesn't need him to think. It does without him entirely. It leaves him outside. Without thought, in a parade of thoughts! Wholly disarmed, impotent. To think is to be able to stop thoughts, to take them up again, to find them, to place them, to displace them and especially to be able to 'go back.' But he can only go forward, forward . . . His head cannot stop thinking. He cannot say 'enough' to the swarming useless activity which continues and which he cannot stop.36

Thought-Image. In a lightninglike interlock they are wedded: A thought, and the spontaneously imagined sensation of it, causing a momentary “dream” of the thought, are linked together. This linkage is a building block of ordinary “imagination,” and also of hallucination. It is the basic fast-circuit habit of a natural, or constitutional, “tendency to apparition.” The second state startlingly uncovers this linkage. It can also be seen “in action” if one is able to pay extraordinary attention to the formation of a dream, as it is being fabricated in front of one's eyes. 

For example, when one is falling asleep, a sudden “twitch” of the leg is immediately linked to the drama of stumbling.

This imaging micro-operation, the relentless illustrator, creates theater by dramatizing ideas, and it does so “without the least participation of the will and without any consciousness of desire.” Within the second state, this micro-operation can be seen to be embedded in consciousness, an automatic act of being “conscious.” Some have said that this action is in “bondage to consciousness.” 37  It is a common experience in the second state (and sometimes while dreaming) 38  that it dawns on one, “Whatever I think—happens!” Within the excesses of second-state speed one may come to feel, “I can create worlds!” Donald Crowhurst called this phenomenon “creative abstraction.”

A chasm-situation is created through a “calamity of intensifications.” Thinking, intensified by speed, repetition, multiplication and sensation-lock, becomes heard reflection. Thinking is materialized in voices, or whisperings, or buzzings. It feels like “someone is saying aloud the thought which I am about to think.” And the sound takes over, said Michaux, and “glues itself to the front of the stage which everyone carries within himself behind his brow.”

Inside or outside? Where is all of this happening? Inside or outside? That is always the question. Perception teeters on the brink of doubt as to whether what is happening is inside one's mind or in the environment. Or whether it is happening at all! One appears to have fits of inattention when all one's concern becomes fixed on a dangerous interior.

Oppositions. Oppositions are endless, whiplashing chains of thought together with their negative antithoughts, in mechanical coupling, in sub-atomic parity. This is a reflection of how the nervous system is built:

Every neural unit is an on-and-off coupling, every impulse arises with its counterimpulse, every muscle group is linked with its antagonist, every perception includes its negative afterimage. The structure of the system seems wired for instant complementary counterpoint—a primitive stereo-thinking principle. Whatever is subjected to it, whether it be a sight, sound, idea, or feeling, is as if put in a rotary blender: “Everything you offer to the mescalinian schizo will be ground to pieces.” It is “infinitized”; he is infinitized. Within the micro-operation of oppositions, speed thrives on itself, perpetuates itself, accelerates.

The chasm of oppositions is a chorus of discordant and disparaging voices, conflicting commands, and staggering ambivalence at every level. On the surface, one is unable to eat, or not to eat. At times it comes to a standstill, a gridlock, a jamming, perhaps the only “braking” this system can know.

Infernal Animation. In a sense, this is nothing more than the human tendency to “personify,” to imbue with life. It is a further action of the nervous system at liberty to do more freely what it already does. It is usually innocuous on the surface. But at the point of its microdevelopment— almost mockingly brought to light in the second state—the micro-operation of infernal animation can achieve demonic proportions. The first moment of animation feels like a sense of presence, of imminence, of “about-to-happen.” At first, it is only a potential space, pregnant with possibility, yet directly sensible. Then it begins to pulsate (and what space can resist throbbing in this atmosphere of pulsing proliferation?). A “prebeing” begins to quicken and emerge.

Yet it cannot stop there. The presence becomes a creature; the creature has eyes, around which forms a face, which looks at you, which is inquisitive, and so on—anything can happen from there. To John Perceval they often appeared out of a flame. (For years, Justice Schreber called them “fleetingly improvised men.” They could appear out of anywhere; some even lived in the pores of his skin.)

Perverse Impulses. The attack of perverse impulses may begin slowly, at first only by innuendos, suggestions, urgings. But they escalate into a furious onslaught of infernally animated oppositions:

a procession of mad ideas, for they always came one by one . . . I might do a thousand insane things, cut my finger, break the window, set fire to the chairs, open my veins with a razor, smash the mirrors. The contrary of normal action was what seemed tempting. The fascination of the aberrant idea, the fascination of the thing that should not be done. Any object, when an idea for dramatizing gets hold of it, is capable of anything. I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid to let myself go. I was afraid to turn out the light, knowing that in the dark my thoughts would be without resistance.39

The one who is attacked struggles with all his might against preposterous acts rushing into his mind. Arriving at unbelievable speeds, they seize him, goad him, throttle him to make him carry out the acts in question. Everything that has been rejected raises its head. They are all abnormal ideas and they are avid for realization, the lure of the indecent, a kind of perverse “freedom.” Many of the saints, during “sensitive” states of mind, have attested to the temptations of the demonic. But here, the brakes have faltered; Michaux felt it impossible to resist a perverse impulse: “I am they. They are identical with me, and I am more than acquiescent, I am inseparable from them the moment they appear.”40

Now arises an archetypal chasm-situation of madness, the sense of per-secution:

That he is assailed is the pure truth. He undergoes assaults, mysterious, invisible and not understood by others. This persecutes him. Who holds this extraordinary power over him? The lunatic sometimes takes years to be able to point out his persecutor or persecutors, and sometimes they never are clearly designated. Generally, both ignorant and educated people likewise end up in madness by incriminating secret societies, supernatural, paranatural beings, who act at a distance, by magic, by fluids, by rays. This is in a sense a rational reaction. It is hypotheses to be tested, which is dictated by circumstances so singular. The general idea of a persecution invades him, comes from all directions, a real cross-roads-idea which everything supports.41

There is no doubt that it feels like one is being “possessed,” sometimes by a demoniac double or opposite: “By idealized perversity which every man unknowingly carries within him, an ideal made up of thoughts and desires grouped together, momentarily forming the 'self, a self which is totally and vertiginously swept along.”42

Selves. Selves come and go. They are utterly real, new visions of oneself, at times a processional of them. In an instant, a “past life” is lived and abandoned. There may be many of them, new personalities, momentary, short-lived. They may be lives of nobility or of infamy. One may experience them like a tearing apart, a tearing down, or stripping away. While that is happening there might be flashes of insight: “There is no one self. There are no ten selves. There is no self. SELF is only a position of equilibrium. One among a thousand others continually possible and always ready.”43

Each self is experienced as complete and profound, intensified and exaggerated by the micro-operation machinery, yet it also has a certain hollowness. But it is not simply their transiency that makes them suspect. Each is transparently manufactured, and when it leaves there is a momentary disillusionment. However, when one of these selves is held onto and elaborated, it leads to chasm-situations of disastrous self-importance.

Sense of Conviction—Certitude. Everything is convincing: Once you get a mescalinian idea into your head, it is more real than anything else, and it has to be reckoned with, on the spot. An intensification of thought-images, plus the sense of “presence” linked to most sensations, gives mental images a surreal presence. These hallucinations are infinitely more compelling than the sight of ordinary reality, they are “super-real.” Ideas become reality, memories become present tense, speculations (“what-ifs”) become convictions:

In the tragedy of the measureless intensifications in the midst of which he is advancing, here comes the one which is perhaps the gravest of all (and he does not see it), the one which will cause the doors of the asylum to close on him, the sense of total certitude.44

Everything becomes a “sign” to him, or a proof of what he only sus-pected. But the glibness of his explanations gives him away. After all, he is using logic only as an afterthought. His real basis for argument is in his conviction, in knowledge by direct revelation. He is again in a chasm-situ-ation of “insight and power.”

The most natural study of the sense of conviction is, of course, the dream state. The dream state is marked by complete certitude, by a conviction in the reality of what is happening. In fact, it is a caricature of our inherent tendency to become so convinced. Thus, the apparatus, the means necessary for such an illusion of surety, is within all of us and is always disturbingly available.

Two Places at Once. Being in two places at once is a “trick” that we perform very comfortably in the normal state. It is our tendency or habit to be somewhere else, as to be in a daydream at the same time that we are trying to be here. We can eat, read, bathe, and do most of our work and at the same time we might be absorbed in a mental drama. We often seem to prefer to indulge a divided world, to dilute the world by living with a split consciousness. In the second state, too, this tendency is accentuated to the point of a chasm-situation.

The dislocated one is torn between the absolute certitudes of an inner reality and an outer reality, and both are making demands on him. John Perceval felt overwhelmed with ingratitude when he could not do it, when his world of angels and demons demanded his complete obedience at the expense of his body and mind. It is no wonder that the deranged one so typically asks himself, “In what part of the world am I at the same time that I am here?” He feels that his survival depends on how well he can perform the difficult feat, like a juggling act, of living in two places at once.
When he is able to do it, he feels that it is a most magical sensation: “The lunatic constantly talks of magic. He has a right to do so. On whom more than on him does magic operate, an altogether special magic?”45 But otherwise, and for most of the time, he lives in the great pain of feel-ing inadequate and doing poorly in both worlds—he is a “failure.”

Reorientations. In the normal state, we may notice that we have casually glanced at our watch for no apparent reason. That is only the tip of the iceberg of what we ordinarily do in the microunconscious. The one in the second state discovers himself invoking micro-orientations to trace, to recall, to grasp, to fix, to predict, to recapture a sense of place—many times a minute. He tries to find shelter. But over and over again, in hun-dreds of ways, he keeps losing track of it. This repeated orienting of him-self, this abrupt and incessant taking of coordinates, is like a continual tic movement of the mind.

These ordinarily silent operations of reorientation and realignment are uncovered and magnified in the “desperate attention” of the second state: “I had to admit it: from birth, I had spent most of my life orienting myself . . . taking bearings, second by second.”46  The amount of time and energy spent in attempted reorientations is phenomenal, and fatiguing. The moments of exhaustion can be profound.

From Recovering Sanity
by Edward M. Podvoll, M.D.

33. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 13.
34. Ibid., 23.
35. Ibid.
36. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 175.
37. Hsiian-tsang, The Doctrine of Mere-Consciousness, trans. Wei Tat (Hong Kong:
1973).
38. Hervey de Saint-Denys, Dreams and How to Guide Them (London: Duckworth, 1982).
39. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 72.
40. Ibid., 67.
41. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 135.
42. Michaux, Infinite Turbulence, 148. ' 43. Henri Michaux, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Ellman (New York: New Direc-tions, 1968), xvi.
44. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 156.
45. Ibid., 157.
46. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 4.
47. Michaux, Infinite Turbulence, 173.
48. Sally Clay, “Stigma,” Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy 4 (1987).
49. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983), 306.
50. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 37.
51. Jeremy Hayward, Perceiving Ordinary Magic (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1985).
52. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 10.
53. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 117.
54. Ibid.
55. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 158.
56. Henri Michaux, Vers la completude (Paris: Editions G.L.M., 1967).
57. Terry Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry (York Beach, Maine:
Samuel Weiser, 1984).
58. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 120.
59. Ibid., 42.