Henri Michaux
In The Bag
I spit on my life. I want no part of it.
Who can do no better than his life?
IT BEGAN WHEN I was a child. There was an adult. A big nuisance.
How to avenge myself on him? I stuck him in a bag. There, I could beat him at my leisure. He cried out, but I ignored him. He was not interesting.
I have, wisely, preserved this childhood habit. The options for action that one acquires in growing up, aside from not getting one very far, are of doubtful use.
To someone in bed, one does not offer a chair.
As I say, I have kept this habit, and until today kept it secret. It was safer that way.
Its drawback — it does have one — is that because of it, I put up too easily with impossible people.
But I am waiting for them, I know, with the bag. And a wonderful patience comes of this.
I purposely let ridiculous situations go on and on and let those bloodsuckers stick around.
The joy I would take in actually putting them out the door is, when the chance presents itself, checked by the incomparably greater delights of putting them soon after in the bag. In the bag where I thrash them with impunity and with a vigor to wear out ten hearty men working tag-team.
Without this little art of mine, how would I have passed my discouraging life, often impoverished, always under somebody’s thumb?
How would I have been able to persist dozens of years through so many trials, under so many masters, near and far, through two wars, two long occupations by a people in arms who do not like to leave a single pin standing, and through countless other enemies.
But the liberating habit saved me. Just barely, it is true, and I fought the despair that seemed bound to leave me nothing. Bores, zeroes, one lout whom I had managed to get rid of a hundred times, I saved them all for the bag.
(Translated from the French by Steven Reese)
Henri Michaux
The Slap Gun
IT WAS IN the family, as might be expected, that I produced the slap gun. I produced it without forethought. My anger suddenly shot out of my hand like a glove of wind, gusting, like two, three, four, ten gloves, whiffs of gloves which, spasmodically and terribly fast, threw themselves from my manual extremities, flying towards the target, toward the odious head they reached like that.
This repeated discharge from my hand was astonishing. It was really no longer just a slap or two. I am naturally reserved, and only the abyss of rage makes me lose control like this.
So a veritable ejaculation of slaps, cascading and convulsing with my hand remaining rigorously still.
On that day, I touched magic.
A careful eye would have noticed something. A sort of electric shadow spurting spasmodically from the end of my hand, gathered and reforming instantly.
To be perfectly frank, the cousin who had mocked me had just opened the door and gone out when, suddenly realizing the shame of the offense, I responded belatedly with a volley of slaps that, truly, escaped from my hand.
But I had found the slap gun, if I may call it that, and really nothing says it better.
Afterwards, I could no longer see the conceited girl without slaps like wasps flying toward her from my hand.
This discovery was worth putting up with her odious chatter. That is why I sometimes counsel tolerance within the family.
(Translated from the French by Steven Reese)
Henri Michaux
The Statue and I
IN MY SPARE moments, I am teaching a statue to walk. Given its unnaturally prolonged immobility, it is not easy. Not for it. Not for me. Great distance divides us, I am aware of that. I’m not so foolish as to not understand that.
But one can’t have all the good cards in one’s hand. Well then, onward.
What matters is that the first step be right. For the statue, everything is in the first step. I know it. I know it too well. In that lies my anguish. And so, I prepare. I prepare as never before.
I get up close and copy its pose exactly, my foot lifted like its foot, and stiff as a stake driven into the ground.
But alas, it is never quite right. Either the foot, its arch or how it is poised, or the style, something is always missing, and so that setting forth, so waited-for, is prevented.
That is why I have come to be nearly incapable of walking anymore, overcome with rigidity, though ever so spirited, and my bewitched body frightens me and will no longer carry me anywhere.
(Translated from the French by Steven Reese)
