Henri Michaux in Search of his Tempo, or Great Health
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Henri Michaux clearly stated that he painted and wrote ‘for his good health’. Yet, due to his weak heart, he suffered from ill-health all his life. However, not heeding medical advice, he did not spare himself for over 80 years. As he put it, his only drug was ‘feeling tired’! By means of ‘pen strokes’, Michaux lay on paper the innumerable aspects of his psycho-somatic suffering, thereby both exorcizing and alchemizing it through the poetic act. His work focusses on the narcissistic self and phenomenological body awareness: ‘Coenesthésie, mare nostrum’, he said. But this did not prevent him from having an accurate perception of other people and of the world, at a distance. By an alchemical process, he appropriated and operated a value-transmutation of the scientific and medical languages of the 20th century for his personal use. He, thus, offers an unclassifiable and open-ended poetry, resisting all power abuse of a single interpretation, especially that of the medical world. According to his poetry function, the ‘non-breathable becomes breathable and the unlivable becomes livable’. His whole output is an exercise in perfection, medicine for oneself, a Nietzschean healing pedagogy, that is to say ‘good health’.