Henri Michaux - A Barbarian in Asia

A friend said to me at a dance performance in Bali: They look like hens in a hen-coop.

It is quite true. Like hens in a hen-coop; the neck is all that works.

In the modern Bali plays, rows of squatting men, playing sparrows on a branch, in rows of eight or nine, dislocating their necks, rolling their eyes and grumbling but not flying away, and aside from that, bluffing it out as much as to say: ‘Hold onto me, fellows, back there. Or I might make trouble.’

What I was able to see of the Malayan theater of the present day in Singapore (one of them was called the Grand Opera of Borneo) was not unpleasant, but it did not amount to much. Dancers with horrible short dresses, oscillating from one leg to the other, in one spot, glued by who knows what ‘chewing gum,’ tunes that were slow, sentimental, muddy, variety-show, themes for a primary school; masters and servants, nobleman and prince, mother and son, self-sacrifice, the great dramatic scene, entreaty, getting down on one’s knees, great operatic airs, headdress of warriors or rather of noblemen, a kind of Egyptian eureus forty centimeters high; idiotic effects, the fondness for great ceremonies, raised seats, bowing down, and also gross farces right in the middle of the show, kicks on the bottoms of minor characters, bad jokes and something that smelled all over the place of the scourge of the sentimental.

Someone who knew fish only through the aquarium of Batavia would have a singular notion of them, but on the whole rather correct. He would know that neither the color, nor the shapes, nor the aspect are what characterize a fish. A toothbrush, a cab, a rabbit may be a fish; it all depends on the insides.

I saw a young example (old ones are quite different) of Ostracium cornutum , which is nothing but a little calf’s head. This head navigates. A block with a tiny mustache that vibrates. One must look closely to perceive it. Is that all? Not absolutely. This head has a tail, not a body, but a tail; cut a match in two, well, half of the match, but suppose it to be rather flexible, and there it is.

Take it all in all, it is possible that the colonials may have done less harm to the colonies than they seemed fated to do.

Look at a little Dutch boy. It is an inharmonious creature, apt to shout, roar, break, destroy, and to assert the weight of his dangerous imagination.

As an adult, the Dutchman will be considerably more phlegmatic. But perhaps he may destroy and alter more coldly, more scientifically the things around him.

There are everywhere such invasions of different races, Huns, Tartars, Mongolians, Normans, etc., and such an afflux of religions, Islamic, Buddhistic, Animist, Nestorian, Christian, etc., that no one is pure; each one is composed of a horrid mixture, not counting the prejudices that he has acquired in his own country.

Therefore, when one retires into oneself, flees from the world, and when one succeeds in getting rid of that enormous superstructure and that multiple controversy, one attains to a peace, on a plane so unheard of that one might ask oneself if this is not the ‘supernatural.’

What is a civilization? A blind alley.

No, Confucius is not great.

No, Tsi Hoang Ti is not great, nor Gautama Buddha, but since then nothing better has been done.

A people should be ashamed to have a history.

And the European just as much as the Asiatic, naturally.

It is in the future that they must see their history.

1 The finest theatrical performance that I saw was at a Malay theater in Singapore. Fishermen armed with knives and faggots of reeds fought against a kind of saw-fish. The struggle was formidable. Yet so unbelievably stressed, that the infinitely diverse movements seemed woven in some mechanism and to belong to another world .

2 The Balinese women go bare-breasted. Already the Javanese women’s dress is exceedingly low-cut, leaving as much of the breasts exposed as possible, stopping just at the nipple, entirely uncovering the place where the breast is separated into two hemispheres, that hollow which disturbs schoolboys so much .

And now, said Buddha to his disciples, when about to die:

‘In the future, be your own light, your own refuge.

‘Seek not another refuge.

‘Go not to seek refuge other than in Yourselves.’

‘Pay no attention to another’s way of thinking.

‘Hold fast in your own island.

‘GLUED TO CONTEMPLATION.’