The Best of Science Fiction 12

Henri Michaux

Translated by Richard Ellmann

By force of suffering I lost the limits of my body and irresistibly gave up my shape.

I was all things: ants especially, interminably in file, laborious and yet hesitating. It was a terrific moving about. I had to devote all my attention. I soon noticed that I was not only the ants, but also their path. And after being crumbly and dusty at first, it became hard and my suffering was horrible. I expected every moment that it would explode and be hurled into space. But it held firm.

I rested as well as I could on another part of me, a softer one. This was a forest and the wind stirred it gently. But a storm blew up, and the roots, to resist the increasing wind, bored into me — a mere trifle — but went on to hook so deeply into me that it was worse than death.

A sudden fall of earth made a beach enter into me, a pebbly beach. Then it began to ruminate inside me and that summoned the sea, the sea.

Often I turned boa and, although a little troubled by the elongation, I would prepare to sleep or else I was a bison and would prepare to graze, but soon from one shoulder came a typhoon, boats were thrown into the air, the steamers wondered whether they would reach port, only SOSs could be heard.

I was sorry not to be a boa or a bison any more. A little later I had to shrink up so as to fit into a saucer. Always the changes were abrupt, everything had to be made over, and that was not worth the trouble, it would last only a few instants and yet you had to adapt yourself, and always these abrupt changes. It's not so much trouble to pass from a rhombohedron to a truncated pyramid, but it's a lot of trouble to pass from a truncated pyramid to a whale; you must know immediately how to dive, to breathe, and then the water is cold, and then you find yourself face to face with the harpooners, but I, as soon as I saw men, fled. But it so happened that I was suddenly changed into a harpooner, then I had just as long a distance to go over again. At last I succeeded in overtaking the whale, I quickly launched a well-sharpened and solid harpoon (after having first made fast and checked the rope); the harpoon darted, penetrated far into the flesh, making an enormous wound. I realised then that I was the whale, I had changed into it again, there was a new opportunity to suffer, and I am not one to get used to suffering.

After a mad race I lost my life, then I was turned back into a boat, and when I am the boat, believe me, I take in water all over, and when things get desperate, then for sure I become captain, I try to display an attitude of sangfroid, but I'm without hope, and if in spite of everything we are saved, then I'm changed into a rope and the rope breaks and if a lifeboat is smashed right at that moment I am all its planks, I began to sink and turned to an echinoderm that didn't last more than a second, for, disabled in the midst of enemies I knew nothing about, they got me at once, devoured me alive, with those white and ferocious eyes that are found only under water, under the salt sea water which makes all wounds smart. Oh! Who will leave me be for a bit? But no, if I don't budge, I rot where I am, and if I budge it's to undergo the blows of my enemies. I don't dare make a move. Just then I throw myself out of joint to become part of a grotesque mass with a defect of equilibrium which is revealed only too soon and too clearly.

If I always changed into animal form, as a last resort I would have accustomed myself to it finally, since it's always more or less the same behavior, the same principle of action and reaction, but I'm things too (and even things would be bearable), but I'm such artificial and impalpable combinations. What a to-do when I was changed into lightning! There I have to move fast, I who always lag and never know how to come to a decision.

Oh! If I could only die once and for all! But no, I'm always found good for some new being and yet I only pull boners and lead it promptly to its destruction.

No matter, I'm immediately given a new one where my prodigious incapacity can prove itself over again.

And so always and without respite.

There are so many animals, so many plants, so many minerals. And I have already been everything so many times. But these experiments don't help me. Becoming ammonium hydrochlorate again for the thirty-second time, I still have a tendency to behave like arsenic, and, changed once more into a dog, my night-bird habits always show up.

Only rarely do I see something without experiencing this very special feeling ... Ah yes, I've been that ... I don't remember exactly, I feel it. That's why I'm particularly fond of Illustrated Encyclopedias. I turn over the pages, I turn over the pages, and I often find some satisfaction, for there are some pictures of several creatures that I've not yet been. That rests me, that's delightful, I say to myself: "I might have been this one and that one and that other has been spared me." I heave a sign of relief. Ah! Peace!

The word is groove and careful there, because the new edition is a verb. You can groove on almost anything including the things you can groove behind, but the latter usage is usually limited to speed, smack, acid, grass, weed, pot, Mary Jane, hash, and other chemical turn-ons. Lexicographers and jargon collectors are advised to be wary: possibly in an effort to maintain freedom of speech in an illegal zone, head talk has an even faster turnover of meanings than most pop jargon, and nothing specified here is likely to mean just the same thing by the time this book is published . Head itself, for instance, is already used with a completely different meaning in the phrase to have a head — nothing to do with hangovers, rather with philosophy.

Or it may be that the swift-shift thing is simply an advance-guard symptom of the general effort to reach beyond the Word Barrier. I have a notion that what the 'psychedelic' people mean by 'consciousness-expanding' is that the tripper can drop out of his customary semantic matrix, turn on previously unexercised nonverbal perceptions, and tune in to aspects of his environment invisible inside the word-spectrum.

The French poet and painter Henri Michaux is one of the very few writers who has succeeded in the improbable effort to translate some of this kind of experience back into words. His book Miserable Miracle (City Lights, 1963, translated by Louise Varése), a record of mescaline and marijuana experiences in words and drawings, should be a shelf-companion (less instructive, more immediate; less analytical, more poetic) to every copy of Huxley's Doors of Perception.

In science fiction, the same impatience with the limitations of words-as-medium has led to some fascinating speculation about 'ESP', or psi (not necessarily 'extrasensory' but specifically nonverbal) communication. One of the most memorable psi stories from the peak interest period in the fifties was Katherine MacLearn's 'Defence Mechanism'. In recent years, Miss MacLean has published very little: she was back at school studying clinical psychology; this is one of the first of the new ones.

Tree shadows moved on the grey linoleum of the hospital floor, swaying like real leaves and twigs. Joey blurred his eyes to make the leaf shadows green.

The floor quivered slightly to foam-padded footsteps, and a man-shaped shadow appeared across the sunlight. That was Dr. Armstrong. He was kind. He always walked softly and then stood and shuffled when he hoped you would notice him.

The feet shuffled hopefully. When Joey concentrated on the doctor's shadow he could turn the head part pink, like a face.