The block of [Henri Michaux's] works written under the influence of drugs and usually referred to as the "mescaline cycle" is composed of five works. Misérable miracle (1956) represents Michaux's "first knowledge as an observer" … and consequently recounts the learning experience of a neophyte who successfully attempts to maintain an intellectual distance from the matter which he is studying. He carefully analyzes after the fact the effects of mescaline and attempts to give an approximation of the actual experience by typographical devices and by the reproduction of samples of the handwritten notes and designs which he composed in the state of intoxication. In L'Infini turbulent (1957) this distance is lessened; the result is a depiction of the initiatory stage in which the poet prepares himself, "like a priest," for the encounter with infinity, the "Great Whirlwind."… These two works then are primarily discursive and descriptive. Paix dans les brisements (1959) is the poetic product of the preceding observations and initiation and consists of a series of drawings, followed by two poetic essays and a long poem. These four parts form a single artistic unity, a Book in the Mallarmean sense of the word…. With Connaissance par les gouffres (1961) Michaux reverts to a depiction of experiences and dreams but does intersperse a few smaller poems, followed by his own explication of them. In Les Grandes Epreuves de l'esprit (1966) he limits himself, as in his first work, to analysis and description…. This extensive opus is the outcome of Michaux's struggle against what is the greatest menace which the artist confronted with drug-induced visions faces, the danger of succumbing to autism. The accelerated tempo of the drug-induced spectacle makes it all but untranslatable…. What made it possible for him to achieve a victory over his ataraxia was his ability to exploit the immediate post-hallucinatory stage. Without succumbing to the temptation of "the excess of mastery, the overly great utilization of the guiding power of thought," he was able to employ his rediscovered intelligence while simultaneously maintaining contact with "the subconscious, the unknown, the mystery."… (pp. 133-35)

The six years during which Michaux experimented with drugs represent a period of intensive investigation, and the scope and seriousness of his explorations surpass similar efforts by other writers. Furthermore, his sensitive reportorial imagination enabled him to record with minute accuracy and insight what he had found. But a more important distinguishing feature in his attempt may be discerned in the very nature of the relationship which he established with drugs and what he expected of them…. Michaux is not in search of paradises, artificial or otherwise, which he curtly dismisses in Connaissance par les gouffres with the words: "Drugs bore us with their paradises … We are not a century for paradises"…. His is a quest for knowledge, and of a very particular type. He wants to discover not the product of thought, that is to say ideas, but the very process of thought, the marvelous mechanism which makes knowledge possible…. For Michaux drugs represent nothing more or less than a heuristic device, a valuable tool which in clumsy hands can be dangerous and even destroy the one who manipulates it heedlessly. (pp. 135-36)

In the process of reconstituting his experiences with mescaline, Michaux destroys a number of myths concerning the effects of drugs. He refuses the notion that they are creative when at the most they are revelatory…. An artist can only create with what he already possesses. A mediocre imagination, no matter how stimulated, cannot surpass its own mediocrity. There are no medications to enrich the phantasy, to raise the level of intelligence, or to transform sterility into creativity. At best pharmaceutical agents can produce an ambience favorable to artistic endeavor. (p. 136)

Scattered throughout Michaux's reflections are notations which indicate his disappointment. Drugs are incapable of fulfilling man's expectations and their effects are as often as not actually negative. The use of drugs can be deleterious: far from stimulating the imagination, they significantly diminish its powers…. In addition, drugs and Eros are incompatible…. With the impoverishment of the imagination and the banishment of love, poetry as we know it becomes impossible. This is the conclusion which Michaux reaches in Misérable miracle: "Thus it [mescaline] is the enemy of poetry, of meditation and especially of mystery"…. [Mescaline] does create images, but of an abstract type not usually associated with poetry. They are "one hundred percent pure" and "so perfectly stripped of the comfortable fur wrapping of sensation … that they are the springboard of the pure mental, of the abstract and of demonstration."… In other words, although deprived of sensuality, of the poetic aura, the images produced by drugs might be capable of revealing the structures of the mental processes which Michaux seeks to discover. (pp. 137-38)

Michaux [admitted] the impossibility of reconstructing the moment of "gratuitious grace" and [turned] his attention instead to another phase of the drug experience, the one which Cocteau had described as "the unique moment of a detoxication when the hallucinatory faculty still functions a little and coincides, by accident, with the return of the ability to comunicate." As Michaux relates in Les Grandes Epreuves de l'esprit, this moment of intense suffering and joy contains a wondrous sequence of experiences which reveals "the unique nature of thought, its sudden birth"…. After the disintegration and chaos of hallucination, it is the ecstasy of rediscovered unity…. Michaux transforms this moment into the work Paix dans les brisements, which is at the same time a poetic reconstruction of the post-drug period, a depiction of thought coming into being and a mystic hymn. The concrete details of the text describe the psycho-physical symptoms of drug withdrawal, which, taken together, present an almost clinical depiction of the detoxication syndrome. There is the distortion of temporal and spatial perception, the shattering and reintegration of internal structures, the inhuman chill of the body, and in general a sense of instability. Simultaneously, the same details recount the steps of the via negativa which leads to a vision of the transcendent…. [Michaux's poems] convey the physical sensation of coldness and the feeling of dispossession which are familiar signs of the incipient convalescence of the body deprived of the chemical stimulants on which it had come to depend. They also communicate the process of destruction of the inessential, of the self, symbolized by the vacating of the body, which is a prerequisite for the encounter with the void and the eventual discovery of nirvana. (pp. 139-40)

The problems posed by fragmentation, the desire for unicity, the importance of extraordinary phenomena, all of these elements are already present thirty years before Michaux ingested mescaline for the first time. So his basic project was not transformed, but rather reinforced, by his experiments with drugs…. With the help of drugs Michaux had succeeded in modifying his … internal architecture to such an extent that he could express a vision present in seminal form from the very start. This modification did not cease with the termination of the drug experiments, and its effects can be seen in all of his subsequent works…. (pp. 140-41)