Scattered about the landscape of Michaux's far-off domain are the poems, seen by most commentators not as megaliths which could supply us with clues towards the understanding of an ever-vanishing kingdom but as beautiful and sometimes monstrous totems, protected from the graffiti of passing tourists by the awfulness of their inherent magic. It is as if these poems were … strangely biased signposts pointing to nowhere and indicating nothing, or artifacts which the poet has brought into existence at the same time depriving them willfully of all significance: meaningless being. Understandable as such an uncritical attitude may be, it does not lessen the distance which separates us from a foreign universe nor does it serve the reading of Michaux's tantalizing enigmas. And it certainly does not seem to accord with the poet's own stance, unambiguously described in his most recent work and summarized by the phrase: "My first quest: signs." These "signs" are not symbols of a static reality or surreality but the images of the creative and destructive processes…. [The] actual existence of poems made up of such signs is secondary to their coming into and going out of existence…. Because the mechanisms of thought are far more marvelous than the thought which they engender, Michaux's goal is to "reveal the complex mechanisms which make of man first and foremost an operator." (pp. 187-88)

Michaux, like the erstwhile practitioners of automatic writing, tends to question the role of the poet as unique creator of his own work. "Anyone can write 'Mes Propriétés,'" he said of the work in which he comes closest to defining in allegorical terms his very personal vision of reality. And in his afterword to the recently revised edition of Plume he addresses the reader directly with the statement, "Reader, you are now holding in your hands, as happens so often, a book which the author did not make, although a world participated in its making. But after all, what matter?" (p. 188)

Michaux is in search … of a marvelous of the depths, a profundity as diverse and transient as the reality to which it gives birth, a marvelous common to all men which he can find only in that momentary eternity of peace amidst the breaking of the waves….

The early essays of Michaux, despite their occasional nature and a certain superficiality, are revelatory. They accurately predict that Michaux's work to be will consist of a successful attempt to go beyond surrealism to achieve what so many poets have sought after in vain. The driving erotic force behind the explosive poems of Breton is surpassed in Michaux's works by a multiplicity of forces which are maintained in a state of constantly suspended animation. They thus contain that terrible basic force which Artaud perceived in the plague, the force of the ever-virtual as opposed to the actual. The influence of this equilibrium maintained under pressure on the very texture and dynamics of Michaux's style is apparent. While Breton's poems are orgasmic, those of Michaux are pulsative. (p. 189)

In the early fifties Michaux found his ["preparer of feasts"]: mescaline. Six years later he dismissed this servant who had become the master of so many of his contemporaries in order to compose Paix dans les brisements. This work occupies a place apart in the total production of Michaux because it is the first and only one in which the poet, the prose writer, and the graphic artist join forces to create what is truly a Gesammtkunstwerk. In Connaissance par les gouffres prose commentaries follow the poems, which are interspersed among descriptions of drug experiences. In Emergences-Résurgences drawings serve as illustrations of the text. But in Paix dans les brisements drawings, essays, and the poem form a whole which should be indivisible. (pp. 190-91)

The designs themselves seem to be sheets of brief lightning flashes, some connected, some disconnected, sometimes rushing together in a swirling motion to form vortices, sometimes seeming to fly apart in a barely contained explosion which is really an implosion. The initial impression is one of total disorganization. But, as in a seismograph, one senses an underlying organization on the verge of upheaval. (p. 191)

[Images] and words serve a double function: they are the containers of forces and consequently the creators of tension; at the same time they are the signs which record the constant fluctuation of these forces, just as an encephalogram records the ever-changing brain waves. The sign-covered pages could thus be called an eidogram, a transcription of the patterns of the imagination.

Words and images in Paix dans les brisements refuse the limitations of their functionality and succeed in transcending their instrumental role. In the relationship which exists between them can be found the very tensions which they create. The lines of the drawings are constantly striving to become words and are sometimes on the verge of breaking through their own matter. (p. 192)

[Later in the poem, Michaux says that] only is the poet time, but he is what contains time ("le sablier") and what measures it ("le sable"). And a higher order of magnitude is reached as the trickling of the sand becomes the rush of a mountain torrent. In different form, in images rather than in words, this is precisely what we have already seen in the drawings, where the lines are measure, measured, and container of the measured. Like the grains of sand, the minuscule lines form a wild cascade. In the poem the words which emerge soon after the marriage with time are also a verbal representation of the lines. (pp. 196-97)

Michaux has always been fascinated with wings, and in La Vie dans les plis he had conceived of headless, even bodiless wings, pure wings which can rise up beyond serenity toward a region of future felicity where there reigns a peace beyond peace. The question as to how to calm them does not really call for an answer but suggests the inward tranquility of acceptance. And in fact, simultaneously with the inception of this upward motion, peace is discovered…. This peace is constructed upon the elements of disintegration, for it is achieved by the "ground grain" with its biblical connotations of fruitfulness achieved through destruction: the grains must be crushed between the millstones just as the poet had earlier been dismembered by space. At the same time these potentially fruitful seeds recall the dry grains of sand pouring through the narrow neck of the hour glass. This tranquility of the soul is achieved only slowly and through patience…. Furthermore, this inward harmony can be realized only within the framework of self-reconciliation suggested by the ambiguity of the verse "dans une douceur de soie" ("in the softness of silk") which could be read just as well "dans une douceur de soi" ("in the well-being of the self"). Nor is this word play merely fortuitous. (pp. 197-98)

Peace within the ascensional movement leads to that spiritual union for which the poet had longed. It is the recompense for the long period of human solitude and loneliness…. He has achieved this pantheistic identification of the self with an animistic nature by divesting himself of all of his "privileges," that is to say of those human attributes which distinguished him from non-human natural phenomena, sources of that hostility which originally existed between him and the universe.

This gradual elevation toward the ether, toward "la région où vivre" from which Mallarmé's swan is forever exiled, is momentarily interrupted by the first and only climactic outcry in this work. In fact, this is the only consequential climax in the entire work of Michaux. It is true that the surface tension of his poems is often punctured by brief expressions followed by an exclamation mark, those superficial indications of a moment of crisis. However, they are but the occasional bursting bubbles of an unchanging and ever-simmering fluid and the transformation from liquid to gaseous form is an always reversible one. Prior to Paix dans les brisements it is impossible to find a radical and irreversible break which changes not only the direction but the very substance of the poetic enterprise. Here there is true rupture, an emergence followed by an irrevocable resurgence after which nothing will ever be the same again. And so the drama of the moment is accentuated by its very unexpectedness…. For Michaux there is no regret, no looking backwards. He has divested himself of his body because he no longer needs it. Without it he becomes infinite expansion and can live the "life of the temple" to the exclusion of all else. (pp. 199-201)

[Michaux ends his book Paix ans les brisements with mention of "the incline which aspires the marvelously simple irresistible ascension."] This is not the natural incline which Gide had urged everyone to follow upwards. It is the supernatural incline of the via mystica which once found can never again be abandoned and which leads to a simple marvelous far beyond that revealed by the subconscious of the surrealists. The last two pages of the designs had already given pictorial expression to this irresistible ascent…. [They] sweep out of the darkness, disintegrating into ever fewer and smaller lines and even dots, as they move inevitably towards the blankness of the last half of the page. They are tending towards a ["région du primordial"]…. In this "région du primordial" reigns the primeval marvelous, the "normal marvelous" …, which, with the help of mescaline, Michaux had been able to perceive and which, with the help of his artistic and poetic genius, he was able to express. (pp. 201-02)

Michaux's entire work is a thousand times broken poem whose fragments suddenly fall into place in a kaleidoscopic pattern, ever reconstituting themselves within the infinite reflection of the prism of Paix dans les brisements. (p. 202)