Michaela Hulstyn
Stanford University, USA
Abstract: In this paper I examine the work of Belgian-born poet Henri Michaux, who uses the concept of the mutative self to communicate his mescaline experiments of the 1950s and 1960s and reify his status as the ultimate witness figure. Lacking an operative metaphysical vocabulary for expressing the encounter with the beyond, Michaux develops a secular language for talking about the unselfing that occurs during mind-altering experiences. This self-experimentation allows him to proclaim that synchronic disunity is a natural (albeit highly uncomfortable) state. The experience of mutative unselfing alters Michaux’s perception of time and space, leading him to discover unchartered expanses of the self.
Keywords: self, self-experiments, altered-states, French literature, drug literature, unselfing
Introduction
Can narratives on drug experimentation shed light on philosophic and psychological accounts of the self? The questionable status of the self during altered states of consciousness was already present in John Locke’s highly influential account of personal identity in the seventeenth century. In Locke’s account, this problem is solved by the existence of an omniscient God that knows the entirety of ones identity, even the parts for which the subject is not fully conscious.1 This importantly includes the moments of that individual’s existence during which he is not “in his right mind,” including the time he spends asleep, or drunk, or on the drug mescaline, as in the case of Belgian-born poet Henri Michaux. Nietzsche pronouncing God dead at the turn of the century has become the cultural marker for the shift away from theological-based understandings of the self that posited God in this objective third-person position. Lacking Locke’s faith in a God that
could see our full identity, Michaux seeks to understand what happens to the metaphysical part of the self during altered states of consciousness.
Knowing that hallucinatory drugs had long played a role in religious ceremonies in various cultures across the world, Michaux, at the age of 54 began taking mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic derived from the peyote cactus, used for thousands of years in religious ceremonies by Native Americans in Mexico and in South America. In the first of his mescaline texts, Misérable miracle (1956), Michaux writes that while “les Huichols, les Tarahumaras, et bien d’autres Mexicains (…) allaient à un dieu en allant au Peyotl” [the Huichols, the Tarahumaras and plenty of other Mexicans (…) went to a god in going to the peyote] 2 other gods, like the god of the volcanoes or of fire for example, were not far. (Michaux 1972, 69) Primed for the experience of the supernatural, he writes that the Native Americans had to simply name his god, and he would appear to the drug-taker. Westerners however, undergo a different experience on the drug, and only see “infinite cascades of relativity.” He explains,
”Quant à l’Occidental d’à présent, depuis longtemps incroyant aux dieux, et qui serait bien incapable d’imaginer une forme sous laquelle ils seraient susceptibles de lui apparaitre, ce que son esprit saisit, seul dieu qu’il aperçoive encore et qu’il serait vain d’adorer, c’est l’infinie relativité, la cascade qui n’a pas de terminaison, la cascade des causes et des effets, ou plutôt des précédents ou des suivants, où tout est roue entraînante et roue entraînée." (Michaux 1972, 70)
[As for the Westerner today, who for so long has been an unbeliever in the gods, and would be incapable of imagining a form under which they could appear to him, what his mind grasps, the only god of which he is still aware and one that would be vain to worshop, is infinite relativity, the cascade without ending, the cascade of cause and effect, or rather the precedents or the followings, where everything is pulling wheel and pulled wheel.]
Underlining that his own interpretation of metaphysical experience is shaped by historical and cultural assumptions, Michaux compares the outcome of his experiments with the spiritual discourse of the Native Americans he mentions. His reflections are attempts at descriptions of the supernatural, without having recourse to a preexisting religious vocabulary. At certain points in these texts, Michaux acknowledges his fears that there may be nothing objective to be gained from these voyages into the beyond, since the human mind is highly suggestible. Peter Broome summarizes this tension in Michaux’s work: “Whatever one’s thought, one’s visual image of the moment, one’s current obsession, it will launch it on the road to the absolute. It has no objective truth of its own to propose, apart from that of a scientific process, and will lend accidentally to any vision” (Broome 1977, 91).
Despite these worries, however, Michaux ultimately posits that altered states are privileged moments of insight on the self. Lacking an operative metaphysical language for what I refer to as the “unselfing”3 that occurs during mind-altering experience, Michaux develops a vocabulary for communicating this state of insight in a secular age. In the absence of a functional theologically based philosophical framework, Michaux attempts to track down the metaphysical piece of personal identity that persists through altered states. Given his understanding of the self as a witness figure living in an eternal succession of present moments, altered states of selfhood productively change his sense of time and space. The altered state is a monumental event that allows for the development of a narrative of before and after, one that opens up new expanses of the self.
While terms like “mind-altering” are commonplace in discussions of drug culture, especially as related to the psychedelic 1960s, few studies of altered states have considered a connection with philosophical discussions of the self, and what self-experimentation can tell us about the nature of the self during ordinary circumstances. In this paper I examine Michaux’s take on the process of unselfing, as described during the self-induced drug experiments that began in 1956 and were carried out through the 1960s. I first consider Michaux’s conception of the self during so-called normal states, using terminology from current research in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience to help understand the self-experience that Michaux describes in his work. It will then be possible to examine his take on altered states of selfhood in a synchronic sense, or, the way he describes the experience of disunity in the moment, as well as the effect of the experience in his long-term, or diachronic sense of the self. I also examine the implications of Michaux’s work on the development of a metaphysical vocabulary for otherworldly experience in the absence of faith in an omnipotent third party witness.
Implicit in this study is the assumption that studies of writers like Michaux, and more generally speaking, studies of literary texts are valuable contributions to discussions of altered states of selfhood within empirical-based disciplines. It is my view that studies of literary accounts of altered states can contribute to philosophical discussions of the self. Especially given the fleeting nature of altered states, and the impossibility of pairing such highly unusual (and potentially unethical) self-experiments with technology in the hard sciences, the study of these accounts gives us precious insight into the phenomenology of experiences that might be impossible to study in the lab.
To review, in this paper I first explore the altered self in Michaux’s work in a philosophical mode, arguing that Michaux experiences synchronic disunity at the moment of the experience, and later interprets unselfing in the diachronic sense as a fundamental mutation. Michaux’s experience of mutative unselfing should be
distinguished from other narrative models that account for dramatic change in the self over time, such as the conversion narrative.4 As opposed to Saul who becomes Paul, Michaux does not claim to become a different person entirely after his experience. Rather, mescaline allows for the illumination of formerly obscured contours of the self. I then situate Michaux in his literary and historical context in order to interpret the metaphysical language he develops for discussing altered states. At the end of this paper, I consider the value of Michaux’s self-experiments for relations with the outer world, comparing his interpretations of unselfing with other Francophone writers of the period.
The self according to Michaux
Michaux offers a unique perspective on the question of the self in his writings that fall somewhere between autobiography and auto-fiction. Indeed, in reading Michaux’s works one is made aware of the slippery boundaries between reality and fiction, as his narrators constantly wonder about the constructed nature of reality itself. Much like Paul Valéry, who created his Monsieur Teste character as a model for his theories on the self, Michaux over the course of his career created a pen name character, appropriately named “Plume” who serves as a testing ground for his ideas on consciousness and the self in writing. In turning to Michaux’s texts on altered states of selfhood during drug experiments, we must keep in mind that before these experiences, Michaux was particularly attuned to the constructed nature of self-unity, and saw disunified states of the self as more natural states of being than the usual state of ego-dominion.
As such, before turning to Michaux’s exploration of altered states of selfhood, it is important to first examine how Michaux believed the self to function under ordinary circumstances. This question is especially difficult in studying Michaux;
he famously proclaimed the eternal escape of the self when faced with attempts to pin it down – in language, in ancestry, in literary influences and otherwise. Broome writes,
“There are enough warning-signs in Michaux’s work to make any biographer uneasy. Not only has he always refused to entertain a facile relationship with his public, retreating behind the wall of imagination and slipping from the grasp in bristling metamorphoses, but he has never felt any solidarity with his own life”
(Broome 1977, 1).
Indeed, there are many instances in Michaux’s texts where he claims to
“désolidarise” or “break away” from his life, not to mention the extra distance he often sets up between himself and the first-person-narrators of his texts. The theme of the absurd also figures in Michaux’s works, and his texts on selfhood often testify to the divorce Camus once proclaimed between man and his life, the actor and his
décor.5 In Michaux’s work, the self is often described as an undifferentiated inner space without justification, identity, project or even reality. Because of this, he and his narrators are often frustrated by the lack of ensemble of life, the eternal documentation of the present.6
In his texts on his experience taking mescaline, Michaux stresses that disunity would be our natural mental state, if not for the dominion of the ego, which holds us under its tyrannical control. He writes, “La drogue, qu’on s’en souvienne, est plus révélatrice que créatrice” (Michaux 1966, 33). [The drug, let us remember, indicates, reveals, more than it creates” (Michaux 1974, 22)]. Of the return from one such mescaline trip he writes,
“Maintenant revient le pragmatique, l’utile, l’adapté, l’harmonieux, revient l’ego, ses bornes, son autorité, son annexionnisme, son gout des propriétés, des prises, son plaisir de s’imposer, de faire tenir ensemble, de forcer coûte que coûte. Et cela paraît naturel!”(Michaux 1966, 29) [Now the pragmatic returns, the useful, the adapted, the harmonious; the ego returns, with its limits, its authority, its annexationism, is possessiveness, its grasping, its delight in imposing, in amalgamating, in forcing at all costs.
And it all seems natural! (Michaux 1974, 20)]
Given these observations, we should understand the self during ordinary circumstances in Michaux’s work to mean a minimal degree of unification, as maintained by the ego. The process of unselfing, then, operates as a two-step process and undoes the ego’s unifying power. During altered states of selfhood, Michaux documents the experience of unselfing in the synchronic sense, and later reflects on its diachronic implications. That is to say, Michaux first describes a loss of perceived unity at the moment of the experience, and later, in the process of writing, reflects on the meaning of the experience in a narrative of mutation. In the scope of this paper, I focus on the first and last of Michaux’s texts on drug experimentation, Misérable miracle [Miserable Miracle] (1956) and Les grandes épreuves de l’esprit [The Major Ordeals of the Mind] (1966).
Altered states: the “core” self and the “extended” self
While documenting his altered self-experience, Michaux is most concerned with the effect of the substance on his basic or core self. The first level of the experience should therefore be understood as the effect of the experience on the most fundamental conception of mind. While disciplines such as neurobiology, psychology and philosophy account for a form of the core self, their definitions diverge. For instance, while Damasio (2010) writes that the “core self” is responsible for conscious attention to a given object, and emits “pulses” of provisional subjectivity in the field of neurobiology, phenomenologists Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2008) argue that the most basic level of the self is a pre-reflective
self-consciousness. This discussion was contemporary to Michaux as well; In L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943) Sartre argues for the existence of a pre-reflective, non-cognitive relation to the self.7 In this paper, I assume the core self as examined by Michaux to be a reflective state. While Michaux seeks to consciously witness the experience, often drawing or writing notes while taking the drug, his texts are delayed reflections on these changing mental states. The focus on unselfing at the level of the core self should be understood as a reflection on the philosophical problem of synchronic identity, as these experiments temporarily destroy the subject’s perceived experience of coherence or unity, and sometimes embodiment as well.
The difference between unselfing understood as a temporary state of disunity, and unselfing understood as total annihilation of the self is aptly illustrated by Michaux’s description of his overdose experience. Whereas his other experiments with mescaline are characterized by an altered state that the observer is able to document, Michaux is not able to witness the experiment when he overdoses.
During his fourth mescaline trip described in this work, Michaux writes that the overdose experience that caused him to fully “coincide with himself”, as he puts it.
He writes, “Qu’avais-je fait? Plongeant, je m’étais rejoint, je crois en mon fond, et coïncidais avec moi, non plus observateur-voyeur, mais moi revenue à moi, et là-dessus en plein sur nous, le typhon” (Michaux 1972, 124). [“What had I done?
Plunging, I met myself, I believe in my foundation, and coincided with myself, no longer as an observer-voyeur, but me returned to me, and right on top of us, the typhoon.”] This is a different level of unselfing than Michaux had hitherto experienced. In a footnote to this passage, he writes, “Dans ma vie j’essaie (voulant observer) d’approcher le plus possible de moi, mais sans coïncider, sans me laisser aller, sans me donner” (Ibid).
[In my life I try (wanting to observe) to approach myself as much as possible, but without coinciding, without letting myself go, without giving myself up.] Michaux attempts to distance himself from recreational drug use with this caveat, giving us an important feature of mutative unselfing: save for this exceptional overdose experience, the core self is never completely lost during these experiences. In this way, Michaux affirms the privileged status of the witness figure, the one who both lives and documents the altered-self experience.
The second level of the experience involves what is referred to, across disciplines as an extended sense of the self. Damasio (2010) calls this sense of selfhood the
“autobiographical self” and Schechtman (1996) refers to the “narrative self” in her philosophical work. Both designate a sense of self that is extended through time and that is teleological in nature. The eventual reconstruction of the self after the witness event should be understood within the context of the diachronic personal identity problem. Given that the experience happened, how does Michaux think about
events past and future? In the work of Michaux, the construction of a narrative for this self-experience occurs after the witness event, during the writing process. Of course, the distinction between the two steps that make up mutative unselfing may be difficult to discern, as they are mutually dependent on one another. Michaux presents his experiments as productive mutations in his temporal and spatial self-experience.
According to Michaux this leads to a state of insight that does not disappear once the substance has physically left his system. For example, coming down from the drug, he writes, “Au sortir de la Mescaline on sait mieux qu’aucun bouddhiste que tout n’est qu’apparence. Ce qui était avant, n’était qu’illusion de la santé. Ce qui a été pendant était illusion de la drogue. On est converti” (Michaux 1972, 80).
[Leaving Mescaline, one knows better than any Buddhist that there is nothing but appearance. What was before, was nothing but illusion of health. What was during, was illusion of the drug. One is converted.] The word “conversion” here is not used traditionally. Michaux does not seem to mean he is converted to a transcendent absolute, not even the Buddhist philosophy he references. Rather, he seems to mean there is no “going back” to one’s former self once one has experienced the fragility of reality. Michaux insists that the self is changed by these drug experiments. This state of insight is “lightning on a dark night, all illumination” he writes, “but it is a lightning that lasts” (Michaux 1974, 166).
At the end of his last text on mescaline, Michaux asserts emphatically that an inner space is opened up within the self thanks to these experiments, and persists after the experiment is over. He writes,
“Mais dira quelqu’un, ces mondes sans objet, au-delà d’un objet, amour sans objet, contemplation sans objet, n’est-ce pas de la fume, dont il restera moins encore de la fumée? Une étendue nouvelle, un fond surcreusé, depuis en partie comblé, mais non annulé, subsiste après l’expérience et peut-être à jamais, non pas tout uniment non plus. ” (Michaux 1966, 207)
[But, someone will say, aren’t these worlds without object, beyond an object, love without object, contemplation without object- aren’t such worlds so much smoke, leaving behind even less than smoke? A new expanse, a profoundly hollowed depth, which may afterward be partially filled, but not annulled, subsists after the experiment and perhaps forever, though not quite uniformly either. (Michaux 1974, 170)]
Michaux represents the experience as an illuminating rupture that opens up “new expanse” within. And yet, each moment of unselfing always involves its corresponding return. While the rare state that one reaches during the drug experiment may lead to valuable insight, it cannot be maintained. The return to the state of dominion is inevitable, but perhaps even more importantly,
ego-dominion is more comfortable than the state of illumination. Michaux goes as far to compare his state of illumination to an “occupation.” He writes,
“Fini! Les heures de l’occupation sont passées. A présent il est seul dans son cerveau. Admirable impression. Jouissance intime, de toutes peut-être la plus intime, si discrète pour être presque identique au ‘moi’ collant indissolublement à l’être en vie, et dont l’absence est une essentielle, indicible, incessante catastrophe"
(Michaux 1966, 17). [Finished! The hours of alien occupation are over. Now he is alone in his brain. A wonderful feeling. Inner enjoyment of rights, perhaps inmost of all, so private as to be virtually identical with the ‘self’ clinging inseparably to the living being, and whose absence is a basic, inexpressible, unremitting catastrophe” (1974, p. 9).]
What this vocabulary suggests, despite Michaux’s insistence on the ephemeral and provisional nature of selfhood in his work, is that even during extreme experiences of unselfing, someone is there to witness the unselfing event, to resist total self-abandonment or self-loss, someone to recount the experience upon his return. The metaphysical piece of the self – the witness position – is never fully lost during mutative unselfing. Moreover, the witness’s viewpoint is improved by the experience, illuminated as by lightning on a dark night.
Altered states and metaphysical insight: Michaux in his literary-historical context Much like his predecessors Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Michaux seeks to transcend everyday reality in order to access untapped expanses of human consciousness.
With his psychedelic experiments and poetic writings thereupon, Michaux enters into a tradition of both Belgian and French avant-garde writers who positioned the poetic imagination as a site for revelation, naturally or unnaturally achieved. As early as 1836, the term Supernaturalisme appears in French when Nerval translated Faust. The term was then associated with German romanticism and referred to the power of revelation and the faculty of imagination, carrying the connotation of
“above or beyond.” In 1855, Baudelaire uses the word surnaturalisme to mean a heightened sensory experience and an internal state of revelation. Baudelaire’s usage of the term marks a break with the traditional theological notion of supernaturalism, referring rather to an excess of experience.Influenced by De Quincey before him, Baudelaire was interested in the effects of wine, hashish and opium on the faculties of perception, writing on the subject in Les paradis artificial (1860). Like Baudelaire, Michaux would worry about the potential for solipsism – that the drugs represented a “cheap” route to revelation, and that what was revealed was only a distorted self-mirror, not a glimpse of the beyond. The Decadent movement further revived an interest in transcendence and the occult with Rimbaud embodying the figure of the poet-as-visionary. Of this influence on Michaux, Rigaud-Drayton writes, “Constructing the poet as a ‘Seer’, like Rimbaud, he conceived of poetry and painting as modalities of the visionary – and the