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The love of Meidosemsby Jean-Michel MAULPOIX Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
From Equador to the country of Magic, from Plume to Pollagoras, et from the bomb-Man to Men-in-threads, through the Hacs, Orbus, Ecoravettes, Rocodis, Niijidus, Garinavets and all other fantastically human creatures, Henri Michaux's work looks very much like a menagerie of frightening animals, of a gallery upholstered with unseemly little pictures or distorting mirrors sending back to the passer-by a grotesque, moving or cruel image of his own condition. One would believe that those are but surface games but such that one can only make out through the latter, as if it were a feverished or decomposed face, or on a shivering skin, the delusional pathology of a depth, of dubious identity due to metamorphosis, of an uneasiness or of an anxiety which wouldn't be one person's business but everyone's. Such a work is bountiful both in unexpected creatures and encounters, coup de théâtres and « interventions » : it broaches both to the romanesque and to ethics, it urges to question, to startle and to give to see, both burst and meditative at one time, purgative as well as scrutinizing, it considers with some kind of suspicion the far too complacent poetry that cherishes the subject and worships language. One would hardly be wrong if one re-read it in the manner of a modern compendium of Characters that would describe the folds and frightening passages of the human species on our very earth.
Among the many creatures haunting Henri Michaux's imaginary world, one stands out by both its name and virtues as if it concentrated on its own person, however chancy and fictitious, that very thing that was at the origins of the begetting in the world of his fellow creatures. This creature is not single but plural or at least resembles the queen of a prodigious swarm of one's internal ghosts. Such is typical of the children of both fancy and day-dream : they mysteriously proliferate. Its name is the meidosem, which by itself is enough to entail vertigo since one hears in it the Greek word « eidos » which refers to both the species and the essence completed by a prefix and a suffix repeating the very initials of Michaux's name : i.e. that « admirable and memorable » letter « M » about which Claudel wrote in 1946 that it « erects itself in the middle of our alphabet as an arch of triumph resting on its trippled legging, unless the typography were to turn it into a spiritual indentation of the horizon : i.e. the World's, e.g. and why not Death's ? A portico open to all kinds of views and suggestions. »
Thus, the meidosem and his partner meidosemme do make an ideal couple partaking of an essential species. They become the sole child that Michaux, the writer, accepts begetting. They may just as well be his own parents and may pride on obliquely revealing his identity in a far surer and definitive way than the hated patronymic inherited through the Public Records. They have neither face nor constant appearances but they borrow their changing features from the desires and anxieties of him who once invented them and whose portrait they'll go on delineating an objective portrait beyond his death. Their whole life thus rests between the folds of a text of sixty nine pages published in the first time in Point du Jour in 1948, and taking its place in 1949 in Life in folds between « apparitions » and « inexprissible places ». Their existence is fragmentary as these pages made of only very few words to « short-circuit », in the refusal of budding and petrification. Their adventure starts without neither preamble nor careful concerns, on two almost blank pages, two sentences grasp in its flight the fable in the Meidosems.
p. 101 : « Besides, like all lady Meidosemmes, she only dreams of entering the Confetti Palace. » p. 102 : « and while he's watching her, he gives her a soul child. »
Here is utttered the essential word « soul » (« âme » in French), never articulated but compelling ourselves to open and close our mouths when pronounced, no swifter than a breath. « Soul » to say everything, the Meidosem could very well have also been called « meidosâme » (since in French, « âme » is « soul ») but that name would have been too heavy a burden and the word « to love » (since in French, phonetically, the « em » resembles « aime », love …) wouldn't have been thus heard underneath. For this fable of the soul is also a love story, nay the love story as embodied lightly by this tall and gracious meidosemme « on her long, thin and curved legs ». Better than men in threads of Trials, exorcisms met « after a long lasting illness, at the termination of a deep anaemia », and who came across him they were standing in front of, upright and tense, meidosems are flimsy, transient and imperceptible creatures hence difficult to be caught. Of the lightness of a quill and vegetable hypersensitiveness, they react to all that take place both in the world and in their hearts with such an intensity that those very events seem to be moves of their own very substance. They know no rest, no respite, but always surge anywhere, unexpected, shivering, ceaselessly clad with its shapes, e.g. they mey may be seen going down, naked, hanging « from a parachute from some unknown country, hidden in some ionosphere » or transforming themselves « into cascades and cracks of fire », varying their reflections with the vain hope of suffering less. Hence they become « hundreds of threads along which they wander suffering from spasmodic electrical shiverings », such are they « thirty-four entangled spears » or « some bundles fallen from a cart » or « sorrow running running, or fleeing rolling ». Their precarious existence thus proceeds through quick definitions and indented lines. The effort of writing may seem as minimal as the Meidosems' trade with the world. Such furtive exchanges, vertigo and small medley aggregates of terms express both the impatience and dissatisfaction of these chancy creatures who only dream of alleviating themselves from their substance, which is however so light to undo themselves and fly off. As the soul from which it is but a winding fold, the Meidosem is awaiting delivery on this earth and dreams of the celestial and minute Palace of a confetti blown away by the wind. His desire begins to be achieved when « eadless wings, birds, wings devoid and pure of any bodies fly towards a solar sky not yet so bright but fighting hard for brilliance, piercing its way in empyrean as a shell of felicity to come. »
The meidosem country is that of transcience and passages, it can be made out through its terraces, its roofs, its ladders, its promontories shaken with gusts, all kinds of openings and invitations to space, its silent take-offs to escape from the « barbed wired polygon of a no-way-out present ». There are also creepers, long stems and trees on to which Meidosems climb « through the sap » to rest. Always on the verge of being born or of disappearing, such creatures are soon no longer but what can be taken up from the soul, what flitters, what surges up, desires or huddles a short while in oneself or in the other person franctically. They make such a tiny difference between their own body and the world as between softness and pain. Their strength is all in weakness, their foresight in their blindness, their wealth in their poverty. They may dream of flying off to put an end to such paradoxes.
If one had to find Plume an heir amid the large family of tiny imaginary beings begotten by Henri Michaux, I would choose the Meidosem without wavering at all. Born precisely as he was by a quick stroke of the pen at the very moment when the writer chooses to exchange the latter with a brush or accelerate its line. But people should not be mistaken : the Meidosems are both abstract, ideal creatures with light lines, refined, so it seems, from any human scoria and most resolutely objective and real beings than others, since they are seen from the point of view of weakness and finitude, carefully observed in their shivering interiority, their chores and cares, their desires and their fears, as translucent and chancy as they are sensitive. Their portrayal is thus salutary. It only seems necessary to specify the frightening details so that anxiety may disappear, their minute existence is such that an unbearable fate and marvellous relief can be both at once deciphered.
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