Henri Michaux – Roerige Nacht

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) became an artist and writer out of inner necessity. He had an awkward relationship with life and sought refuge in fields in which he could cope with the world. This resulted, among other things, in his prose poems, which he wrote, to put it in his own words, “for sanitary reasons”. Roerige Nacht contains a broad selection of two early French volumes (1929 and 1933) that Michaux published in 1967 with Editions Gallimard under the collective title of La Nuit Remue.

In casual but musical phrases Michaux leads the reader to worlds reminiscent of our own but unvariably containing alien elements: a language, biology, ethnology or psychology of their own. Cheerful, tart, and at times enlivening images.

“The soul loves swimming. In order to swim you lay down on your belly. The soul starts to move and departs.