Michaux

Ecuador was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I overpacked and brought four.
Michaux's breezy and surreal writing style was an important antidote to the heaviness of the words and situations I found myself in during my tenure in Baghdad. The order and time was both out of joint, and factions left and right conspired to march forward, for and against the war, without a breath or break to marvel at the absurdity of Iraq as a country and a sociopolitical myth.
Michaux created his own alphabet based on his drawings. Every utopian begins by creating their own language for their own world. It is a desperate ploy used by desperate people to do sublime things.

	Fragments from Ecuador
	HENRI MICHAUX February 1, 1928 No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth's interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we care, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth as been done to death. (This opinion, I know. are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.) PG30 September 12, 1928 Now my mind is made up. This whole journey is a trap. Traveling does not broaden you as much as make you sophisticated, 'up-to-date,' taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury. The look of a go-getter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry. At that time I kept dropping out of sight in that horizon which my two arms contained. May 10, 1928 Chastity has on me the effect of a drug . Its symptoms: quick gestures, hostility, fear, a need for music. When I am slow I feel like a painter, stupid, accepting, and completely given over -- my downfall after the woman's. Tum viderunt quia nudi erant. When I am chaste no word can keep up with me. My ideas come to me with the speed needed to seize a man drowning. If in these moments I write, useless, it is never more than a resume. Still, alas, it is my lucid optimum. March 21, 1928 It is almost an intellectual tradition to pay heed to the insane. In my case those that I most respect are the morons. PREFACE A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here. February 13(?), 1928 I'm not that good; so I miss much of what is understandable. That's too bad. In the carpeting of their rooms, where there are only little spots of light, a few lines, a spot, a bit of something torn, the sick see little devils. In the same way I too have looked -- not neurotically, or out of fear, but kindly rather. This, then, is one of those nothings: March 21, 1928 A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage... And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad... November (?), 1928 Andre and I make pretty funny travelers. Malaria...hell! We just want to go to sleep. Our mosquito nets are small. They make you suffocate, and we have never used them. But here there are decidedly too many mosquitoes. Sleepless night. Back
	Ecuador was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I overpacked and brought four. Michaux's breezy and surreal writing style was an important antidote to the heaviness of the words and situations I found myself in during my tenure in Baghdad. The order and time was both out of joint, and factions left and right conspired to march forward, for and against the war, without a breath or break to marvel at the absurdity of Iraq as a country and a sociopolitical myth. Michaux created his own alphabet based on his drawings. Every utopian begins by creating their own language for their own world. It is a desperate ploy used by desperate people to do sublime things.