Ideograms in China by Henri Michaux

Author:Henri Michaux [Michaux, Henri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2522-9
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

“Things in motion, motion in things”—the mimology proposed here is based less (to use Peirce’s terminology) on the iconic resemblance between the sign and what it represents than on an indexical relation of causality or contiguity between the two. Indeed, if Fenollosa or Pound consider Chinese the ideal medium for poetry, it is because its characters actually mime or respond to the very processes of Nature in a language whose signs are visibly patterned by the primal energies of the elements (much as, in Peirce’s example of the indexical sign, the wind causes the weathervane to register its direction). Answering to a natura naturans, a nature in process, in the making, Chinese writing thus becomes a scriptura scribens, a writing in and of process. Fenollosa’s post-Romantic insistence on energeia over ergon (“the verb must be the primary fact of nature,” “The cherry tree is all that it does”) not only had a great deal to do with Pound’s own drift from estheticism into activist politics (a poet is all that he does, however grievously he might err in the process), but it also served to shape his conception of the Cantos as a kind of gigantic Action Poem—not an autonomous textual artifact, not a noun, but a verb, an ongoing enactment of individual and collective process, a performative experiment open to whatever might at the moment be at hand, including its own incompletion or eventual ruin.

I have deliberately borrowed the notion of an Action Poem from the vocabulary of modern art history (it was Harold Rosenberg who was the first to speak of Action Painting)7 because it provides an obvious bridge into Michaux—poet, painter, actor, in short, inscriber of actions or agons on canvas or page, performer of dramatic events that invite reading as signs, traces of movement, vestiges of gesture. Scholars of Michaux concur in emphasizing the centrality of le geste to his entire work—whether it be the onomatopoetic vocal gesticulations of Michaux’s “nonsense” verse or the calligraphic pantomime that is a trademark of his drawings.8 Michaux describes as follows the process recorded in Mouvements, a series of some 1200 sheets of ideogrammic signs enacted in encre de Chine over the course of 1950–51: “It involved gestures, interiors, for which we have no limbs at our disposal but only the desire of limbs, tensions, élans, all made up of living cords, never thick, never swollen with flesh or enclosed in skin.”9 Gestures incarnating, dramatizing something beyond or before the body, gestures realizing themselves in or as signs, the sheer generation or proliferation of which allows Michaux to leave words behind:

It’s precisely because I managed to liberate myself from words, these sticky hangers-on, that the drawings are so slender and almost joyous, that their movements were so easy for me to execute, despite their occasional exasperations. I see in them a new language, turning its back on the verbal, a liberator … an unexpected, soothing mode of writing in which one would finally be able to express oneself far from words, far from other people’s words.

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