ABSTRACT
Henri Michaux was a protean poet and artist, yet at the same time his poems, prose poems, travelogues, ink drawings, oil paintings, and even his experiments with psychotropic drugs all express a unified quest. Moreover, Michaux—though an agnostic—was fascinated by the imaginative flights offered by mysticism. The frenetic "multiplicity" perceptible in Michaux artistic routines parallels his lifelong search to "multiply" the self, to burst out of the corporeal cage, to experience metempsychosis. For Michaux, writing and painting above all imply practicing metaphysics; or rather, depicting physics as pushed to extreme limits. As a travel writer, Michaux both perpetuates a long tradition of disgruntled francophone voyageurs and sketches out a new way of interpreting the puzzling surface of elsewhere. Michaux's cultural and scientific curiosity help him to succeed in his metaphysical quest, to probe ever deeper into himself. In Les Grandes Epreuves de l'esprit, commenting on a drug-induced vision, he remarks that "the voyager marveled.
