Miserable Miracle

by Henri Michaux, Louise Varèse (Translator), Octavio Paz (Introduction)

"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, France, Drugs, Memoir, Philosophy, Literature

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian poet, writer and painter who wrote in the French language. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

Reviews

[David Katzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful dwarves in skin-tight gold lamé pantsuits. Cats who scratch out dreams on your wooden leg. Pleistocene fists pounding frenetic rhythms across your naked skin. Heretic wishes left to their own devices. Soaring stories built second by second moment by moment until nothing is left but a wish a thought a syllable and a sill upon which sits the things left over, after, above and between, always between never complete, always left over, never beginning, only between the things, the shape of a shape, the crevasse where the self is/was, the outside not the inside, the space around a cup that doesn’t exist that does that only exists that only does that leaves you helpless that symmetric asymptotic line drawn from your self to the outside world, the hypothetical world, the assumption, the consuming assumption that things that things where they are they go with you. Get closer get closer never reaching your destination never like Zeno suggested despite the disproof you can never reach a thing no matter how many distances you cut in half and in half because nothing touches electrons repel atoms mingle like gyroscopes fighting touching. Mescaline dreams mescaline the subject of a poetic exploration, a dissertation, a beautiful torture, a gorgeous nightmare, a shape that leaves you shattered, ego spread across the bathroom floor like blood wrists cut and bled out the victim, the deserving victim, realizing the Hindu vision, the multiplicity of oneness, the artificiality, the psychosis of psychedelia, the psychosis of

patience, my friend, have patience with the impossible. An overdose left disturbed for months, hashish for the simpler times, for the investigation, the examination, looking close closer the resolution is infinite, don’t look at the subject, behind it, that figure, that ambiguity, the mountains in the distance, the sound of feet walking, the feeling of shapes and leaving a taste in your mouth of curiosity, the infinite confidence to leap into your mind and perhaps never come back, you might not come back, the fever, the speed of Mescaline, unquenchable, irresistible, to know what it’s like to not be/ing able to stop your mind, to be quiet to have peace, every moment an eternity so painful so beautiful you are dying over and over you can’t get off the merry-go-round, but the face of death is…later…is worth it, you touched it, you survived the terror of insanity so you know, you walked the fragile surface of consciousness, you understand, every surface is essential and simultaneously nothing, you understand

madness. It’s always interruption. The indisputable concretely is disputable. During nirvana, after samsara, the challenge being can you take a piece with you and understanding the artificiality so that maybe you might just love a little bit more and live a little bit more and breath a little bit more. Or you might just be a douchebag. It really depends. 50/50 odds, I say. Everyone has to make up what’s in their own mind.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

You go from little death to little death for hours on end, from shipwreck to rescue, succumbing every three or four minutes without the least apprehension, only to be gently, marvelously resuscitated once more. A deep sigh, which speaks volumes to those who know, is the only intimation of new rescues, but the voyage continues, a new death is preparing from which you will emerge in the same way. It is as though you had another heart whose systole and diastole occurred fifteen or twenty times an hour.

Homesick for himself. Three weeks in the wake of mescaline's demands of submission. Three months for the troll to get back to his under the belly goat's bridge. Michaux surrendered for a memory of stealing his wool weaving to see through. I don't have nothing but I am relishing/writhing in the envy of his born visions. I don't ever want to try mescaline, or any drug for this. I give in/pick up a sleeping pill problem. Oblivion, rather fooling myself that this time it will be possible to set down on the other side. Hibernating bears have it all. It doesn't work that way. The nothing doesn't burn on nothing. Something like in the Neverending Story and taunting wolfs offering nothing for something. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to relate to the "fun part" of drug taking instead of the rock drowning, leaving the bereft that knows me. Going under for surgery was a blackhole too. The cosmic floating happened, yet I was deaf to tastes and blind to sounds. A contextless black hole. I'm terrified of the spiritual leprosy of returning to the same cliff, anyway. Yet it is almost tempting, to think about the are they the same figments of cats. I have seen them before, on bridges. Are they the same as Anna Kavan's leopards from inside and the tigers prowling Robert Smith. Michaux's psuedo cats, long after the three months. When Russian bears break into airports for the jet fuel fumes are they communicating with their spirit animals? It's a colorblindness in the flying solo world (to hell with that. Fever dreams float over horrors and can't-tear-away-wrecks). I want to know why the mescaline colors could be the same from one head orbit to another celestial homing pigeon. Does the mystery lose anything if you can go, oh that's just the mescaline? Or the contrasting hashish. Michaux was willing to follow hashish as he tooth and nailed the imprisming of mescaline. I liked how he describes the massaging laughter in the bodies of its users. I don't believe in a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow this way any more than I do any other drug. I see empty cages and pacing great outdoors prisons. But I liked it like this. Feed my nest. The closest to this I've ever had must have been when my sister and I were babies. My aunt said we laughed in our sleep. Must be the same tigers, under the glassy fish and spirit bears.

I didn't know about the Zilla spiders. I love Michaux for saying the psychiatrists should have tested the marijuana and urine of schizophrenics on themselves rather than on the spiders.
I also tested what he said how it is impossible to envision colors and hear music with your inner ears. The colors went sun spots (I called staring at the sun and lamps and bringing forth the popping inside out colors "my magic powers" when I was a small girl). If I do my insomniac standby of boats it's an awareness of colors more than sensual vividness of the music.... (Spiders have the highest success rate for stupors. I can't wait to get mixed up about zilla spiders.) I get the one foot in the realm of the living and the let's see if we can get it away with it experimentation. I loved his bridges. I want Michaux bridges. I don't know about the heat of hashish versus frozen alive of mescaline.... It has to be a hearing aid and not the big, big picture. That's how it works to do the body's own chemistry.... (There have to be the dead inside the drug robots. Laika can't always make it up above the world.)

Offer what is of little importance, mental images, little everyday ideas.
Otherwise you will be wholly uninhabitable, horrifying to yourself, your house in the torrent, an object of ridicule in your own eyes.

The illustrations reminded me of jacob's ladder on skin, your only home walled in.... I want to know the whole work, though I can't read French and all.... Michaux's I-wanted-to-say when it was happening.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Henri Michaux was in his fifties he decided to try mescaline. Until this decision he was a veritable teetotaler. He didn’t even drink coffee. But he was an adventurous sort, a natural psychonaut, so in the name of a worthy experiment in consciousness he took mescaline. He didn't "enjoy" it, in fact it was rather torturous, but what it helped to open up in his mind he considered a miracle, hence Miserable Miracle.

I have yet to read this book in its entirety – to be frank, it gets repetitive - but then it's not a beginning-middle-end type of book, so it's easy and even appropriate to dip into it at random and read at your leisure. And what you will find inside are writings which are like what a literate & extremely delicate surrealist seismograph with a dozen flexible arms (each with an extra fine tipped pen attached) might produce if it had an agile capacious mind and a preternatural ability to detect and transcribe rapidly mutating and infinitely layered "mental movies" playing on its inner eye.

And not only verbal descriptions are produced but also nervous looking drawings of delicate lines whose overall symmetry has been skewed and warped by hallucinatory mental cross winds.

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[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a 'weekend hippy' in the early 70s I consumed quite a lot of hallucinogens/psychedelics, mostly LSD but also 'magic mushrooms', pot of course and once mescaline. I still remember that trip, maybe because it was one of my first, it was a fairly gentle one I think, due to a smaller than normal dose but still spiked with amazing hallucinations - I remember staring at the pictures I discovered in the bathroom linoleum, which seemed like a load of Polaroid pictures of several families whose histories and struggles I knew instantly, that someone had ripped up and scattered. I didn't pick them up and re-assemble but could have, I'm sure, if I wanted to. Later the air seemed to be hiding things from me, then every molecule would be visible with chemical formulae attached. Patterns emerged everywhere I looked, tessellations (?) forming and merging. Everything seemed to click into place and then fall apart. What it did was take me, a 17 year old ignorant, small town boy and destroy me, toss me aside, and open something new, the universe, the infinite. Or something.

Michaux chronicles his experiences with the drug in 1955 (the year I was born, of completely no significance), in both notes and drawings (some reproduced in the book) he makes during his 'trips' and reflections after, and also comparing the experience of hashish. I was there, remembering, as he starts off: the world retreating in the distance, an ever increasing distance - Each word becoming more and more dense, too dense to be uttered from now on, word complete in itself, word in a nest, while the noise of the wood fire in the fireplace becomes the only presence, becomes important, strange and absorbing in its movements....

And the 'self' being tossed aside: I was being shoved about, I was being crumpled . The person is absorbed into something else. In Michaux at one point: thousands of little ambulacral tentacles of a gigantic starfish fastened to me so compactly that I could not tell if I was becoming the starfish or if the starfish had become me
and then the visions. Sometimes the hallucinations are pleasant/intriguing: a glass staircase, a stairway like Jacob's ladder, a stairway with more steps than I could climb in 3 lifetimes.. rose into the absolute. More often than not though they are disturbing. Michaux sees a foetus in a washbasin - I touched the soft bluish head of the sticky blood stained little thing. He picks up a stick and began energetically shoving the little body back and forth.. it opened and fell apart.. The fetus no longer existed, yet it was still there, livid, bluish, blood stained, with really delicate tones, almost irridescent..

Mescaline puts him in touch with absolutes, with essences: And white appears. Absolute white. White whiter than all whiteness. White of the advent of white. White without compromise, by exclusion, by the total eradication of non-white. White, mad, exasperated, shreiking with whiteness. Fanatical, furious, riddling the eyeball. White, atrociously electric, implacable, muderous. White in blasts of white.

Some of it is straightforward: When the action of Mesclaine is at its height, it produces blinding images, or images ringed with lightning, trenches of fire, as well as , in the distance, lilliputian men whose motions are more like those of the pistons of an engine than human gestures.. sooner or later everything turns into crytals. (that's what I remember - the images ringed by lightning, and the crystallisation of everything - pictures on the wall, a heater, a friend's face).

You have a new time scale: With your new time, with your minutes made up of three million instants, you will never be in a hurry, with your attention superdivided you will never be outdistanced. I was in an infinity mechanism.

I recall how the improbable unreality of reality is obvious, violent. The swift, shining thoughts revolve like astral bodies. Coming out of Mescaline you know better than any Bhuddist that everything is nothing but appearance.

I think you can tell I liked this book, it brought back vivid memories. Sometimes it seems a bit silly, eg talk of the pinkness of pink, and I would not recommend the ingestion of hallucinogens (especially if you are my daughter reading this): I've seen a few acid casualties in my life.

David Katzman's review brought me to this book, and you should read it if you are still interested: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
there is a very good thread about drugs and addiction there as well.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely love the philosophical side of this book, beginning with the idea that Michaux has set out to "explore the mediocre human condition." Octavio Paz, in his introduction, relates that what Michaux discovered in this exploration was that man is not mediocre at all, since "A part of oneself -- a part walled in, obscured from the very beginning of the beginning -- is open to the infinite." I believe this absolutely. How this discovery was made is at this work's core. I do have to say that I laughed while reading about Michaux's experiments with hashish (as did he!).

more to come.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "writer takes drugs and tells the tale" summary does not do this justice, particularly if that conjures visions of Hunter S. Thompson. This reads almost more like travel writing where the space is internal and the behavioral/built culture is formed from the pharmacological/philosophical aspect of a given drug ... comparative ethnography of Mescaline and Hashish. Hardly surprising since Michaux has also written some excellent travelogues. The writing is occasionally terrifying (and terrifyingly beautiful) ... I get glimpses of Lovecraftian architecture, of Kafkaesque labyrinths, and, yes, of Burrough's more cerebral passages, but all tempered by a very modern poetic respect for the stark, the simple, the clean. Surrealist line drawing, and the drawings in the book, are apt visual metaphors. He manages to capture the infinite, uncomposed nature of Mescaline in with concision and form. No small accomplishment. And kudos for giving me my new favorite word: ruiniform.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

far more intellectually honest (in its postscript and appendices) than say, Huxley and his doors of perception or whatever. The actual mescaline journals in here are fun to read if you don’t try and think about it too much; mostly incoherent rambling about colours punctuated by brief moments of lucidity. The appendix that deals with the orientalist gaze on narcotics is the big highlight for me

[Daniel Polansky]

I read this book.

[Lukáš Palán · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahojda jahoda,

tato knížka je o tom, jak si Henri Mišo řekl "páteček, tak co budem dělat, možná nějaký drogy by to chtělo" a pak to všechno napsal na papír. Díky bohu to nenapsal třeba na chleba, to by se to nikdy nedochovalo. Jelikož jsem taky experimentoval s drogami, jako třeba rumové pralinky, Indiánek a bombičky do sifonu, vím moc dobře o čem tady kolega píše! Moc mě nenalákal, abych to zkusil, ale nikdy neříkej nikdy. Každopádně, jako vždy, průlet mozkem pana Mišaoauxe mě dost bavil. Doporučuji všem, kterým u heroinu z Václaváku nedali k nákupu takovej ten složenej papírek s Instrukcema k použití.

[Loki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well-written account and simulation of mescaline. His experiences sound horrible! Maybe if he had elaborated on the insights he got on his trips it would have been better. However, the chapter on hash was great - very eloquent.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there's a better book about psychoactive drugs, I'd like to know about it.

[Augments · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too French

[Andy Dávila · Rating 5 out of 5]

i feel like i underlined something in every single page,
this was my first introduction to Michaux’s writing and I enjoyed it so much I’m writing about his work for my MA!

[Lila Sandu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best trip report I’ve ever read (sorry Aldous)

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michaux is 57 years old. He does not drink alcohol, tea, or coffee, nor smoke tobacco. He practices moderation--abstinence really--in the use of all excitants.

So he takes mescaline, then, in the interest of comparative analysis, he tries hashish... thereafter moving on to a massive dose of mescaline, which juices the ability to write or analyze right out of his nerd's body, and ultimately results in a compulsion to push innocents into the Seine.

His thoughts on the color pink are 5-star or better:
"Like the sensitive tip of the tongue at the height of its enjoyment, if this tip of the tongue became instantaneously a big, fat pink hippopotamus replete with that enjoyment, and not only one, but a hundred big-bellied hippos, and ten thousand sows, suckling already biggish little pigs snuggling against their swollen flanks, and all this huddled together one against the other, and if the height of the enjoyment thus spread out and multiplied were solely the fact of being pink, pink, pink, stupidly, deliriously, paradisiacally pink, pink enough to make you howl, --unless you had the soul of a whore adn took a flabby pleasure in yielding to it,-- that was the way I was seeing pink."

[Solange te parle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Descriptions poétiquement décousues de trips sous psychédéliques. Michaux est attendrissant et réussit à rendre compte comme personne des états de conscience modifiée. Entre extase et perte de soi-même. (Mais lecture un peu absconse pour qui n'aurait aucun intérêt pour les substances...)

[Jere · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miraculous and miserable; maybe I'll read this book again, but I'll never take mescaline.

[Richard Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bar none the most vestigial I’ve read to date is the INTRODUCTION BY OCTAVIO PAZ, which in no way disqualifies the superiority, in every aspect, of his translated subject to Huxley’s earlier, and by comparison relatively fraudulent treatment. Still, readers suffering aphantasia are encouraged to skip this volume entirely; the fun consists in imagining images:

Sometimes a glass stairway, a stairway like Jacob’s ladder, a stairway with more steps than I could climb in three entire lifetimes, a stairway with ten million steps, a stairway without landings, a stairway up to the sky, the maddest, most monstrous feat since the tower of Babel, rose into the absolute. Suddenly, I could see it no longer. The stairway had vanished like bubbles of champagne, and I continued my navigation, struggling not to roll, struggling against suctions and pullings, against infinitely small jumping things, against stretched webs, and arching claws. [p.37]

As you can see, Michaux’s prose quality is adequate to the task of conveying psychedelic phenomena, although of course language at its best can only ever trace the shadow of experience, right? Not quite; but more than most should ask for, for who would want to poke a blood-drenched just-birthed fetus in a bathroom sink with a stick, even in hallucination, as our author did one page later: perhaps more horrifying when you link this scene to his earlier comments on the effects of mescaline, which for him immanentizes linguistic reifications, sews together mind and matter in phenomenal space, yes, he (or some part of him) wrote that baby there—and then it was.

Endlessly broken up, our attempts at composition admit only this one constant… Very… It is very… Everything is very… [p.70]

A fruitful syntactic analysis may be performed on Michaux’s pronoun usage, as all three of “I,” “we,” and “he” occur throughout to refer—ostensibly—to himself; I suspect they serve as distance modifiers for (patterns of) thoughts he would prefer us more or less to associate with him, that is, his central self:

More than anything else Mescaline demolished some of my effectual barriers, the ones that make me myself and not one of the others among my possible “me’s.” It took me weeks and weeks to reconstruct them and to shut myself inside them again. [p.82]

Additionally, scanned pages from Michaux’s tripping notebooks are scattered in groups, always interrupting the flow of text from the page before. From these I found “chaque foi” and “une cigarette”; but I am not here to scavenge scraps of coherence from illegibility, nor to entertain methodological conceits regarding the mechanism of conceptual access:

Coming out of Mescaline you know better than any Buddhist that everything is nothing but appearance. [p.80]

I am here, apparently, to mine for quotes (which I can then deploy in opportune contexts); Miserable Miracle is by and large a juicy vein:

What is it in life that is most exhausting and that leads surely to madness? It is to stay awake. It is to remain too long at one’s instrument panel. [p.154]

[Nik · Rating 4 out of 5]

suddenly a knife, suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand brilliant scythes of light set in lightning, huge enough to level whole forests, violently start slicing up space from top to bottom with gigantic slashes, with amazingly rapid slashes that I have to keep up with, inwardly, painfully, at the same unbearable speed, at those same impossible heights and just afterwards in the same abyssal depths, in increasingly excessive, crazy, dismembering leaps...

I decided to read this book after learning that the above passage inspired the title of one of my favourite songs, Thousand Knives by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Mild disappointment to discover it almost immediately on page 10; just 169 more pages to go. But what followed was a pleasantly engaging (and relatively quick) read, a rich description of Michaux's experiences, at times repetitive but that was perhaps to be expected given the nature of his subject. He makes thought-provoking comments on drugs and mental illness revealed by his experience, for example:

Personally, I had always had a hard time making sense of delusions of persecution. What a lack of pride, I had always thought--in spite of the example of great writers, those persecuted madmen--to admit that other people were enemies, and powerful enemies! Now I believed I understood. The staging, for the man who feels persecuted, is not what counts. He begins by feeling the threat, by feeling himself threatened. Afterwards he finds the people who are threatening him (people who fit the role more or less).

I also particularly enjoyed parts II and III of the Addenda, a brief philosophical exploration of emptiness and consciousness; and a more objective, analytical take on his overall experience than the seemingly stream-of-consciousness associations that make up much of the book. This part more than others I will likely be returning to.

Other reviews here compared this book to a travel journal; a surreal internal journey rather than a lucid external one. Read that way, it is quite interesting.

[ethan pickett · Rating 5 out of 5]

it really is a shame that this book (and sometimes even the entirety of michaux himself) gets subsumed by the label "trip report" because there is a lot more going on. he's not so much writing about his experiences with a drug as writing through them. he rambles and concludes only to contradict those conclusions moments later in a complete exploration of a feeling, never an idea. he maintains this vision of sorting through the tumult of feeling.

his syntactical proficiency allows him to describe ventures of philosophy as it relates to the self and a desire for its abandon. out of context this all still works as it's laid out here. the contact he makes with the dissolution of time and the arrival of color feels like a vision that comes to you in a prophetic dream. his loss of footing when considering his placement in the matrix of All is particularly prescient.

ultimately, michaux is an extremely practiced visionary artist and writer before he's anything else. a work like this simply can't arrive without that as a base, and in the end, that's what makes the work interesting. in the same way that we might read a work on a subject we don't know or care about because of who wrote it (and how they wrote it), we can approach this as a research project. he's peeling back the curtain on human experience and finding words and ways to describe certain interactions with the world that we can't take for granted. it doesn't really matter much to me how he got there when the description of such precise torment is this good.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michaux's middle-age experiments with mescaline were not fun (“Should I speak of pleasure? It was unpleasant.”), but they were fascinating enough that he wrote extensively about them, then went on to try hashish (for the sake of comparison) and then mescaline again. It's wild and chaotic, but, amazingly, he is able to articulate the chaos in a way that is as intelligible and insightful as such writing can be. His accompanying drawings are also fascinating. He doesn’t romanticize drug taking at all or claim that his experiences are akin to those of, say, a heroin addict’s, which are far more likely to be lethal than enlightening. His reflections are about how, as Octavio Paz writes in his outstanding introduction, “The so-called human experience is a point of intersection with other forces.”

In lesser hands this book could have been nonsensical, a don't-try-this-at-home-kids absurdity. However, Michaux was a poet and an intelligent man who was able to describe such deeply inner experiences in a way that is perceptive and compelling.

[olivier · Rating 5 out of 5]

it is only to be so contradictively lucid that one can write into (self-)annihilation… what a dream state to be in as an artist and writer...to be such in solitude that you can recognise there is a self, another self, another inhabitant. or because of the recognisation that’s why there is this Solitude.

this whole writing hovers over a death that isn’t “dying”—way too alive that it is impossibleto be alive. maybe the Emptyness.

as a translation, it’s hard to say where michaux stands with emptyness and nothingness and annihilation and what he seems to write alongside: buddhism/hinduism’s enlightenment.

it is also weird and beautiful and maybe even calming to know this state of existing isn’t at all close to depressiveness and self-destruction.

this is the sort of writing that makes me go “god damn it u did it"

[Christianmaggitti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molto diversi, i disegni che facevo dopo l'hashish erano maldestri, imbarazzati, spezzettati, prematuramente interrotti. Presentavano sempre parti non finite. Le superfici erano composte di quadrati, di poligoni. Ne mancavano sempre molti.
Erano fatti lentamente.
Anche le ragnatele dei ragni Zilla, drogati (esperimento compiuto dal dottor Peter Witt, dell'Università di Berna) con l'atropina e la benzedrina, il nembutal e la marijuana, sono sempre incomplete, un'incompletezza identica per tutti i ragni della stessa famiglia, che è diversa per ciascuna droga usata.
Cosa che ci si poteva aspettare, ugualmente incomplete sono le ragnatele dei ragni ai quali si è somministrata l'orina di uno schizofrenico.
Non sarebbe per caso più opportuno compiere l'esperimento sugli psichiatri, piuttosto che sui ragni?

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A subjective view of the mescaline and hashish experience with some insights into the mind, being and madness. Michaux likens mescaline to madness, and was deeply uncomfortable and disturbed during the trip; he seems a bit more comfortable with hashish but still experiences hallucinations, which is a rare reaction to that drug.

There is obvious familiarity with psychology and the text is pseudo-psychological in tone; pseudo, because he is untrained, not in a pejorative sense.

From p.77:

"There is a certain temperament that longs to adore God, cannot adore God and is frightened to death by God. How many men have become atheists (above all, theophobes), in order to get back their peace of mind?"

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to parse at first, I stuck with this obtuse volume of prose until the final chapters, which provided a much more mature analysis of Michaux's mescaline experiences beyond "Everything sucks and I'm being tortured." (Seems the guy just needed a better setting than his stuffy apartment. Once he got out into the mountains, mescaline was much more fun.) The inner "silence" he mentions is one I myself have experienced on this medicine, so it was neat to see that reflected in someone else's experience. I also enjoyed his weird, scribbly drawings (done while on mescaline) than I thought I would. It was almost as though the drug coming through him wanted to draw naturalistic textures such as furrows, wood grain, and wrinkles.

[Stu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hey, I want to climb Mount Everest, without a guide and zero mountaineering experience. After that horrific experience, I want to climb up the hill out back and compare the two experiences.

This is pretty much what Michaux does, first taking mescaline without any previous hallucinogenic experience and without a guide, and then later taking hash as a comparison.

His experience with the sacred medicine of mescaline goes exactly as you’d expect if there’s no ceremony or guide. Still it’s a fascinating read, like watching a train wreck.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I let others do drugs so I don't have to. Then they create something simultaneously wonderfully creative and alarmingly unnerving. This book is just that. The author takes you with him on his journey with the drug mescaline, a hallucinogen which elongates everything impossibly. This work is perhaps one of the greatest about the dream state or that blurry border between the conscious and unconscious, between the boring order of normal life and the unendurable erraticism of true chaos.

[Carpasmeencasiola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would recommend this 5/7. Matter of fact: already did. Unbelievably fascinating is the way he keeps finding the words to describe the indescribable.

Reading this is a trip by itself.

That’s it I'm booking Airbnb and gonna replicate this fieldwork and let the feels work.

See you in the acid house.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful exploration of mescaline in personal use. It doesn't seem to intend to sway the reader one way or another on experimentation but rather offer up the author's own experience and musings on the matter. It's a gentle yet riveting journey with many amazing illustrations by Michaux himself.
This is especially a great read when paired with Junky by William S. Burroughs

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

J’aime l’inclusion de dessins pour décrire les images vues pendant l’expérience de Michaux avec les drogues. Cependant, le livre est trop répétitif. Ok, je comprends, tout ce que tu vois est grand. Oui, il a trouvé plusieurs manières pour décrire cette grandeur, mais il faut pas écrire ça 30.000 fois 😩

Un livre au fin ennuyeux.