Adelheid Duvanel, Inner Tumult

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

Henri Michaux, Light Through Darkness, Major Ordeals

Someone asked in a comment about the good drug books by Henri Michaux.

Here are two. I'll write about them soon. I always loved the title: The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

These are out-of-print so snatch them up if you ever see them. They are both hardcovers. Major Ordeals definitely came out in paperback too, in a 70s Harcourt Psychology series (!) if I remember correctly.

Henri Michaux, By Surprise, Hanuman Books

I never noticed the nice paper and foil stamping of this Hanuman Book under its tiny dust jacket. Hanuman publications are truly pocket-friendly at 2-3/4" by 4-1/8".

By Surprise was published in France in 1983, one year before Michaux's death (1899-1984). Randolph Hough translated the book for Hanuman in 1987. It is one of Michaux's many texts on hallucinogenic drugs. I find his "drug books" fascinating because he had been writing hallucinogenic texts since the 1920s, but he didn't try mescaline or any drug like it until 1956.

At age 59 he described his early childhood years:

"Brussels.
Indifference.
Inappetance.
Resistance.
Uninterested.

He avoids life, games, amusements and variation.
Food disgusts him.
Odors, contacts.
His marrow does not make blood.
His blood isn't wild about oxygen.

Anemia.

Dreams, without images without words, motionless.
He dreams of permanence, of perpetuity without change.
His way of existing in the margins, always on strike, is frightening or exasperating.
He's sent to the country."