Etymologies of Gesture
By Richard Sieburth

Saisir and Par des traits were originally published in 1979 and 1984 as separate plaquettes by Michaux’s favorite small press, Fata Morgana – as it so happened,the latter volume was to be the last book he personally saw into print before his death at age eighty-five. These works provide a late self-portrait of Monsieur Plume’s final adventures in the Realm of Signs.

As Michaux explains in the opening pages of his 1972 autobiography, Emergences-Resurgences,in the beginning was the line.He evokes his first faltering forays into drawing in the mid-20s,inspired by his recent discovery of the work of Paul Klee:

I too, one day, late on, adult, feel the urge to draw, to participate in the world via lines.
One line, rather than many. And so I begin, letting myself be led by a line, a single line,
which without lifting pencil from paper I allow to run until, having restlessly wandered
within this restricted space, things necessarily come to a stop. And then,what one sees is
an entanglement,a drawing as it were desiring to withdraw into itself.
Is what I’m doing just a kind of poor man’s drawing,like someone playing guitar with
one finger?

Like me the line seeks without knowing what it seeks, refusing the sudden lucky finds, the
easy solutions, the initial temptations. Line loathe to “arrive,” line of blind investigation
Leading nowhere, intending neither to be artful or interesting traversing itself without
flinching, without turning away, without twisting,without clinging to anything without
the perception of any object, landscape, figure.
Sure of step, sleepwalking line.
Curved here and there, yet net entwining.
Encircling nothing, never encircled.

Line not yet having made its choice,not yet ready to have the point explained.
Without preference,without accentuation,without entirely giving in to what attracts it.
... Watchful, wandering line. Single line,confirmed bachelor, keeper of distances, refusing
to submit blind to what is material. Neither in charge nor in partnership, above all not
in subordination.

Later the signs,certain signs.Signs say things to me.I would gladly make signs,but a
sign is also a stop sign. And at this juncture there is still something I desire above all
else. A continuum A murmur without end, like life itself – which continues us, above and
beyond quality.
Impossible to draw as if this continuum did not exist.This is what needs to be bodied
forth.
Failures.
Failures.
Attempts.Failures.
For want of anything better, I trace out pictograms of sorts,or rather pictographic trajec-
tories,but without rules. I want my tracings to be the very phrasing of life – yet supple,
deformable, sinuous. Around me,the embarrassed shoulder shrugs of my various well-
wishers.... I was on the wrong track... instead of simply pursuing writing.
What I considered a need as extreme and natural as the need for water, bread, or sleep,
those around me considered no need at all. What they saw above all were the results –
awkward, timid.
How could it be otherwise? How could I dare take myself entirely out of the picture?
How presumptuous of me!
I have no formal training in drawing.These are my first ventures.
Failures. Not total failures (a certain embryo...perhaps for later).
I give up.

Over half a century later, having recently revisited the art of Chinese calligraphy in his Idéogrammes en Chine(1971), Michaux is still pursuing this same utopian venture in the pages of Saisirand Par des traits – to seize upon the act of writing/drawing as sheer occasion, the verbal and the pictorial falling together (ob-cadere), enacting their own origin, bodying forth the moment at which lines and signs,not yet fully bearers of meaning,begin to stand forth ...and disappear. “What I wanted to represent was the gesture within a man, taking off from the inside, releasing, ripping free; the angry eruptionof this intense, sudden, ardent concentration from which the blow will proceed, rather than the blow’s arrival at its destination.” Michaux as an aging Zen pugilist, taking aim not to aim.

_____

The French verb saisir, like its English cognate seize, goes back to the Gallo-Latin sacire, “to take possession of, to claim (a right). ”Its resonances in French are frequently juridical – as they are in the Anglo-Norman seisinretained by British common law. Saisir, or la saisie: to attach (real estate or bank accounts), to distrain upon (goods), to embargo or confiscate, to foreclose, sequestrate, garnish, take into custody. All acts involving the appropriation of something or somebody by legal force. In choosing the word Saisiras his title, however, Michaux pointedly seeks to erase all these etymological traces of the law. Instead, the verb he is after is more palpably rooted in the epistemological and aesthetic: to perceive,to discern, to apprehend. Taking my cues from his various plays on saisir throughout the text (which, at its culmination, in a characteristic dialectical reversal, proposes a movement “vers plus d’insaisissable”), I have chosen to translate this pivotal term not by its Latinate (false) friend, but by the Anglo-Saxon grasp, whose semantic and acoustic contours nicely map out the kinds of events Michaux here rehearses:gropings, grabbings, grippings, gaspings. Get a grasp on. Within one’s grasp. Beyond one’s grasp. Grasp at straws. The myth of Tantalus. The first lines of Hölderlin’s “Patmos”: “Nah ist/Und schwer zu fassen.” “Near and/Hard to grasp.”

Addressed to Micheline Phan,his Asian muse and closest companion during the last two decades of his life, Grasp is Michaux’s retrospective narration – part prose, part verse, part drawing – of a particular episode in his lifelong quest to formulate a language of graphic signs that would take place at once before and beyond the domain of conventionalized verbal expression. In 1966, in the course of one of his rare interviews entitled “The Experience of Signs,” he spoke of this dream of a universal language:

I dreamed for a time,without any serious result,of searching for a universal language,I tried to come up with characters clear for all, independent of speech.But nothing ever came of it....Or if it did, one character was never different enough from the next. I was missing the point. In Chinese writing, when the pen was in use before the brush,anyone could understand characters in a second. I’ve always hoped to find this language among other peoples or in other places. In Africa, for example, but let’s admit that this is never too clear or that it remains conventional: man, woman, mountain, stream, nothing more. It’s a hope that I have not fulfilled. I would willingly give all that I have to achieve this.

Grasp represents one more stab at this semiotopia. Now eighty, the signs no longer come pouring out of him as they did back in 1951 when,sometimes arriving at the clip of 5000 a day,he delivered himself of some 1200 pages of Indian ink ideograms,selections of which were published in the volume Mouvements.Nor is he here giving birth,as in Misérable Miracleand his other mescaline texts of the late fifties,to an amniotic wash of protozoic vibrations and oscillations.The project here is far more modest:he will attempt to “grasp”the élan vital of living things – Michaux shares a vitalist Bergsonianism with Deleuze – via the creation of his own private bestiary.At the outset,the experiment seems to be proceeding well enough along;soon,however,by a typically comic turn of events,Michaux clownishly suffers a series of pratfalls:the commonest of animals (dogs, cats,crows,sparrows) obstinately elude his pictographic grasp;other creatures turn up in his bestiary half-formed,unfinished;and finally,like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa,he observes that “insects,especially insects,were happening to me.Intrigued,I became more and more of a bug.”A series of entomological sketches ensues – centipedes,bees,wasps,beetles,acarids – all exoskeletal,all minutely segmented (as in the Greek root entomon,“one whose body is cut into parts”).

But even as he undergoes this temporary metamorphosis into insect (“to make myself insect to get abetter grasp/ with hooked legs, to get a better grasp”), Michaux finds himself rebelling against this sort of appropriative purchase on the world – “grasping being something that does not come naturally to me (a late acquisition), grasping having as its contrary ‘contemplation,’ disinclination, an attitude of reserve.” The second half of the text accordingly enacts an opposite movement – a movement of dispossession in which he must learn to loose his grasp and turn away from mimesis, away from images that might in some way recall familiar animal shapes, away from recognizable forms, in order to capture what he calls “the primal dance of creatures,” reduced and abstracted into sheer motion, sheer gesture, sheer élan. As the drawings evolve from their insect stage into vaguely anthropomorphic fragments (heads, legs, torsos, severed arms), they waiver between figuration and disfiguration,aggregation and disaggregation, leap into a series of balletic ideograms, then, toward the end of the book,finally mutate into lines of runes or filigree strands of some still undeciphered language – with the closing visual chord faintly alluding to the hexagrams of the I Ching,signs of an ultimate (and ungraspable) gnosis.

What will Michaux have learned at the end of this miniature cosmogony? That he has been lost in translation all the while – image into sign,figure into abstraction,insect into human, all living things into the infinite disseminations of language. “Grasp: translate,” he concludes – before moving on.

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While the words and images in Grasp conjoin to tell the common narrative of their own origins and dispersals, Par des traits, the second book included here,is designed somewhat differently: first, a brief riff of drawings, then an eight-page poem, then a longer reprise of drawings,and a concluding manifesto of sorts in prose, accompanied by a running head of private ideograms — or rather idiograms. The title can be literally translated as “by (means of) lines,” but this doesn’t fully capture the rich implications of the French word trait. Derived from the Latin trahere (to drag or draw), the term in its various deployments includes: marks, lines, traces, strokes, arrows, barbs, darts, gibes, quips, draughts, gulps, traits, distinctive features, lineaments, acts, deeds, and moves. In Michaux’s case, it might be best translated by the Chinese wen, a character signifying marks, whether these be the veins of stones or wood, the lines that connect stars into constellations, the tracks of animals on the ground,the cracks in tortoise shells used for divination, or finally, the art of writing, and all aspects of courtesy. Given the trisyllabic drumbeat of its recurrence throughout Michaux’s poem, I have in this case activated his par des traits into the English stroke by stroke, thereby energizing those precise rhythmic instances when his calligrapher’s brush strikes paper: “Directions changed/stroke by stroke, multiplied/exploded stroke by stroke.”

Also published in the Orwellian year of 1984, “Of Languages and Writing:Why the Urge to Turn from Them ”constitutes Michaux’s final act of political insurgency against what he calls “applied languages, corporate languages ,organizational tools” – an anarchist’s bomb hurled at the global technologization of the word in the Information Age. By choosing to translate Michaux’s “tissu”as “web,” I have deliberately read into his text an uncanny prophecy of the Internet: “Everything is to be woven into a web, the web of words, the tree into a web, the passing breeze, into a web the distant and the near, into a web the bird on the wing, into a web the unsettled soul, even the blood, the racing blood, into a web of boredom, of enslavement, into a common thing, a vulgar, monotonous thing.” Against this worldwide web of dematerialized signification, against this proliferation of words grounded in nothing more than infinitely extensible lines of credit, Michaux proposes an etymological return to a far more archaic (and ascetic) economy of language, one based not on the multiplication or globalization of signs,but on their reduction to a handful of primitive characters locally and lovingly exchanged among a small circle of friends: “small bits of language,well-chosen, would do, would please, after a while, would change. ”The ideogram that closes the text seems to hint that he has at last managed to subtract his body, his world into one final gesture, one final sign – a signature, near death, here offered up to us, in all its frailty, for translation.