A review by cais
Miserable Miracle: Mescaline by Henri Michaux

5.0

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.