The Tao of Travel

"The Book of the Machines," which Higgs quotes extensively, warns against "the ultimate development of animal consciousness"—what we would call artificial intelligence. The rights of animals are also described: animal rights are protected.

At last Higgs escapes in a hot-air balloon, and we are left to reflect on the fact that his descriptions of machines, banks, criminality, and animals have echoes in Darwinism, the church, and Victorian law; that the "straighteners" have their counterparts in doctors and priests; that the seemingly distant place he has described is not so distant.

Henri Michaux: Voyage to Great Garaban

HENRI MICHAUX, WHO was born in Belgium in 1899 and lived most of his life in France, where he died in 1984, is an obscure figure at the fringes of surrealism, known for his poems, his odd short stories, his hectic journeys, his strange paintings and drawings, and most of all for his experiments with practically every drug known to man. He probably had more acid in his body than the average car battery. Hallucinatory experiences and drug dreams were his chosen recreation as well as his access to a higher consciousness and a heightening of his imagination.

Because of the intensity of his vision, and his humor, it is hard to sort out his actual travels from his drug trips. He spent a decade on the move, from 1927 to 1937. His travels in China, Japan, and Malaysia in the thirties resulted in A Barbarian in Asia, little more than a travel diary. Ecuador, which appeared in France in 1968, is also diaristic but more personal and relentless—angry, impatient, cranky, highly readable, and still relevant. Michaux's books are hard to find; he is obscure now as he was in his lifetime; in spite of his achievement, he never enjoyed any fame or material success, but he said he didn't care.

"There exists a banality of the visionary world," he wrote in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, first published in French in 1966. (Michaux's titles are superb.) This suggests to me that his imaginary travels are based more on his actual travels than on his drug trips. Even so, it is impossible to tell from some of his works whether he is describing a lived experience or a dream state.

In three books, gathered under the one title Ailleurs (Elsewhere), he wrote about three imaginary countries. The works are Voyage to Great Garaban, In the Land of Magic, and Here Is Poddema. One of the pieces in his book Spaced, Displaced is called "Journey That Keeps at a Distance," the sort of trip that is so full of frustrations, incomplete encounters, and half-baked impressions that it resembles that of the travel writer who arrives in a place and finds nothing to write about except frustration—one of the less readable sorts of travel books.

Voyage to Great Garaban, first published in 1936, illustrates another feature of imaginary travels: the detailed sociology and anthropology of such places; the politics, the history. When a traveler invents a place, he or she usually describes more of the place and its people than if it were real. So the land of the Hacs, in Garaban, is described as a set of brutal spectacles, each with a number, and growing in violence. There is hand-to-hand combat (vicious street fighting, families battling in muddy swamps), animals attacking humans (an entertainment), and animal fights ("caterpillars that were ferocious, and demon canaries"). Some Hacs make an attempt to kill their king for the sole purpose of being arrested and condemned to death, and for the splendor of being executed in style—"Spectacle Number 30 which is called 'Receiving one's death in the Palace courtyard.'"

Though the anonymous traveler doesn't condemn these outrages, he flees the Hacs and moves on to the Emanglons. He describes the Emanglons as an anthropologist would, even using the heading "Manners and Customs." We learn of their death rituals, the implications of sickness, their contempt for work and its danger ("After a few days of sustained labor an Emanglon will be unable to sleep"), their odor ("a complex perfume"), their tendency to weep for no reason, their aversion to flies: "Emanglons cannot endure living in the same room with a fly. In their eyes the cohabitation has something monstrous about it."

The Hivinizikis, the last group in Great Garaban, are manic, furiously rushing about, praying madly and prostrating themselves. Unbalanced, in a froth, they are "always outdoors. If you see someone inside, he doesn't live there. No doubt about it, he's visiting a friend." Everything about the Hivinizikis is hectic—religion, politics, the theater, all is rough-and-tumble.