detail from Mouvements by Henri Michaux (1899–1984), from a copy in Harvard’s Houghton Library. As with Xu Bing today, Michaux often used asemic writing to convey rhythm, story, and visual delight. No words are indexed, and yet there’s reading to be done here; give it a try. Call it postliterate asemia (if you need a name for it). Some critics like to say that such semantically meaningless pseudowriting, when produced by literates, is somehow essentially different from the doodles made by the bored, the young, and the nonliterate; I’m not so sure. More likely, some postliterates can access the ludic spirit of pen-in-hand that we all felt before the Palmer Method and cursive brought us to heel.
Michaux’s late career was consumed with some of the most thorough and searching explorations of psychoactive substances ever undertaken by an artist. His work from the period, like Mouvements above, makes counterpoint out of asemia derived not only from scribbling, calligraphic models, and the automatic inscription of medical sensing technologies as well as printed poetry and prose. Perhaps he’s best known, however, for his uncanny tragicomic stories about an alter-ego who slumbers, travels, and falls prey to troubles beyond his reckoning. His antihero’s name? Plume.
