167 - Henri MICHAUX. Their Secrets on Display. No place or date [1955–1956?]. Signed typescript, 15 pages, in-4.

Henri MICHAUX. Their Secrets on Display. No place or date [1955–1956?]. Signed typescript, 15 pages, in-4. Signed typescript, with handwritten corrections and strikethroughs. A literary and metaphorical account of a pictorial art born of mental illness, or Michaux’s fascination with the state of insanity. Through a blend of deceptively objective descriptions and poetic commentary, Michaux engages with fifteen paintings created by institutionalized schizophrenics, each resembling an apocalyptic vision. A dog gives birth to a human child, whom two midwives, summoned in haste, pull from beneath her tail. The newborn, immediately holding his head high—there is no doubt that he will soon begin to speak, to command—a man to whom the keys to the house, the keys to the world, and the keys to his life must be entrusted. Meanwhile, a large, bloodstained parasol opens in the sky and lets drops fall, which a few devotees, with angelic expressions, gather in chalices. But the angel within them is completely false, false and foolish, a menthol angel. Seven birds are in the air, flying upside down, terribly low, their legs stiff […]. The last page, signed, suggests as a possible subtitle: “written on the basis of a few drawings of singular men mired in their problems”; a subtitle that would be changed to “paintings by the insane” upon the text’s first publication in *Lettres Nouvelles* in December 1956. These fifteen “secrets” were included in the collection *Vents et Poussières*, edited by Karl Flinker in 1962, and later in *Les Ravagés* in 1976. (Imbert, no. 197.)