The Best of Science Fiction 12

And More Changes Still Henri Michaux

Translated by Richard Ellmann

By force of suffering I lost the limits of my body and irresistibly gave up my shape.

I was all things: ants especially, interminably in file, laborious and yet hesitating. It was a terrific moving about. I had to devote all my attention. I soon noticed that I was not only the ants, but also their path. And after being crumbly and dusty at first, it became hard and my suffering was horrible. I expected every moment that it would explode and be hurled into space. But it held firm.

I rested as well as I could on another part of me, a softer one. This was a forest and the wind stirred it gently. But a storm blew up, and the roots, to resist the increasing wind, bored into me — a mere trifle — but went on to hook so deeply into me that it was worse than death.

A sudden fall of earth made a beach enter into me, a pebbly beach. Then it began to ruminate inside me and that summoned the sea, the sea.

Often I turned boa and, although a little troubled by the elongation, I would prepare to sleep or else I was a bison and would prepare to graze, but soon from one shoulder came a typhoon, boats were thrown into the air, the steamers wondered whether they would reach port, only SOSs could be heard.

I was sorry not to be a boa or a bison any more. A little later I had to shrink up so as to fit into a saucer. Always the changes were abrupt, everything had to be made over, and that was not worth the trouble, it would last only a few instants and yet you had to adapt yourself, and always these abrupt changes. It's not so much trouble to pass from a rhombohedron to a truncated pyramid, but it's a lot of trouble to pass from a truncated pyramid to a whale; you must know immediately how to dive, to breathe, and then the water is cold, and then you find yourself face to face with the harpooners, but I, as soon as I saw men, fled. But it so happened that I was suddenly changed into a harpooner, then I had just as long a distance to go over again. At last I succeeded in overtaking the whale, I quickly launched a well-sharpened and solid harpoon (after having first made fast and checked the rope); the harpoon darted, penetrated far into the flesh, making an enormous wound. I realised then that I was the whale, I had changed into it again, there was a new opportunity to suffer, and I am not one to get used to suffering.

After a mad race I lost my life, then I was turned back into a boat, and when I am the boat, believe me, I take in water all over, and when things get desperate, then for sure I become captain, I try to display an attitude of sangfroid, but I'm without hope, and if in spite of everything we are saved, then I'm changed into a rope and the rope breaks and if a lifeboat is smashed right at that moment I am all its planks, I began to sink and turned to an echinoderm that didn't last more than a second, for, disabled in the midst of enemies I knew nothing about, they got me at once, devoured me alive, with those white and ferocious eyes that are found only under water, under the salt sea water which makes all wounds smart. Oh! Who will leave me be for a bit? But no, if I don't budge, I rot where I am, and if I budge it's to undergo the blows of my enemies. I don't dare make a move. Just then I throw myself out of joint to become part of a grotesque mass with a defect of equilibrium which is revealed only too soon and too clearly.

If I always changed into animal form, as a last resort I would have accustomed myself to it finally, since it's always more or less the same behavior, the same principle of action and reaction, but I'm things too (and even things would be bearable), but I'm such artificial and impalpable combinations. What a to-do when I was changed into lightning! There I have to move fast, I who always lag and never know how to come to a decision.

Oh! If I could only die once and for all! But no, I'm always found good for some new being and yet I only pull boners and lead it promptly to its destruction.

No matter, I'm immediately given a new one where my prodigious incapacity can prove itself over again.

And so always and without respite.

There are so many animals, so many plants, so many minerals. And I have already been everything so many times. But these experiments don't help me. Becoming ammonium hydrochlorate again for the thirty-second time, I still have a tendency to behave like arsenic, and, changed once more into a dog, my night-bird habits always show up.

Only rarely do I see something without experiencing this very special feeling ... Ah yes, I've been that ... I don't remember exactly, I feel it. That's why I'm particularly fond of Illustrated Encyclopedias. I turn over the pages, I turn over the pages, and I often find some satisfaction, for there are some pictures of several creatures that I've not yet been. That rests me, that's delightful, I say to myself: "I might have been this one and that one and that other has been spared me." I heave a sign of relief. Ah! Peace!