In a 1961 piece for ArtNews on the murmuring intimacy of Henri Michaux's work, John Ashbery singled out this statement of Michaux's aims:

Instead of one vision which excludes others, I would have liked to draw the moments that, placed side by side, go to make up a life. To expose the interior phrase for people to see, the phrase that has no words, a rope which sinuously, and intimately accompanies everything that impinges from the outside or inside. I wanted to draw the consciousness of existence and the flow of time. As you would take your pulse.

The ideas in this passage, reprinted in Ashbery's collected art criticism Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 (1989), undoubtedly appealed to his imagination. Years later the desire to make the many sides of consciousness visible--what Michaux calls here the wordless "interior phrase" playing responsively against what "impinges from the outside or inside"--still...