Passages translated by Irving Weiss from the French of Malcolm de Chazal's Sens-Plastique (Gallimard, 1948) .

The Mauritian poet, painter, and mystic philosopher Malcolm de Chazal (1902-1981) is best known for his Sens-Plastique , a collection of more than two thousand observations and reflections on the correspondence between the world of sensations and the world of spirit. At the center of Chazal's thought is the human face and body, based on the conception that man was made in the image of God and nature was made in the image of man. Chazal writes his thoughts in the form of aphorisms and pensées but he intends them as observations; not as imaginative expressions but as scientific notations (he was trained as an agronomist) and relies on the reader's experience and judgment to consider whether they are fanciful or truthful, despite their analogical extravagance.

Sens-Plastique presents its passages in no particular order.
Regardless of its apparent subject, each passage is a version of every other one as they represent the interconnections among our sensational experiences of life.

Irving Weiss has published two selective translations of Sens-Plastique : Plastic Sense (Herder and Herder, 1972), with a preface by W. H Auden, and Sens-Plastique (SUN, 1979). He is now working on a complete translation to be published by Sun and Moon Press. These excerpts have never been published before.

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