Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) was an engineer, philosopher and author from the island nation of Mauritius. He graduated from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and qualified as a sugar engineer and chemist in 1931.
In 1897 the Audubon Sugar School transferred to LSU, and required two years of study in Baton Rouge and two years of work in New Orleans.
Much to his family's chagrin, he departed the sugar industry and began a literary career. Although he briefly occupied a minor position in Mauritius' government telecommunications department, he became dedicated to writing and painting.
Considered by some a genius, his artistic work was largely unrecognized by peers who ridiculed his work as primitive or naïve.
Malcolm de Chazal had French ancestry and wrote in French, was born and lived most of his life in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. He is best known for his work entitled Sens Plastique, a collection of about two thousand unnumbered sentences and paragraphs usually referred to as aphorisms or pensées.
Here are two examples:
- Taste is a one-room house consisting of the mouth. Hearing has the boudoir of the ear, the eyes have the parlor of the cornea, and smell has the long hall of the nose. But the poorest lodged is touch, who lives on the naked plains of the skin like a vagabond in the streets.
- We never feel that nature is excessive in anything because color and form are so completely connected: button and buttonhole adjusted by divine fingers. Only manufactured objects strike us as being excessive in one way or another, and this arises from the fact that either the buttonhole is too tight or the button swims in its moorings.
Chazal described his work in Sens Plastique thusly:
- My philosophical position in this work derives from the principle that man and nature are entirely continuous, and that all parts of the human body and all expressions of the human face, including their feelings, can actually be discerned in plants, flowers, and fruits, and to an even greater extent in our other selves, animals. And although minerals are usually considered inanimate, death-like rather than life-like, I would have them also tend towards that supreme synthesis, the human form, especially when they are in motion. "Man was made in the image of God," but beyond that I declare that "Nature was made in the image of man."
- But I could never have done this by reasoning. I had to rely on subconscious thinking, the only intuitive resource available to humans--which few of us ever use in an entire lifetime. . . .I should add that I could never have learned to think subconsciously without years of ascetic withdrawal. depriving my body, isolating my self, concentrating my mind and spirit. . . until by stages I had perfected what I consider to be a totally new method of writing.
