The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

  I feel someone watching me and turn around: the band of monkeys is spying on me from the other end of the terrace. I walk toward them in a straight line, unhurriedly, my stick upraised; my behavior does not seem to make them uneasy, and as I continue to walk toward them, they remain there, scarcely moving, looking at me with their usual irritating curiosity and their no less usual impertinent indifference. As soon as they feel me close by, they leap up, scamper off, and disappear behind the balustrade. I walk over to the opposite edge of the terrace and from there I see in the distance the bony crest of the mountain outlined with cruel precision. Down below, the street and the fountain, the temple and its two priests, the booths and their elderly vendors, the children leaping about and screeching, several starving cows, more monkeys, a lame dog. Everything is radiant: the animals, the people, the trees, the stones, the filth. A soft radiance that has reached an accord with the shadows and their folds. An alliance of brightnesses, a thoughtful restraint: objects take on a secret life, call out to each other, answer each other, they do not move and yet they vibrate, alive with a life that is different from life. A universal pause: I breathe in the air, the acrid odor of burned dung, the smell of incense and poverty. I plant myself firmly in this moment of motionlessness: the hour is a block of pure time.

  Ten-armed Hanumn, Jodhpur, 19th century.

  13

  A thicket of lines, figures, forms, colors: nooses of curving strokes, maelstroms of color in which the eye drowns, a series of intertwined figures, repeated in horizontal bands, that totally confound the mind, I as though space were being slowly covered line by line, with letters of the alphabet, each one different and yet related to the following one in the same way, and as though all of them, in their various conjunctions, invariably kept producing the same figure, the same word. Nonetheless, in each case the figure (the word) has a different meaning. Different and the same.

  Above, the innocent kingdom of animal copulation. A plain covered with sparse, sunscorched grass, strewn with flowers the size of trees and with trees the size of flowers, bounded in the distance by a narrow red-tinged horizon—almost the trace of a scar that is still fresh:, it is dawn or sunset—on which tiny, fuzzy white patches merge or dissolve, vague mosques and palaces that are perhaps clouds. And superimposed on this innocuous landscape, filling it completely with their obsessive, repeated fury, tongue thrust out, gleaming white teeth bared, immense staring eyes, pairs of tigers, rats, camels, elephants, blackbirds, hogs, rabbits, panthers, crows, dogs, donkeys, squirrels, a stallion and a mare, a bull and a cow—the rats as big as elephants, the camels the same size as the squirrels—all coupling, the male mounted atop the female. A universal, ecstatic copulation.

  Below: the ground is not yellow or dark gray but a bright parrot-green. Not the earthly kingdom of animals but the meadow-carpet of desire, a brilliant surface dotted with little red, white, and blue flowers, flowers-that-are-stars-that-are-signs (meadow: carpet: zodiac: calligraphy), a motionless garden that is a copy of the fixed night sky that is reflected in the design of the carpet that is transfigured into the pen-strokes of the manuscript. Above: the world in its myriad repetitions; below: the universe is analogy. But it is also exceptions, rupture, irregularity: as in the upper portion, occupying the entire space, outbursts of primal fury, vehement outcries, violent red and white spurts, five in the upper band and four in the lower one, nine enormous flowers, nine planets, nine carnal ideograms: a nyik, always the same one, like the repetition of the same luminous patterns in fireworks displays, emerging nine times from the circle of her skirt, a blue corolla spattered with little red dots or a red corolla strewn with tiny black and blue crosses (the sky as a meadow and both reflected in a woman’s skirt)—a nyik lying on the carpet-garden-zodiac-calligraphy, reclining on a pillow of signs, her head thrown back and half hidden by a translucent veil through which her jet-black, pomaded hair can be seen, her profile transformed into that of an idol by her heavy ornaments—gold earrings set with rubies, diadems of pearls across the forehead, a diamond nose-pendant, chokers and necklaces of green and blue stones—sparkling rivers of bracelets on the arms, breasts with pointed nipples swelling beneath the orange choix, the body naked from the waist down, the thighs and belly a gleaming white, the shaved pubis a rosy pink, the labia of the vulva standing out, the ankles circled by bracelets with little tinkling bells, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet tinted red, the upraised legs clasping the partner nine times—and it is always the same nyik, simultaneously possessed nine times in the two bands, five times in the upper one and four in the lower one, by nine lovers: a wild boar, a male goat, a monkey, a stallion, a bull, an elephant, a bear, a royal peacock, and another nyik—one dressed exactly like her, with the same jewels and ornaments, the same eyes of a bird, the same great noble nose, the same thick, well-defined mouth, the same face, the same plump whiteness—another self mounted atop her, a consoling two-headed creature set like a jewel in the twin vulvas.

  A Monkey of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas)

  Asymmetry between the two parts: above, copulation between males and females of the same species; below, copulation of a human female with males of various species of animals and with another human female—never with a human male. Why? Repetition, analogy, exception. On the expanse of motionless space—wall, sky, page, sacred pool, garden—all these figures intertwine, trace the same sign and appear to be saying the same thing, but what is it that they are saying?

  14

  I halted before a fountain standing in the middle of the street, in the center of a semicircle. The tiny little stream of water flowing from the faucet had made a mud puddle on the ground; a dog with sparse, dark gray fur and patches of raw, bruised flesh was licking at it. (The dog, the street, the puddle: the light of three o’clock in the afternoon, a long time ago, on the cobblestones of a narrow street in a town in the Valley of Mexico, the body of a peasant dressed in white cotton work clothes lying in a pool of blood, the dog that is licking at it, the screams of the women in dark skirts and purple shawls running in the direction of the dead man.) Amid the almost completely ruined buildings forming the semicircle around the fountain was one that was still standing, a massive, squat structure with its heavy doors flung wide open: the temple. From where I was standing its inner courtyard could be seen, a vast quadrangle paved with flagstones (it had just been washed down and was giving off a whitish vapor). Around the edges of it, against the wall and underneath a roof supported by irregularly shaped pillars, some of stone and others of masonrywork, all of them whitewashed and decorated with red and blue designs, Grecian frets, and bunches of flowers, stood the altars with the gods, separated from each other by wooden bars, as though they were cages. At the entrances were various booths where elderly vendors were peddling their wares to the crowd of worshipers: flowers, sticks and bars of incense; images and color photographs of the gods (depicted by movie actors and actresses) and of Gandhi, Bose, and other heroes and saints; bhasma, the soft red paste with which the faithful trace religious signs on their foreheads at the moment in the ceremony when offerings are made; fans with advertisements for Coca-Cola and other soft drinks; peacock feathers; stone and metal lingas; boy dolls representing Durga mounted on a lion; mandarin oranges, bananas, sweets, betel and bhang leaves; colored ribbons and talismans; paperbound prayer books, biographies of saints, little pamphlets on astrology and magic; sacks of peanuts for the monkeys…. Two priests appeared at the doors of the temple. They were fat and greasy, naked from the waist up, with the lower part of their bodies draped in a dhoti, a length of soft cotton cloth wound between their legs. A Brahman cord hanging down over their breasts, as ample as a wetnurse’s; hair, pitch-black and oiled, braided in a pigtail; soft voices, obsequious gestures. On catching sight of me drifting amid the throng, they approached me and invited me to visit the temple. I declined to do so. At my refusal, they began a long peroration, but without stopping to listen to it, I lost myself in the crowd, allowing the human ri
ver to carry me along.

  The devout were slowly ascending the steep path. It was a peaceful crowd, at once fervent and good-humored. They were united by a common desire: simply to get to where they were going, to see, to touch. Will and its tensions and contradictions played no part in that impersonal, passive, fluid, flowing desire. Thejoy of total trust: they felt like children in the hands of infinitely powerful and infinitely beneficent forces. The act that they were performing was inscribed upon the calendar of the ages, it was one of the spokes of one of the wheels of the chariot of time. They were walking to the sanctuary as past generations had done and as those to come would do. Walking with their relatives, their neighbors, and their friends and acquaintances, they were also walking with the dead and with those not yet born: the visible multitude was part of an invisible multitude. They were all walking through the centuries by way of the same path, the path that cancels out the distinction between one time and another, and unites the living with the dead. Following this path we leave tomorrow and arrive yesterday: today.

  Although some groups were composed only of men or only of women, the majority were made up of entire families, from the great grandparents down to the grandchildren and great grandchildren, and including not only those related by blood but by religion and caste as well. Some were proceeding in pairs: the elderly couples babbled incessantly, but those recently wed walked along without exchanging a word, as though surprised to find themselves side by side. Then there were those walking all by themselves: the beggars with infirmities arousing pity or terror—the hunchbacked and the blind, those stricken with leprosy or elephantiasis or paralysis, those afflicted with pustules or tumors, drooling cretins, monsters eaten away by disease and wasting away from fever and starvation—and the others, erect and arrogant, convulsed with wild laughter or mute and possessed of the bright piercing eyes of illuminati, the sdhus, wandering ascetics covered with nothing but a loincloth or enveloped in a saffron robe, with kinky hair dyed red or scalps shaved bare except for a topknot, their bodies smeared with human ashes or with cow dung, their faces daubed with paint, and carrying in their right hand a rod in the shape of a trident and in their left hand a tin bowl, their only possession in this world, walking alone or accompanied by a young boy, their disciple, and in certain cases their catamite.

  The nyik, the incarnation of the love of all creatures, miniature in an album, Rajasthan, c. 1780.

  Little by little we crossed hill and dale, amid ruins and more ruins. Some ran ahead and then lay down to rest beneath the trees or in the hollows of the rocks; the others walked along at a slow, steady pace, without halting; the lame and the crippled dragged themselves painfully along, and the invalids and paralytics were borne on stretchers. Dust, the smell of sweat, spices, trampled flowers, sickly-sweet odors, stinking breaths of air, cool breaths of air. Little portable radios, belonging to bands of young boys, poured forth catchy popular love-songs; small children clinging to their mother’s breasts or skirts wailed and squalled; the devout chanted hymns; there were some who talked among themselves, some who laughed uproariously, and some who wept or talked to themselves—a ceaseless murmur, voices, cries, oaths, exclamations, outcries, millions of syllables that dissolved into a great, incoherent wave of sound, the sound of humans making itself heard above the other sounds of the air and the earth, the screams of the monkeys, the cawing of the crows, the sea-roar of the foliage, the howl of the wind rushing through the gaps in the hills.

  The wind does not hear itself but we hear it; animals communicate among themselves but we humans each talk to ourselves and communicate with the dead and with those not yet born. The human clamor is the wind that knows that it is wind, language that knows that it is language and the means whereby the human animal knows that it is alive, and by so knowing, learns to die.

  The sound of several hundred men, women, and children walking along and talking: the promiscuous sound of gods, dead ancestors, unborn children and live ones hiding between their mother’s bodice and her breast, with their little copper coins and their talismans, their fear of dying. The wind does not complain: man is the one who hears, in the complaint of the wind, the complaint of time. Men hears himself and looks at himself everywhere: the world is his mirror; the world neither hears us nor looks at itself in us: no one sees us, no one recognizes himself in man. To those hills we were strangers, as were the first men who, millennia ago, first walked among them. But those who were walking with me did not know that: they had done away with distance—time, history, the line that separates man from the world. Their pilgrimage on foot was the immemorial rite of the abolishing of differences. Yet these pilgrims knew something that I did not know: the sound of human syllables was simply one more noise amid the other noises of that afternoon. A different sound, yet one identical to the screams of the monkeys, the cries of the parakeets, and the roar of the wind. To know this was to reconcile oneself with time, to reconcile all times with all other times.

  15

  As he created beings, Prajpati sweated and suffocated, and from his great heat and fatigue, from his sweat, Splendor was born. She made her appearance all of a sudden: there she was, standing erect, radiant, resplendent, sparkling. The moment they set eyes on her, the gods desired her. They said to Prajpati: “Allow us to kill her: we can then divide her up and share her among all of us.” He answered unto them: “Certainly not! Splendor is a woman: one does not kill women. But if you so wish, you may share her—on condition that you leave her alive.” The gods shared her among themselves. Splendor hastened to Prajpati to complain: “They have taken everything from me!” “Ask them to return to you what they took from you. Make a sacrifice,” he counseled her. Splendor had the vision of the offering of the ten portions of the sacrifice. Then she recited the prayer of invitation and the gods appeared. Then she recited the prayer of adoration, backwards, beginning with the end, in order that everything might return to its original state. The gods consented to this return. Splendor then had the vision of the additional offerings. She recited them and offered them to the ten. As each one received his oblation, he returned his portion to Splendor and disappeared. Thus Splendor was restored to being.

  The palace of Galta (18th century), (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

  In this liturgical sequence there are ten divinities, ten oblations, ten restitutions, ten portions of the group of the sacrifice, and the Poem in which it is said consists of stanzas of verses of ten syllables. The Poem is none other than Splendor. (Satapatha-Brahmana, 11-4-3)

  16

  The word reconciliation appears and reappears. For a long time I lighted my way with it, I ate and drank of it. Liberation was its sister and its antagonist. The heretic who abjures his errors and returns to the bosom of the church is reconciled with it; the purification of a sacred place that has been profaned is a reconciliation. Separation is a lack, an aberration. A lack: something is missing, we are not whole; an aberration: we have gone astray, we are not in the place where we belong. Reconciliation unites what was separated, it transforms the exclusion into conjunction, it reassembles what has been dispersed: we return to the whole and thus we return to the place where we belong. The end of exile. Liberation opens up another perspective: the breaking of chains and bonds, the sovereignty of free will. Conciliation is dependence, subjection; liberation is self-sufficiency, the plenitude of the one, the excellence of the unique. Liberation: being put to the proof, purgation, purification. When I am alone I am not alone: I am with myself; being separated is not being excluded: it is being oneself. When with everyone, I am exiled from myself; when I am alone, I am in the whole that belongs entirely to me. Liberation is not only an end of others and of otherness, but an end of the self. The return of the self—not to itself: to what is the same, a return to sameness.

  Is liberation the same as reconciliation? Although reconciliation leads by way of liberation and liberation by way of reconciliation, the two paths meet only to divide again: reconciliation is identity in concord, liber
ation is identity in difference. A plural unity; a selfsame unity. Different, yet the same; precisely one and the same. I am the others, my other selves; I in myself, in selfsameness. Reconciliation passes by way of dissension, dismemberment, rupture, and liberation. It passes by and returns. It is the original form of revolution, the form in which society perpetuates itself and re-engenders itself: regeneration of the social compact, return to the original plurality. In the beginning there was no One: chief, god, I; hence revolution is the end of the One and of undifferentiated unity, the beginning (re-beginning) of variety and its rhymes, its alliterations, its harmonious compositions. The degeneration of revolution, as can be seen in modern revolutionary movements, all of which, without exception, have turned into bureaucratic caesarisms and institutionalized idolatry of the Chief and the System, is tantamount to the decomposition of society, which ceases to be a plural harmony, a composition in the literal sense of the word, and petrifies in the mask of the One. The degeneration lies in the fact that society endlessly repeats the image of the Chief, which is nothing other than the mask of discomposure: the disconcerting excesses, the imposture of the Caesar. But there never is a one, nor has there ever been a one: each one is an everyone. But there is no everyone: there is always one missing. We are neither a one together, nor is each all. There is no one and no all: there are ones and there are alls. Always in the plural, always an incomplete completeness, the we in search of its each one: its rhyme, its metaphor, its different complement.