by Octavio Paz
I felt separated, far removed—not from others and from things, but from myself. When I searched for myself within myself, I did not find myself; I went outside myself and did not discover myself there either. Within and without, I always encountered another. The same self but always another self. My body and I, my shadow and I, their shadow. My shadows: my bodies: other others. They say that there are empty people: I was full, completely full of myself. Nonetheless, I was never in complete possession of myself, and I could never get all the way inside myself: there was always someone else there. Should I do away with him, exorcise him, kill him? The trouble was that the moment that I caught sight ofhim, he vanished. Talk with him, win him over, come to some agreement? I searched for him here and he turned up there. He had no substance, he took up no space whatsoever. He was never where I was; if I was there he was here; if I was here he was there. My invisible foreseeable, my visible unforeseeable. Never the same, never in the same place. Never the same place: outside was inside, inside was somewhere else, here was nowhere. Never anywhere. Great distances away: in the remotest of places: always way over yonder. Where? Here. The other has not moved: I have never moved from my place. He is here. Who is it that is here? I am: the same self as always. Where? Inside myself: from the beginning I have been falling inside myself and I still am falling. From the beginning I am always going to where I already am, yet I never arrive at where I am. I am always myself somewhere else: the same place, the other I. The way out is the way in: the way in—but there is no way in, it is all the way out. Here inside is always outside, here is always there, the other always somewhere else. There is always the same: himself: myself: the other. I am that one: the one there. That is how it is; that is what I am.
Hanumn, Kalighat painting (Bengal), 20th century.
With whom could I reconcile myself: with myself or with the other—the others? Who were they, who were we? Reconciliation was neither an idea nor a word: it was a seed that, day after day at first and then hour after hour, had continued to grow and grow until it turned into an immense glass spiral through whose arteries and filaments there flowed light, red wine, honey, smoke, fire, salt water and fresh water, fog, boiling liquids, whirlwinds of feathers. Neither a thermometer nor a barometer: a power station that turns into a fountain that is a tree with branches and leaves of every conceivable color, a plant of live coals in winter and a plant of refreshing coolness in summer, a sun of brightness and a sun of darkness, a great albatross made of salt and air, a reflection-mill, a clock in which each hour contemplates itself in the others until it is reduced to nothingness. Reconciliation was a fruit—not the fruit but its maturity, not its maturity but its fall. Reconciliation was an agate planet and a tiny flame, a young girl, in the center of that incandescent marble. Reconciliation was certain colors interweaving so as to form a fixed star set in the forehead of the year, or floating in warm clusters between the spurs of the seasons; the vibration of a particle of light set in the pupil of the eye of a cat flung into one corner of noon; the breathing of the shadows sleeping at the foot of an autumn skinned alive; the ocher temperatures, the gusts of wind the color of dates, a yellowish red, and the green pools of stagnant water, the river basins of ice, the wandering skies dressed in regal rags, the drums of the rain; suns no bigger than a quarter of an hour yet containing all the ages; spiders spinning translucent webs to trap infinitesimal blind creatures that emit light; foliage of flames, foliage of water, foliage of stone, magnetic foliage. Reconciliation was a womb and a vulva, but also the blinks of an eye, provinces of sand. It was night. Islands, universal gravitation, elective affinities, the hesitations of the light that at six o’clock in the late afternoon does not know whether to go or to stay. Reconciliation was not I. It was not all of you, nor a house, nor a past or a future. It was there over yonder. It was not a homecoming, a return to the kingdom of closed eyes. It was going out into the air and saying: good morning.
17
The wall was about two hundred yards long. It was tall, topped with parapets. Save for certain stretches that still showed traces of blue and red paint, it was covered with huge black, green, and dark purple spots: the fingerprints of the rains and the years. Just below the parapets, in a horizontal line running the length of the wall, a series of little balconies could be seen, each one crowned with a dome mindful of a parasol. The wooden blinds were faded and eaten away by the years. Some of the balconies still bore traces of the designs that had decorated them: garlands of flowers, branches of almond trees, little stylized parakeets, seashells, mangoes. There was only one entrance, an enormous one, in the center: a Moorish archway, in the form of a horseshoe. It had once been the elephant gateway, and hence its enormous size was completely out of proportion to the dimensions of the group of buildings as a whole. I took Splendor by the hand and we crossed through the archway together, between the two rows of beggars on either side. They were sitting on the ground, and on seeing us pass by they began whining their nasal supplications even more loudly, tapping their bowls excitedly and displaying their stumps and sores. With great gesticulations a little boy approached us, muttering something or other. He was about twelve years old, incredibly thin, with an intelligent face and huge, dark, shining eyes. Some disease had eaten away a huge hole in his left cheek, through which one could see some of his back teeth, his gums, and redder still, his tongue, moving about amid little bubbles of saliva—a tiny crimson amphibian possessed by a raging, obscene fit of agitation that made it circle round and round continuously inside its damp grotto. He babbled on endlessly. Although he emphasized his imperious desire to be listened to with all sorts of gestures and gesticulations, it was impossible to understand him since each time he uttered a word, the hole made wheezes and snorts that completely distorted what he was saying. Annoyed by our failure to understand, he melted into the crowd. We soon saw him surrounded by a group of people who began praising his tongue-twisters and his sly ways with words. We discovered that his loquacity was not mere nonsensical babble: he was not a beggar but a poet who was playing about with deformations and decompositions of words.
The main courtyard was a rectangular esplanade that had surely been the outdoor “audience chamber,” a sort of hall outside the palace itself, although within the walls surrounding it, in which the princes customarily received their vassals and strangers. Its surface was covered with loose dirt; once upon a time it had been paved with tiles the same pink color as the walls. The esplanade was enclosed by walls on three sides: one to the south, another to the east, and another to the west. The one to the south was the Gateway through which we had entered; the other two walls were not as long and not as high. The one to the east was also topped with a parapet, whereas the one to the west had a gable-end roofed over with pink tiles. Like the Gateway, the entryway let into both the other walls was an arch in the form of a horseshoe, although smaller. Along the east wall” there was repeated the same succession of little balconies as on the outer face of the Gateway wall, all of them also crowned with parasol domes and fitted out with wooden blinds, most of which had fallen to pieces. On days when the princes received visitors, the women would conceal themselves behind these blinds so as to be able to contemplate the spectacle below without being seen. Opposite the main wall, on the north side of the quadrangle, was a building that was not very tall, with a stairway leading to it which, despite its rather modest dimensions, nonetheless had a certain secret stateliness. The ground floor was nothing more than a massive cube of mortar, with no other function than to serve as a foundation for the upper floor, a vast rectangular hall bordered on all sides by an arcade. Its arches reproduced, on a smaller scale, those of the courtyard, and were supported by columns of random shapes, each one different from the others: cylindrical, square, spiral. The structure was crowned by a great many small cupolas. Time and many suns had blackened them and caused them to peel: they looked like charred, severed heads. From time to time there came from inside them the sound of parakeeets, blackbirds, bats, ma
king it seem as though these heads, even though they had been lopped off, were still emitting thoughts.
Hanumn, Rajasthan, 20th century.
The whole was theatrical, mere show. A double fiction: what those buildings represented (the illusions and nostalgias of a world that no longer existed) and what had been staged within their walls (ceremonies in which impotent princes celebrated the grandeur of a power on the point of ceasing to exist). An architecture in which to see oneself living, a substitution of the image for the act and of myth for reality. No, that is not precisely it. Neither image nor myth: the rule of obsession. In periods of decadence obsession is sovereign and takes the place of destiny. Obsession and its fears, its cupidity, its phobias, its monologue consisting of confessions-accusations-lamentations. And it was precisely this, obsession, that redeemed the little palace from its mediocrity and its banality. Despite its mannered hybridism, these courtyards and halls had been inhabited by chimeras with round breasts and sharp claws. A novelistic architecture, at once chivalrous and over-refined, perfumed and drenched with blood. Vividly lifelike and fantastic, chaotic and picturesque, unpredictable. A passionate architecture: dungeons and gardens, fountains and beheadings, an eroticized religion and an esthetic eroticism, the nyik’s hips and the limbs of the quartered victim. Marble and blood. Terraces, banquet halls, music pavilions in the middle of artificial lakes, bedroom alcoves decorated with thousands of tiny mirrors that divide and multiply bodies until they become infinite. Proliferation, repetition, destruction: an architecture contaminated by delirium, stones corroded by desire, sexual stalactites of death. Lacking power and above all time (architecture requires as its foundation not only a solid space but an equally solid time, or at least capable of resisting the assaults of fortune, but the princes of Rajasthan were sovereigns doomed to disappear and they knew it), they erected edifices that were not intended to last but to dazzle and fascinate. Illusionist castles that instead of vanishing in this air rest on water: architecture transformed into a mere geometric pattern of reflections floating on the surface of a pool, dissipated by the slightest breath of air…. There were no pools or musicians on the great esplanade now and no nyiks were hiding on the little balconies: that day the pariahs of the Balmik caste were celebrating the feast of Hanumn, and the unreality of that architecture and the reality of its present state of ruin were resolved in a third term, at once brutally concrete and hallucinatory.
18
The grove of trees has turned black and become a gigantic pile of sacks of coal abandoned in the middle of the plot of ground by some unknown person for some unknown reason. A brute reality that says nothing except that it is (but what is it?) and that bears no resemblance to anything at all, not even to those nonexistent sacks of coal with which, ineptly, I have just now compared them. My excuse: the gigantic sacks of coal are as improbable as the grove of trees is unintelligible. Its unintelligibility—a word like a train always just on the point of going off the rails or losing one of its freight cars—stems from its excess of reality. It is a reality irreducible to other realities. The grove of trees is untranslatable: it is itself and only itself. It does not resemble other things or other groves of trees; neither does it resemble itself: each moment it is different. Perhaps I am exaggerating: after all, it is always the same grove of trees and its constant changes do not transform it into either a rock or a locomotive; moreover, it is not unique: the world is full of groves of trees like it. Am I exaggerating though? This grove does indeed resemble others, since otherwise it would not be called a grove of trees but would have another name; yet at the same time its reality is unique and would really deserve to have a proper name. Everyone deserves (we all deserve) a proper name and no one has one. No one has ever had one and no one ever will have one. This is our real eternal damnation, ours and the world’s. And this is what Christians mean when they speak of the state of “fallen nature.” Paradise is governed by an ontological grammar: things and beings are its names and each name is a proper name. The grove of trees is not unique since it has a name that is a common noun (it is a fallen nature), but at the same time it is unique since it has no name that really belongs to it (it is innocent nature). This contradiction defies Christianity and dashes its logic to bits.
The fact that the grove of trees has no name, not the fact that I see it from my window, as the afternoon draws to a close, a blur against the bold sky of early autumn, a stain that little by little creeps across this page and covers it with letters that simultaneously describe it and conceal it—the fact that it does not have a name and the fact that it can never have one, is what impels me to speak of it. The poet is not one who names things, but one who dissolves their names, one who discovers that things do not have a name and that the names that we call them are not theirs. The critique of paradise is called language: the abolition of proper names; the critique of language is called poetry: names grow thinner and thinner, to the point of transparency, of evaporation. In the first case, the world becomes language; in the second, language is transformed into a world. Thanks to the poet, the world is left without names. Then, for the space of an instant, we can see it precisely as it is—an adorable azure. And this vision overwhelms us, drives us mad; if things are but have no name: on earth there is no measure whatsoever.
Garuda, watercolor, Rajasthan, 19th century.
A moment ago, as it was burning in the solar brazier, the grove of trees did not appear to be an unintelligible reality but an emblem, a configuration of symbols. A cryptogram neither more nor less indecipherable than the enigmas that fire inscribes on the wall with the shadows of two lovers, the tangle of trees that Hanumn saw in the garden of Rvana in Lanka and that Vlmlki turned into a fabric woven of names that we now read as a fragment of the Rmyana, the tattoo of monsoons and suns on the wall of the terrace of that small palace in Galta or the painting that describes the bestial and lesbian couplings of the nyik as an exception to (or an analogy of?) universal love. The transmutation of forms and their changes and movements into motionless signs: writing; the dissipation of the signs: reading. Through writing we abolish things, we turn them into meaning; through reading, we abolish signs, we extract the meaning from them, and almost immediately thereafter, we dissipate it: the meaning returns to the primordial stuff. The grove does not have a name and these trees are not signs: they are trees. They are real and they are illegible. Although I refer to them when I say: these trees are illegible, they do not think of themselves as being referred to. They do not express anything, they do not signify: they are merely there, merely being. I can fell them, burn them, chop them up, turn them into masts, chairs, boats, houses, ashes; I can paint them, carve them, describe them, transform them into symbols of this or of that (even symbols of themselves), and make another grove of trees, real or imaginary, with them; I can classify them, analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or a mathematical equation and thus translate them, transform them into language—but these trees, the ones that I point to, the ones that are over there just beyond, always just beyond, my signs and my words, untouchable unreachable impenetrable, are what they are, and no name, no combinations of signs says them. They are unrepeatable: they will never again be what they are at this moment.
The grove is already part of the night. Its darkest, most nightlike part. So much so that I write, with no compunction, that it is a pile of coal, a sharp-pointed geometry of shadows surrounded by a world of vague ashes. It is still light in the neighbors’ patio. An impersonal, posthumous light, for which the word fixity is most appropriate, even though we know that it will last for only a few short minutes, because it is a light that seems to resist the ceaseless change of things and of itself. The final, impartial clarity of this moment of transparency in which things become presences and coincide with themselves. It is the end (a provisory, cyclical end) of metamorphoses. An apparition: on the square cement blocks of the patio, astonishingly itself, without ostentation and without diffidence, the dark wooden table on top of which (as
I only now discover) there is visible, on one corner, an oval spot with tiger markings, thin reddish stripes. In the opposite corner, the garbage can with the lid half open burns with a quiet, almost solid glow. The light runs down the brick wall as though it were water. A burned water, a water-that-is-fire. The garbage can is overflowing with rubbish and it is an altar that is consuming itself in silent exaltation: the refuse is a sheaf of flames beneath the coppery gleam of the rusty cover. The transfiguration of refuse—no, not a transfiguration: a revelation of garbage as what it really is: garbage. I cannot say “glorious garbage” because the adjective would defile it. The little dark wooden table, the garbage can: presences. Without a name, without a history, without a meaning, without a practical use: just because.