The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

  Hanumn, drawing on paper, Rajasthan, 19th century. (J. C. Ciancimino Collection.)

  Things rest upon themselves, their foundation is their own reality, and they are unjustifiable. Hence they offer themselves to our sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell—not to our powers of thought. Not to think; to see, rather, to make of language a transparency. I see, I hear the footsteps of the light in the patio: little by little it withdraws from the wall opposite, projects itself onto the one on the left and covers it with a translucent mantle of barely perceptible vibrations: a transubstantiation of brick, a combustion of stone, an instant of incandescence of matter before it flings itself into its blindness—into its reality. I see, I hear, I touch the gradual petrification of language that no longer signifies but merely says: table, garbage can, without really saying them, as the table and the garbage can disappear in the patio that is now totally dark…. The night is my salvation. We cannot see without risking going mad: things reveal us, without revealing anything, simply by being there in front of us, the emptiness of names, the incommensurability of the world, its quintessential muteness. And as the night accumulates in my window, I feel that I am not from here, but from there, from that world that has just been obliterated and is now awaiting the resurrection of dawn. I come from there, all of us come from there, and we shall one day return there. The fascination held for us by this other face, the seduction of this nonhuman side of the universe: where there is no name, no measure. Each individual, each thing, each instant: a unique, incomparable, incommensurable reality. To return, then, to the world of proper names.

  19

  a rose and green, yellow and purple undulation, wave upon wave of women, a surf of tunics dotted with little bits of mirrors like stars or spangled with sequins, the continual flowering of the pinks and blues of turbans, these thin long-shanked men are flamingos and herons, the sweat runs down the basalt of the cheekbones in rivers, wetting their mustaches that curve dangerously upward like the horns of an attacking bull, making the metal hoops they are wearing in their ears gleam, men with grave eyes as deep as a well, the flutter of feminine fabrics, ribbons, gauzes, transparencies, secret folds that conceal gazes, the tinkle of bracelets and anklets, the swaying of hips, the bright flash of earrings and amulets made of bits of colored glass, clusters of old men and old women and children driven along by the violent gust of wind of the feast-day, devotees of Krishna in pale green skirts, with flowers in their hair and huge dark circles under their eyes, roaring with laughter, the main courtyard seethed with sounds, smells, tastes, a gigantic basket filled to overflowing with bright yellow, ocher, pomegranate, cinnamon, purple, black, wrinkled, transparent, speckled, smooth, glistening, spiny fruits, flaming fruits, cool refreshing suns, human sweat and animal sweat, incense, cinnamon, dung, clay and musk, jasmine and mango, sour milk, smells and tastes, tastes and colors, betel nut, clove, quicklime, coriander, rice powder, parsley, green and red peppers, honeysuckle, fetid pools, burned cow dung, limes, urine, sugarcane, spit bleeding from betel, slices of watermelon, pomegranates and their little cells: a monastery of blood; guavas, little caverns of perfume; peals of laughter, spilled whitenesses, ivory ceremonial rattles and exclamations, sighs of woe is me and shouts of get a move on, gongs and tambourines, the rustle of leaves of the women’s skirts, the pattering rain of the naked feet on the dust, laughter and laments: the roar of water flinging itself over a precipice, the bound and rebound of cries and songs, the mingled chatter of children and birds, childgabble and birdprattle, the prayers of the beggargrims, the driveling supplications of the pilgrim-mendicants, the glug-glug of dialects, the boiling of languages, the fermentation and effervescence of the verbal liquid, gurgling bubbles that rise from the bottom of the Babelic broth and burst on reaching the air, the multitude and its surging tides, its multisurges and its multitudes, its multivalanche, the multisun beating down on the sunitude, povertides beneath the sunalanche, the suntide in its solity, the sunflame on the poverlanche, the multitidal solaritude

  A mendicant (sdhu) dressed up as Hanumn at a fair in Ram-tirth at Amritsar.

  20

  A quiet brightness projects itself on the wall across the way. Doubtless my neighbor has gone upstairs to his study, turned on the lamp next to the window, and by its light is peacefully reading The Cambridge Evening News. Down below, at the foot of the wall, the little pure-white daisies peep out of the darkness of the blades of grass and other tiny plants on the miniature meadow. Paths traveled by creatures smaller than an ant, castles built on a cubic millimeter of agate, snowdrifts the size of a grain of salt, continents drifting in a drop of water. The space beneath the leaves and between the infinitesimal plant stems of the meadow teems with a tremendous population continually passing over from the vegetable kingdom to the animal and from the animal to the mineral or the fantastic. That tiny branch that a breath of air faintly stirs was just a moment ago a ballerina with breasts like a top and a forehead pierced by a ray of light. A prisoner in the fortress created by the lunar reflections of the nail of the little finger of a small girl, a king has been dying in agony for a million seconds now. The microscope of fantasy reveals creatures different from those of science but no less real; although these are visions of ours, they are also the visions of a third party: someone is looking at them (is looking at himself?) through our eyes.

  I am thinking of Richard Dadd, spending nine years, from 1855 to 1864, painting The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke in the madhouse at Broadmoor, England. A fairly small painting that is a minute study of just a few square inches of ground—grasses, daisies, berries, tendrils of vines, hazelnuts, leaves, seeds—in the depths of which there appears an entire population of minuscule creatures, some of them characters from fairy tales and others who are probably portraits of Dadd’s fellow inmates and of his jailers and keepers. The painting is a spectacle: the staging of the drama of the supernatural world in the theater of the natural world. A spectacle that contains another, a paralyzing and anxiety-filled one, the theme of which is expectation: the figures that people the painting are awaiting an event that is about to take place at any moment now. The center of the composition is an empty space, the point of intersection of all sorts of powers and the focal point on which all eyes are trained, a clearing in the forest of allusions and enigmas; in the center of this center there is a hazelnut on which the stone axe of the woodcutter is about to fall. Although we do not know what is hidden inside the hazelnut, we know that if the axe splits it in two, everything will change: life will commence to flow once more and the curse that has turned the figures in the painting to stone will be broken. The woodcutter is a robust young man, dressed in coarse cotton (or perhaps leather) work clothes and wearing on his head a cap from which there tumble locks of curly, reddish hair. With his feet firmly planted on the stony ground, he is grasping, with both hands, an upraised axe. Is this Dadd? How can we tell, since we can see the figure only from the back? Although it is impossible to be certain, I cannot resist the temptation to identify the figure of the woodcutter as being the painter. Dadd was shut up in the insane asylum because during an outing in the country, in a violent fit of madness, he hacked his father to death with an axe. The woodcutter is readying himself to repeat the act, but the consequences of this symbolic repetition will be precisely the contrary of those that resulted from the original act; in the first instance, incarceration and petrification; in the second, on splitting the hazelnut apart, the woodcutter’s axe breaks the spell. One disturbing detail: the axe that is about to put an end to the evil spell of petrification is a stone axe. Sympathetic magic.

  Opposite: The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke, oil by Richard Dadd, 1855-1864 (Tate Gallery, London, photograph courtesy the gallery).

  Detail of The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke.

  We are able to see the faces of all the other figures. Some of them peek out of cracks and crevices in the ground and others form a mesmerized circle around the fateful hazelnut. Each of them is rooted to the spot as though sud
denly bewitched and all of them create between them a space that is totally empty yet magnetized, the fascination of which is immediately felt by anyone contemplating the painting. I said felt when I should have said anticipated, for this space is a place where an apparition is imminent. And for that very reason it is, at one and the same time, absolutely empty and magnetized: nothing is happening except anticipation. The figures are rooted to the spot, and both literally and figuratively, they are plants and stones. Anticipation has immobilized them—the anticipation that does away with time but not anxiety. The anticipation is eternal: it abolishes time; the anticipation is momentary, an awaiting of what is imminent, what is about to happen from one moment to the next: it speeds up time. Fated to await the masterstroke of the woodcutter, the fairies gaze endlessly at a clearing in the forest that is nothing more than the focal point of their gaze and in which nothing whatsoever is happening. Dadd has painted the vision of the act of vision, the look that looks at a space in which the object looked at has been annihilated. The axe which, when it falls, will break the spell that paralyzes them, will never fall. It is an event that is always about to happen and at the same time will never happen. Between never and always there lies in wait anxiety, with its thousand feet and its single eye.

  21

  In the rough and trackless stretches of the way to Galta the Monkey Grammarian appears and disappears: the monogram of the Simian lost amid his similes.

  22

  No painting can tell a story because nothing happens in it. Painting confronts us with fixed, unchangeable, motionless realities. In no canvas, not even excepting those that have as their theme real or supernatural happenings and those that give us the impression or the sensation of movement, does anything happen. In paintings things simply are; they do not happen. To speak and to write, to tell stories and to think, is to experience time elapsing, to go from one place to another: to advance. A painting has spatial limits, yet it has neither a beginning nor an end; a text is a succession that begins at one point and ends at another. To write and to speak are to trace a path: to create, to remember, to imagine a trajectory, to go toward…. Painting offers us a vision, literature invites us to seek one and therefore traces an imaginary path toward it. Painting constructs presences, literature emits meanings and then attempts to catch up with them. Meaning is what words emit, what is beyond them, what escapes from between the meshes of the net of words and what they seek to retain or to trap. Meaning is not in the text but outside it. These words that I am writing are setting forth in search of their meaning, and that is the only meaning they have.

  The palace of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

  23

  Hanumn: a monkey/a gramma of language, of its dynamism and its endless production of phonetic and semantic creations. An ideogram of the poet, the master/servant of universal metamorphosis: an imitative simian, an artist of repetitions, he is the Aristotelian animal that copies from nature but at the same time he is the semantic seed, the bomb-seed that is buried in the verbal subsoil and that will never turn into the plant that its sower anticipates, but into another, one forever different. The sexual fruits and the carnivorous flowers of otherness sprout from the single stem of identity.

  24

  Is it vision that lies at the end of the road? The neighbors’ patio with its little dark wooden table and its rusty garbage can, the grove of beech trees on a prominence of the playing field of Churchill College, the spot with the pools of stagnant water and the banyan trees a hundred yards or so from what was once the entrance to Galta, are visions of reality irreducible to language. Each one of these realities is unique and to truly express it we would require a language composed solely of proper and unrepeatable names, a language that would not be a language: the double of the world, that would be neither a translation of it nor a symbol of it. Thus seeing these realities, truly seeing them, is the same as going mad: losing all names, entering the realm of the incommensurable. Or rather: returning to it, to the world before language exists. Hence the path of poetic writing leads to the abolition of writing: at the end of it we are confronted with an inexpressible reality. The reality that poetry reveals and that appears behind language—the reality visible only through the destruction of language that the poetic act represents—is literally intolerable and maddening. At the same time, without the vision of this reality man is not man, and language is not language. Poetry gives us sustenance and destroys us, it gives us speech and dooms us to silence. It is the necessarily momentary perception (which is all that we can bear) of the incommensurable world which we one day abandon and to which we return when we die. Language sinks its roots into this world but transforms its juices and reactions into signs and symbols. Language is the consequence (or the cause) of our exile from the universe, signifying the distance between things and ourselves. At the same time it is our recourse against this distance. If our exile were to come to an end, language would come to an end: language, the measure of all things, ratio. Poetry is number, proportion, measure: language—except that it is a language that has turned in upon itself, that devours itself and destroys itself in order that there may appear what is other, what is without measure, the dizzying foundation, the unfathomable abyss out of which measure is born. The reverse of language.

  Writing is a search for the meaning that writing itself violently expels. At the end of the search meaning evaporates and reveals to us a reality that literally is meaningless. What remains? The twofold movement of writing: a journey in the direction of meaning, a dissipation of meaning. An allegory of mortality: these phrases that I write, this path that I invent as I endeavor to describe the path that leads to Galta, become blurred, dissolve as I write: I never reach the end, and I never shall. There is no end, everything has been a perpetual beginning all over again. What I am saying is a continual saying of what I am about to say and never manage to say: I always say something else. A saying of something that the moment it is said evaporates, a saying that never says what I want to say. As I write, I journey toward meaning: as I read what I write, I blot it out, I dissolve the path. Each attempt I make ends up the same way: the dissolution of the text in the reading of it, the expulsion of the meaning through writing. The search for meaning culminates in the appearance of a reality that lies beyond the meaning and that disperses it, destroys it. We proceed from a search for meaning to its destruction in order that a reality may appear, a reality which in turn disappears. Reality and its radiance, reality and its opacity: the vision that poetic writing offers us is that of its dissolution. Poetry is empty, like the clearing in the forest in Dadd’s painting: it is nothing but the place of the apparition which is, at the same time, that of its disappearance. Rien n’aura lieu que le lieu.

  25

  On the square-ruled wall of the terrace the damp stains and the traces of red, black, and blue paint create imaginary atlases. It is six in the afternoon. A pact between light and shadow: a universal pause. I breathe deeply: I am in the center of a time that is fully rounded, as full of itself as a drop of sunlight. I feel that ever since I was born, and even before, a before that has no when, I have been able to see the banyan tree at the corner of the esplanade growing taller and taller (a fraction of an inch each year), multiplying its aerial roots, interweaving them, descending to the earth by way of them, anchoring itself, taking root, rising again, descending again, and thus, for centuries, growing larger in a tangle of roots and branches. The banyan tree is a spider that has been spinning its interminable web for a thousand years. Discovering this causes me to feel an inhuman joy: I am rooted in this hour as the banyan tree is rooted in time immemorial. Nonetheless time does not stop: for more than two hours now Splendor and I have been walking through the great arch of the Gateway, crossing the deserted courtyard, and climbing the stairway that leads to this terrace. Time goes by yet does not go by. This hour of six in the afternoon has been, from the beginning, the same six o’clock in the afternoon, and yet minutes follow upon minutes with the sam
e regularity as always. This hour of six in the afternoon little by little draws to a close, but each moment is transparent, and by the very fact of this transparency dissolves or becomes motionless, ceasing to flow. Six o’clock in the afternoon turns into a transparent immobility that has no depth and no reverse side: there is nothing behind it.

  The notion that the very heart of time is a fixity that dissolves all images, all times, in a transparency with no depth or consistency, terrifies me. Because the present also becomes empty: it is a reflection suspended in another reflection. I search about for a reality that is less dizzying, a presence that will rescue me from this abysmal now, and I look at Splendor—but she is not looking at me: at this moment she is laughing at the gesticulations of a little monkey as it leaps from its mother’s shoulder to the balustrade, swings by its tail from one of the balusters, takes a leap, falls at our feet a few steps away from us, looks up at us in terror, leaps again and this time lands on the shoulder of its mother, who growls and bares her teeth at us. I look at Splendor and through her face and her laugh I am able to make my way to another moment of another time, and there on a Paris street corner, at the intersection of the rue du Bac and the rue de Montalembert, I hear the same laugh. And this laugh is superimposed on the laugh that I hear here, on this page, as I make my way inside six o’clock in the afternoon of a day that I am creating and that has stopped still on the terrace of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Galta.