by Octavio Paz
Hanumn flying over the mountains, Jaipur, 19th century.
The times and the places are interchangeable: the face that I am now looking at, the one that, without seeing me, laughs at the monkey and its panic, is the one that I am looking at in another city, at another moment—on this same page. Never is the same when, the same laugh, the same stains on the wall, the same light of the same six o’clock in the afternoon. Each when goes by, changes, mingles with other whens, disappears and reappears. This laughter that scatters itself about here like the pearls of a broken necklace is the same laugh as always and always another, the laugh heard on a Paris street corner, the laugh of an afternoon that is drawing to a close and blending with the laugh that silently, like a purely visual cascade, or rather an absolutely mental one—not the idea of a cascade but a cascade become idea—plunges down onto my forehead and forces me to close my eyes because of the mute violence of its whiteness. Laughter: cascade: foam: unheard whiteness. Where do I hear this laughter, where do I see it? Having lost my way amid all these times and places, have I lost my past, am I living in a continuous present? Although I haven’t moved, I feel that I am coming loose from myself: I am where I am and at the same time I am not where I am. The strangeness of being here, as though here were somewhere else; the strangeness of being in my body, of the fact that my body is my body and that I think what I think, hear what I hear. I am wandering far, far away from myself, by way of here, journeying along this path to Galta that I am creating as I write and that dissipates on being read. I am journeying by way of this here that is not outside and yet is not inside either; I am walking across the uneven, dusty surface of the terrace as though I were walking inside myself, but this inside of myself is outside: I see it, I see myself walking in it. “I” is an outside. I am looking at Splendor and she is not looking at me: she is looking at the little monkey. She too is coming loose from her past, she too is in her outside. She is not looking at me, she is laughing, and with a toss of her head, she makes her way inside her own laughter.
From the balustrade of the terrace I see the courtyard below. There is no one there, the light has stopped moving, the banyan tree has firmly planted itself in its immobility, Splendor is standing at my side laughing, the little monkey is terrified and runs to hide in its mother’s hairy arms, I breathe in this air as insubstantial as time. Transparency: in the end things are nothing but their visible properties. They are as we see them, they are what we see and I exist only because I see them. There is no other side, there is no bottom or crack or hole: everything is an adorable, impassible, abominable, impenetrable surface. I touch the present, I plunge my hand into the now, and it is as though I were plunging it into air, as though I were touching shadows, embracing reflections. A magic surface, at once insubstantial and impenetrable: all these realities are a fine-woven veil of presences that hide no secret. Exteriority, and nothing else: they say nothing, they keep nothing to themselves, they are simply there, before my eyes, beneath the not too harsh light of this autumn day. An indifferent state of existence, beyond beauty and ugliness, meaning and meaninglessness. The intestines spilling out of the belly of the dog whose body is rotting over there some fifty yards away from the banyan tree, the moist red beak of the vulture ripping it to pieces, the ridiculous movement of its wings sweeping the dust on the ground, what I think and feel on seeing this scene from the balustrade, amid Splendor’s laughter and the little monkey’s panic—these are distinct, unique, absolutely real realities, and yet they are also inconsistent, gratuitous, and in some way unreal. Realities that have no weight, no reason for being: the dog could be a pile of stones, the vulture a man or a horse, I myself a chunk of stone or another vulture, and the reality of this six o’clock in the afternoon would be no different. Or better put: different and the same are synonyms in the impartial light of this moment. Everything is the same and it is all the same whether I am who I am or someone different from who I am. On the path to Galta that always begins over and over again, imperceptibly and without my consciously willing it, as I kept walking along it and kept retracing my steps, again and again, this now of the terrace has been gradually constructed: I am riveted to the spot here, like the banyan tree trapped by its populace of intertwining aerial roots, but I might be there, in another now—that would be the same now. Each time is different; each place is different and all of them are the same place, they are all the same. Everything is now.
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The path is writing and writing is a body and a body is bodies (the grove of trees). Just as meaning appears beyond writing, as though it were the destination, the end of the road (an end that ceases to be an end the moment we arrive there, a meaning that vanishes the moment we state it), so the body first appears to our eye as a perfect totality, and yet it too proves to be intangible: the body is always somewhere beyond the body. On touching it, it divides itself (like a text) into portions that are momentary sensations: a sensation that is a perception of a thigh, an earlobe, a nipple, a fingernail, a warm patch of groin, the hollow in the throat like the beginning of a twilight. The body that we embrace is a river of metamorphoses, a continual division, a flowing of visions, a quartered body whose pieces scatter, disperse, come back together again with the intensity of a flash oflightning hurtling toward a white black white fixity. A fixity that is destroyed in another black white black flash; the body is the place marking the disappearance of the body. Reconciliation with the body culminates in the annihilation of the body (the meaning). Every body is a language that vanishes at the moment of absolute plenitude; on reaching the state of incandescence, every language reveals itself to be an unintelligible body. The word is a disincarnation of the world in search of its meaning; and an incarnation: a destruction of meaning, a return to the body. Poetry is corporeal: the reverse of names.
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a rose and green, yellow and purple undulation, human tides, whitecaps of light on skin and hair, the inexhaustible flow of the human current that little by little, in less than an hour, inundated the entire courtyard. Leaning on the balustrade, we saw the pulse of the multitude throbbing, heard its swelling surge. A coming and going, a calm agitation that propagated itself and spread in eccentric waves, slowly filled the empty spaces, and as though it were an overflowing stream, mounted, patiently and persistently, step by step, the great stairway of the cubical building, partially in ruins, situated at the north corner of the parallelogram.
On the third and uppermost story of that massive structure, at the top of the stairway and below one of the arches crowning the building, the altar of Hanumn had been erected. The Great Monkey was represented by a relief carved in a block of black stone more than three feet high, approximately thirty inches wide, and half an inch thick, placed on, or rather, set into a platform of modest dimensions covered with a red and yellow cloth. The stone stood beneath a wooden canopy shaped like a fluted conch shell, painted gold. From the conch there hung a length of violet silk with fringes, also gilded, at the bottom. Two poles, mindful of wooden masts, stood on either side of the canopy, both of them painted blue and each of them bearing a triangular paper banner, one of them a green one and the other a white one. Scattered about on the bright red and yellow cloth covering the table of the altar were little piles of ashes from incense burned in honor of the image, and many petals, still fresh and moist, the remains of the floral offerings of the faithful. The stone was smeared with a brilliant red paste. Bathed in the lustral water, the nectar of the flowers and the melted butter of the oblations, the relief of Hanumn gleamed like the body of an athlete anointed with oil. Despite the thick red pigment, one could more or less make out the figure of the Simian, taking that extraordinary leap that brought him from the Nilgiri Mountains to the garden of the palace of Rvana in Lanka; his left leg bent, his knee like a prow cleaving the waves, behind him his left leg extended like a wing, or rather, like an oar (his leap calls to mind flying, which in turn calls to mind swimming) and his long tail tracing a spiral: a line/a liana/the Milky
Way, his one arm upraised, encircled by heavy bracelets, and the huge hand clutching a warclub, his other arm thrust forward, with the fingers of the hand spread apart like a fan or the leaf of a royal palm or like the fin of a fish or the crest of a bird (again: swimming and flying), his skull enclosed in a helmet—a fiery red meteor hurtling through space.
Like his father Vayu, the Great Monkey “traces signs of fire in the sky if he flies; if he falls, he leaves a tail of sounds on the earth: we hear his roar but do not see his form.” Hanumn, like his father, is wind, and that is why his leaps are like the flight of birds; and while he is air, he is also sound with meaning: an emitter of words, a poet. Son of the wind, poet and grammarian, Hanumn is the divine messenger, the Holy Spirit of India. He is a monkey that is a bird that is a vital and spiritual breath. Though he is chaste, his body is an inexhaustible fountain of sperm, and a single drop of sweat from his skin suffices to make the stone womb of a desert fecund. Hanumn is the friend, the counselor, and the inspirer of the poet Vlmlki. Since legend has it that the author of the Ramayana was a pariah suffering from leprosy, the pariahs of Galta, who particularly venerate Hanumn, have taken the name of the poet for their own and hence are called Balmiks. But on that altar, a black stone daubed with thick red pigment, bathed in the liquid butter of the oblations, Hanumn was above all the Fire of the sacrifice. A priest had lighted a little brazier that one of his acolytes had brought to him. Although naked from the waist up, he was not a Brahman and was not wearing the ritual cord around his neck; like the other officiants and like the majority of those present, he was a pariah. Turning his back to the worshipers who had crowded into the little sanctuary, he raised the brazier to the level of his eyes, and swinging it slowly up and down and in the direction of the eight points of the compass, he traced luminous circles and spirals in the air. The coals sizzled and smoked, the priest chanted the prayers in a whining nasal voice, and the other officiants, in accordance with the prescribed ritual, one by one cast spoonsful of melted butter into the fire: The streams of butter gush forth (the golden rod in the center), they flow like rivers, they separate and flee like gazelles before the hunter, they leap about like women going to a love-tryst, the spoonsful of butter caress the burned wood, and the Fire accepts them with pleasure.
With stones, little hammers, and other objects, the acolytes began to strike the iron bars hanging from the ceiling. A man appeared—wearing a coarse-woven garment, with a mask over his face, a helmet, and a rod simulating a lance. He may have represented one of the warrior monkeys who accompanied Hanumn and Sugriva on their expedition to Lanka. The acolytes continued to strike the iron bars, and a powerful and implacable storm of sound rained down on the heads of the multitude eddying about below. At the foot of the banyan tree a dozen sadhus had congregated, all of them advanced in years, with shaved heads or long tangled locks coated with red dust, wavy white beards, their faces smeared with paint and their foreheads decorated with signs: vertical and horizontal stripes, circles, half-moons, tridents. Some of them were decked in white or saffron robes, others were naked, their bodies covered with ashes or cow dung, their genitals protected by a cotton pouch hanging from a cord that served as a belt. Lying stretched out on the ground, they were smoking, drinking tea or milk or bhang, laughing, conversing, praying in a half-whisper, or simply lying there silently. On hearing the sound of the bars being struck and the confused murmur of the priests’ voices chanting hymns overhead, they all stood up and without forewarning, as though obeying an order that no one save them had heard, with blazing eyes and somnambulistic gestures— the gestures of someone walking in his sleep and moving about very slowly, like a diver at the bottom of the sea— they formed a circle and began to sing and dance. The crowd gathered round and followed their movements, transfixed, with smiling, respectful fascination. Leaps and chants, the flutter of bright-colored rags and sparkling tatters, luxurious poverty, flashes of splendor and wretchedness, a dance of invalids and nonagenarians, the gestures of drowned men and illuminati, dry branches of the human tree that the wind rips off and carries away, a flight of puppets, the rasping voices of stones falling in blind wells, the piercing voices of panes of glass shattering, acts of homage paid by death to life.
A sdhu in the sanctuary of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).
A sdhu and pilgrim near Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).
The multitude was a lake of quiet movements, one vast warm undulation. The springs had let go, the tensions were disappearing, to exist was to spread out, to overflow, to turn liquid, to return to the primordial water, to the ocean that is the mother of all. The dance of the sadhus, the chants of the officiants, the cries and exclamations of the multitude were bubbles rising from the great lake lying hypnotized beneath the metallic rain brought forth by the acolytes as they struck the iron bars. In the sky overhead, insensible to the movements of the hordes of people jammed together in the courtyard and to their rites, the crows, the blackbirds, the vultures, and the parakeets imperturbably continued their flights, their disputes, and their lovemaking. A limpid, naked sky. The air too had ceased to move. Calm and indifference. A deceptive repose made up of thousands upon thousands of imperceptible changes and movements: although it appeared that the light had halted forever on the pink scar on the wall, the stone was throbbing, breathing, it was alive, its scar was becoming more and more inflamed until finally it turned into a great gaping red wound, and just as this smoldering coal was about to burst into flame, it changed its mind, contracted little by little, withdrew into itself, buried itself in its dying ardor, simply a black stain spreading over the wall now. It was the same with the sky, with the courtyard, with the crowd. Evening came amid the fallen brightnesses, submerged the flat-topped hills, blinded the reflections, turned the transparencies opaque. Congregating on the balconies from which, in other times, the princes and their wives contemplated the spectacles taking place on the esplanade, hundreds and hundreds of monkeys, with that curiosity of theirs that is a terrible form of the indifference of the universe, watched the feast being celebrated by the men down below.
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When spoken or written, words advance and inscribe themselves one after the other upon the space that is theirs: the sheet of paper, the wall of air. They advance, they go from here to there, they trace a path: they go by, they are time. Although they never stop moving from one point to another and thus describe a horizontal or vertical line (depending on the nature of the writing), from another perspective, the simultaneous or converging one which is that of poetry, the phrases that go to make up a text appear as great motionless, transparent blocks: the text does not go anywhere, language ceases to flow. A dizzying repose because it is a fabric woven of nothing but clarity: each page reflects all the others, and each one is the echo of the one that precedes or follows it—the echo and the answer, rhyme and metaphor. There is no end and no beginning: everything is center. Neither before nor after, neither in front of nor behind, neither inside nor outside: everything is in everything. Like a spiral seashell, all times are this time now, which is nothing except, like cut crystal, the momentary condensation of other times into an insubstantial clarity. Condensation and dispersion, the secret sign that the now makes to itself just as it dissipates. Simultaneous perspective does not look upon language as a path because it is not the search for meaning that orients it. Poetry does not attempt to discover what there is at the end of the road; it conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations as they intertwine or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other. Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses, volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations are crystallized time: although they are perpetually in motion, they always point to the same hour—the hour of change. Each one of them contains all the others, each one is inside the o
thers: change is only the oft-repeated and ever-different metaphor of identity.
Bharat transporting Hanumn to battlefield with his magic arrow, Oudh, 19th century.
The vision of poetry is that of the convergence of every point. The end of the road. This is the vision of Hanumn as he leaps (a geyser) from the valley to the mountaintop or as he plunges (a meteorite) from the star to the bottom of the sea: the dizzying oblique vision that reveals the universe not as a succession, a movement, but as an assemblage of spaces and times, a repose. Convergence is repose because at its apex the various movements, as they meet, obliterate each other; at the same time, from this peak of immobility, we perceive the universe as an assemblage of worlds in rotation. Poems: crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies. In them the world plays at being the world, which is the game of similarities engendered by differences and that of contradictory similarities. Hanumn wrote on the rocky cliffs of a mountain the Mahantaka, based on the same subject as the Rmyana; on reading it, Vlmïki feared that it would overshadow his poem and begged Hanumn to keep his drama a secret. The Monkey yielded to the poet’s entreaty, uprooted the mountain, and threw the rocks into the sea. Vlmïki’s pen and ink on the paper are a metaphor of the bolt oflightning and the rain with which Hanumn wrote his drama on the rocky mountainside. Human writing reflects that of the universe, it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different and it says the same thing. At the point of convergence the play of similarities and differences cancels itself out in order that identity alone may shine forth. The illusion of motionlessness, the play of mirrors of the one: identity is completely empty; it is a crystallization and in its transparent core the movement of analogy begins all over once again.