The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

  TITLES BY OCTAVIO PAZ AVAILABLE FROM

  ARCADE PUBLISHING

  Alternating Current

  Conjunctions and Disjunctions

  Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

  The Monkey Grammarian

  On Poets and Others

  Copyright © 1974, 2011 by Editorial Seix Barrai, S.A.

  English-language translation copyright © 1981, 2011 by Seaver Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Originally published in Spain in Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., under the title El Mono Gramático

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-481-9

  HANUMN, HANUMAT, HANÜMAT. A celebrated monkey chief. He was able to fly and is a conspicuous figure in the Rmyana, … Hanumn leaped from India to Ceylon in one bound; tore up trees, carried away the Himalayas, seized the clouds and performed many other wonderful exploits…. Among his other accomplishments, Hanumn was a grammarian; and the Rmyana says: “The chief of monkeys is perfect; no one equals him in the sastras, in learning, and in ascertaining the sense of the scriptures (or in moving at will). It is well known that Hanumn was the ninth author of grammar.”

  John Dowson, M. R. A. S.,

  A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology

  TO MARIE JOSÉ

  1

  The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end-without being concerned about what “going to the end” means or what I meant when I wrote that phrase. At the very beginning of the journey, already far off the main highway, as I walked along the path that leads to Galta, past the little grove of banyan trees and the pools of foul stagnant water, through the Gateway fallen into ruins and into the main courtyard bordered by dilapidated houses, I also had no idea where I was going, and was not concerned about it. I wasn’t asking myself questions: I was walking, merely walking, with no fixed itinerary in mind. I was simply setting forth to meet … what? I didn’t know at the time, and I still don’t know. Perhaps that is why I wrote “going to the end”: in order to find out, in order to discover what there is after the end. A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness.

  Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms—all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.

  Hanumn, drawing on paper, Rajasthan, 18th century. Collection of Marie José Paz (photograph by Daniel David).

  2

  Through my window, some three hundred yards away, the dark green bulk of the grove of trees, a mountain of leaves and branches that sways back and forth and threatens to fall over. A populace of beeches, birches, aspens, and ash trees gathered together on a slight prominence, their tops all capsizing, transformed into a single liquid mass, the crest of a heaving sea. The wind shakes them and lashes them until they howl in agony. The trees twist, bend, straighten up again with a deafening creak and strain upward as though struggling to uproot themselves and flee. No, they do not give in. The pain of roots and broken limbs, the fierce stubbornness of plants, no less powerful than that of animals and men. If these trees were suddenly to start walking, they would destroy everything in their path. But they choose to remain where they are: they do not have blood or nerves, only sap, and instead of rage or fear, a silent tenacity possesses them. Animals flee or attack; trees stay firmly planted where they are. Patience: the heroism of plants. Being neither a lion nor a serpent: being a holm-oak, a piru-tree.

  Clouds the color of steel have filled the sky; it is almost white in the distance, gradually turning darker and darker toward the center, just above the grove of trees, where it gathers in violent, deep purple masses. The trees shriek continuously beneath these malevolent accumulations. Toward the right the grove is a little less dense and the leafy intertwining branches of two beeches form a dark archway. Beneath the arch there is a bright, extraordinarily quiet space, a sort of pool of light that is not completely visible from here, since the horizontal line of the neighbors’ wall cuts across it. It is a low wall, a brick surface laid out in squares like graph paper, over which there extends the cold green stain ofa rosebush. In certain spots where there are no leaves, the knotty trunk and the bifurcations of its spreading branches, bristling with thorns, can be seen. A profusion of arms, pincers, claws and other extremities studded with spiny barbs: I had never thought of a rosebush as an immense crab. The patio must be some forty yards square; it is paved in cement, and along with the rosebush, a minuscule meadow dotted with daisies sets it off. In one corner there is a small table of dark wood which has long since fallen apart. What could it have been used for? Perhaps it was once a plant stand. Every day, for several hours, as I read or write, it is there in front of me, but even though I am quite accustomed to its presence, it continues to seem incongruous to me: what is it doing there? At times I am aware of it as one would be aware of an error, or an untoward act; at other times I see it as a critique. A critique of the rhetoric of the trees and the wind. In the opposite corner is the garbage can, a metal container three feet high and a foot and a half in diameter: four wire feet that support a cylinder with a rusty cover, lined with a plastic sack to hold the refuse. The sack is a fiery red color. Crabs again. The table and the garbage can, the brick walls and the cement paving enclose space. Do they enclose it or are they doors that open onto it?

  Five-headed Hanumn, painting, Jammu, 18th century.

  Beneath the arch of the beeches the light has de
epened, and its fixity, hemmed in by the heaving shadows of the foliage, is very nearly absolute. As I gaze at it, I too remain completely at rest. Or better put: my thought draws back in upon itself and remains perfectly still for a long moment. Is this repose the force that prevents the trees from fleeing and the sky from falling apart? Is it the gravity of this moment? Yes, I am well aware that nature—or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us—is neither our accomplice nor our confidant. It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches—this may be a program for life. But the bright spot is no longer an oval pool but an incandescent triangle, traversed by very fine flutings of shadow. The triangle stirs almost imperceptibly, until little by little a luminous boiling takes place, at the outer edges first, and then, with increasing fury, in its fiery center, as if all this liquid light were a seething substance gradually becoming yellower and yellower. Will it explode? The bubbles continually flare up and die away, in a rhythm resembling that of panting breath. As the sky grows darker, the bright patch of light dims and begins to flicker; it might almost be a lamp about to go out amid turbulent shadows. The trees remain exactly where they were, although they are now clad in another light.

  Fixity is always momentary. It is an equilibrium, at once precarious and perfect, that lasts the space of an instant: a flickering of the light, the appearance of a cloud, or a slight change in temperature is enough to break the repose-pact and unleash the series of metamorphoses. Each metamorphosis, in turn, is another moment of fixity succeeded by another change and another unexpected equilibrium. No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords. Ought I to say that the form of change is fixity, or more precisely, that change is an endless search for fixity? A nostalgia for inertia: indolence and its frozen paradises. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. It is transition. But the moment I say transition, the spell is broken. Transition is not wisdom, but a simple going toward…. Transition vanishes: only thus is it transition.

  3

  I did not want to think again about Galta and the dusty road that leads to it, and yet they are coming back now. They return furtively, despite the fact that I do not see them, I feel that they are here again, and are waiting to be named. No thought occurs to me, I am not thinking about anything, my mind is a real “blank”: like the word transition when I say it, like the path as I walk along it, everything vanishes as I think of Galta. As I think of it? No, Galta is here, it has slithered into a corner of my thoughts and is lurking there with that indecisive existence (which nonetheless is demanding, precisely on account of its indecision) of thoughts not completely thought through, not wholly expressed. The imminence of presence before it presents itself. But there is no such presence—only an expectation comprised of irritation and impotence. Galta is not here: it is awaiting me at the end of this phrase. It is awaiting me in order to disappear. In the face of the emptiness that its name conjures up I feel the same perplexity as when confronted with its hilltops leveled off by centuries of wind and its yellowish plains on which, during the long months of drouth, when the heat pulverizes the rocks and the sky looks as though it will crack like the earth, the dust clouds rise. Reddish, grayish, or dusky apparitions that suddenly come gushing forth like a waterspout or a geyser, except that dust whirlwinds are images of thirst, malevolent celebrations of aridity. Phantoms that dance like whirling dervishes, that advance, retreat, fall motionless, disappear here, reappear there: apparitions without substance, ceremonies of dust and air. What I am writing is also a ceremony, the whirling of a word that appears and disappears as it circles round and round. I am erecting towers of air.

  But it is on the other side of the mountain range that dust storms are frequent, on the great plain, not amid these slopes and ravines. Here the terrain is much rougher and more broken than on the other side, although it availed Galta nothing to take shelter beneath the skirts of the mountain range. On the contrary, its situation exposed it even more to the inroads of the desert. All these undulating surfaces, winding ravines, and gorges are the channels and beds of streams that no longer exist today. These sandy mounds were once covered with trees. The traveler makes his way among dilapidated dwellings: the landscape too has crumbled and fallen to ruins. I read a description dating from 1891: “The way the sandy desert is encroaching on the town should be noticed. It has caused one large suburb to be deserted and the houses and gardens are going to ruin. The sand has even drifted up the ravines of the hills. This evil ought to be arrested at any cost by planting.” Less than twenty years later, Galta was abandoned. Not for long however: first monkeys and then bands of wandering pariahs occupied the ruins.

  It is not more than an hour’s walk away. One leaves the highway on one’s left, winds one’s way amid rocky hills and climbs upward along ravines that are equally arid. A desolation that is not so much grim as touchingly sad. A landscape of bones. The remains of temples and dwellings, archways that lead to courtyards choked with sand, façades behind which there is nothing save piles of rubble and garbage, stairways that lead to nothing but emptiness, terraces that have fallen in, pools that have become giant piles of excrement. After making one’s way across this rolling terrain, one descends to a broad, bare plain. The path is strewn with sharp rocks and one soon tires. Despite the fact that it is now four o’clock in the afternoon, the ground is still burning hot. Sparse little bushes, thorny plants, vegetation that is twisted and stunted. Up ahead, not far in the distance, the starving mountain. A skin of stones, a mountain covered with scabs. There is a fine dust in the air, an impalpable substance that irritates and makes one feel queasy. Things seem stiller beneath this light that is weightless and yet oppressive. Perhaps the word is not stillness but persistence: things persist beneath the humiliation of the light. And the light persists. Things are more thinglike, everything is persisting in being, merely being. One crosses the stony bed of a little dry stream and the sound of one’s footsteps on the stones is reminiscent of the sound of water, but the stones smoke, the ground smokes. The path now winds among conical, blackish hills. A petrified landscape. This geometrical severity contrasts with the deliriums that the wind and the rocks conjure up, there ahead on the mountain. The path continues upward for a hundred yards or so, at a not very steep incline, amid heaps of loose stones and coarse gravel. Geometry is succeeded by the formless: it is impossible to tell whether this debris is from the dwellings fallen to ruins or whether it is what remains of rocks that have been worn away, disintegrated by the wind and the sun. The path leads downward once again: weeds, bilious plants, thistles, the stench of cow dung and human and animal filth, rusty tin oil drums full of holes, rags with stains of menstrual blood, a flock of vultures around a dog with its belly ripped to pieces, millions of flies, a boulder on which the initials of the Congress Party have been daubed with tar, the dry bed of the little stream once again, an enormous nim-tree inhabited by hundreds of birds and squirrels, more flat stretches of ground and ruins, the impassioned flight of parakeets, a mound that was perhaps once a cenotaph, a wall with traces of red and black paint (Krishna and his harem of cowherds’ wives, royal peacocks, and other forms that are unrecognizable), a marsh covered with lotuses and above them a cloud of butterflies, the silence of the rocks beneath the luminous vibrations of the air, the breathing of the landscape, terror at the creaking of a branch or the sound of a pebble displaced by a lizard (the constant invisible presence of the cobra and that other, equally impalpable presence, which never leaves us, the shadow of ou
r thoughts, the reverse of what we see and speak and are), until finally, again walking along the bed of the same dry stream, one reaches a tiny valley.

  Behind, and on either side, the flat-topped hills, the landscape leveled by erosion; ahead, the mountain with the footpath that leads to the great sacred pool beneath the rocks, and from there, via the pilgrim path, to the sanctuary at the summit. Scarcely a trace of the abandoned dwellings remains. Along the path here there are three towering, ancient banyan trees. In the shade of them—or rather: immersed in their depths, hidden in the semidarkness of their bowels, as though they were caves and not trees—are a group of lively children dressed in rags. They are watching over a dozen skinny cows resigned to the martyrdom inflicted on them by the flies and cattle ticks. There are also two kid goats and a multitude of crows. The first band of monkeys makes its appearance. The children throw stones at them. Green and gleaming beneath the steady light, two huge pools of pestilential water. Within a few weeks the water will have evaporated and the pools will be beds of fine dust on which the children and the wind will toss and tumble.

  4

  Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary—or would not be fixity. What did I mean by that phrase? I probably had in mind the opposition between motion and motionlessness, an opposition that the adverb always designates as continual and universal: it embraces all of time and applies to every circumstance. My phrase tends to dissolve this opposition and hence represents a sly violation of the principle of identity. I say “sly” because I chose the word momentary as an adjectival qualifier offixity in order to tone down the violence of the contrast between movement and motionlessness. A little rhetorical trick intended to give an air of plausibility to my violation of the rules of logic. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and from corrupting us. (The trouble is that a-diet-of-bread-and-water is a figurative expression, as is the-corruption-of-language-and-its-contagions.) It is necessary to unweave (another metaphor) even the simplest phrases in order to determine what it is that they contain (more figurative expressions) and what they are made of and how (what is language made of? and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?). Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. (Two metaphors.) Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of metaphor—that which is on the other side of language? (Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.) Perhaps reality too is a metaphor (of what and/or of whom?). Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things. With whom and of what do word-things speak? (This page is a sack of word-things.) It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself. (“Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”)