The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

  * Certain realities cannot be expressed, but, and here I quote from memory, “they are what is manifested in language without language stating it.” They are what language does not say and hence says. (What is embodied in language is not silence, which by definition says nothing, nor is it what silence would say if it were to speak. If it were to cease to be silence, and instead be …) What is said in language without language saying it is saying (that is to say?): what is really said (that which makes its appearance between one phrase and another, in that crack that is neither silence nor a voice) is what language leaves unsaid (fixity is always momentary).

  Hanumn, Western India, 17th century

  To return to my initial observation: by means of a succession of patient analyses and in a direction that is the opposite of that of the normal activity of a speaker, whose function is to produce and construct phrases, whereas here it is a question of taking them apart and uncoupling them (de-constructing them, so to speak) we ought to make our way back upstream against the current, retrace our path, and proceeding from one figurative expression to another, arrive back at the root, the original, primordial word for which all others are metaphors. Momentary is a metaphor—for what other word? By choosing it as the adjectival qualifier of fixity, I fell into that frequent confusion whereby spatial properties are attributed to time and temporal properties to space, as when we say “all year long,” “the march of time,” “the sweep of the minute hand,” and other expressions of this sort. If I substitute direct statement for the figurative expression, the result is nonsense or a paradox: fixity is (always) movement. Fixity in turn thus proves to be a metaphor. What did I mean by that word? Perhaps this: that which does not change. Hence the phrase might have been: that which does not change is (always) movement. This is not satisfactory either however: the opposition between nonchange and movement is not clear, and the ambiguity reappears. Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.

  I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is. This morning’s sunlight has fallen uninterruptedly on the motionless surface of the little table made of dark wood that is standing in one corner of the neighbors’ patio (it finally has a function in these pages: it is serving me as an example in a dubious demonstration) during the brief period when the cloudy sky cleared: some fifteen minutes, just long enough to demonstrate the falsity of the phrase: fixity is never momentary. Perched on a thin wire of shadow, the silver and olive-colored thrush, itself a tapered shadow transformed into light standing out between and against the various glints of broken shards of bottles set into the top of a wall, at the time of day when reverberations depopulate space, a reflection among other reflections, a momentary sharp brightness in the form of a beak, feathers, and the gleam of a pair of eyes; the gray triangular lizard, coated with a powder so fine that its green tint is scarcely visible, quietly at rest in a crack in another wall on another afternoon in another place: not a variegated stone, but a bit of animal mercury; the coppice of cool green foliage on which, between one day and the next, without forewarning, there appears a flame-colored stain that is merely the scarlet armorial emblem of autumn and that immediately passes through different states, like the bed of coals that glows brightly before dying away, from copper to wine-red and from tawny to scorched brown: at each moment and in each state still the same plant; that butterfly I saw one noon in Kasauli, resting motionless on a sunflower, yellow and black like itself, its wings spread, a very thin sheet of Peruvian gold in which all the sun of the Himalayas might well have been concentrated— they are fixed: not there, but here in my mind, fixed for an instant. Fixity is always momentary.

  My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”). In this monologue one of the terms finally devours the other: either motionlessness is merely a state of movement (as in my phrase), or else movement is only an illusion of motionlessness (as among the Hindus). Therefore we ought not to say either always or never, but almost always or almost never, merely from time to time or more than is generally supposed and less than this expression might indicate, frequently or seldom, consistently or occasionally, we don’t have at our disposal sufficient data to state with certainty whether it is periodic or irregular: fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity…. All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary.

  * From “Gerontion” by T. S. Eliot

  5

  I must make an effort (didn’t I say that I would now really go to the very end?), leave the spot with the pools of water, and arrive, some thousand yards farther on, at what I call the Gateway. The children accompany me, offer to act as guides, and beg me for coins. I stop to rest alongside a little tree, take out my pocket knife, and cut a branch off. It will serve me as a walking stick and as a standard. The Gateway is a stretch of wall, tall but not very long, that bears faint traces of black and red paint. The entryway is situated in the center of the wall, and is topped by a great Moorish arch. Above and on either side of the arch are two courses of balconies that call to mind those of Seville or Puebla, Mexico, except that these are made of wood rather than of forged iron. Beneath each balcony there is an empty vaulted niche. The wall, the balconies, and the arch are the remains of what must have been a small palace dating from the end of the eighteenth century, similar to the many others all over the other side of the mountain.

  Near the Gateway is a huge banyan tree that must be very old, to judge from the number of its dangling aerial roots and the intricate tangles in which they descend to the ground from the crown, there to attach themselves firmly, ascend again, jut out, and intertwine, like the lines, cables, and masts of a sailing vessel. But the banyan-sailboat is not rotting away in the stagnant waters of some bay, but here in this sandy soil instead. In its branches the devout have fastened colored ribbons, all of them now faded by the rain and the sun. These discolored bits of cloth give it the pitiful air of a giant swathed in dirty bandages. Leaning against the trunk and resting on a small whitewashed platform is a stone about a foot and a half high; its shape is vaguely human and it is daubed all over with thick, shiny, blood-red paint. At the foot of the figure are yellow petals, ashes, broken earthenware pots and other debris that I am unable to identify. The children leap about and point to the stone, shouting “Hanumn, Hanumn!” On hearing them shouting, a beggar suddenly emerges from the rocks to show me his hands eaten away by leprosy. The next moment another mendicant appears, and then another and another.

  I move away, walk through the arch, and enter a sort of little square. To the extreme right, a disorderly perspective of collapsing buildings out of plumb; to the left, a wall that repeats the Gateway on a more modest scale: traces of red and black paint, two courses of balconies, and an entryway topped by a graceful arch that affords a glimpse of a vast courtyard choked with hostile vegetation; across the way, a wide, winding street paved with stones and lined with houses in nearly total ruins. In the center of the s
treet, some hundred yards away from where I am now standing, there is a fountain. Monkeys leap over the wall of the Gateway, scamper across the little square, and climb up onto the fountain. They are soon dislodged by the stones that the children throw at them. I walk toward the fountain. Ahead of me is a building that is still standing, without balconies but with massive wooden doors thrown wide open. It is a temple. Alongside the entrances are various booths with canvas awnings in which a few oldsters are selling cigarettes, matches, incense, sweets, prayers, holy images, and other trinkets and baubles. From the fountain one can glimpse the main courtyard, a vast rectangular space paved in flagstones. It has just been washed down and is giving off a whitish vapor. Around it, beneath a little rooftop supported by pillars, are various altars, like stands at a fair. A few wooden bars separate one altar from another, and each divinity from its worshipers. They are more like cages than altars. Two fat priests, naked from the waist up, appear in the entrance and invite me to come in. I decline to do so.

  The palace of Galta, with traces of red and black paint (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

  The sacred pool of the sanctuary of Galta (photograph by Ensebio Rojas).

  On the other side of the street is a building in ruins but handsome nonetheless. The high wall once again, the two courses of balconies reminiscent of Andalusia, the arch, and on the other side of the arch a stairway possessed of a certain secret stateliness. The stairway leads to a broad terrace surrounded by architectural features that repeat, on a smaller scale, those of the main archway. The lateral arches are supported by columns carved in random, fantastic shapes. Preceded by the monkeys, I cross the street and walk through the arch. I halt, and after a moment of indecision, begin slowly ascending the stairway. At the other end of the street the children and the priests shout something at me that I do not understand.

  If I go on in this direction … because it is possible not to, and after having declined the invitation of the two obese priests, I could just as well walk on down the street for some ten minutes, come out in the open countryside, and start up the pilgrim path that leads to the great sacred pool and the hermitage at the foot of the rock. If I go on, I will climb the stairway step by step and reach the great terrace. Ah, here I am, breathing deeply in the center of this open rectangle which offers itself to one’s gaze with a sort of logical simplicity. The simplicity, the necessity, the felicity of a perfect rectangle beneath the changes, the caprices, the violent onslaughts of the light. A space made of air, in which all forms have the consistency of air: nothing has any weight. At the far side of the terrace is a great niche: again the shapeless stone daubed with fiery red pigment and at its feet the offerings: yellow flowers, ashes from burned incense. I am surrounded by monkeys leaping back and forth: robust males that continually scratch themselves and growl, baring their teeth if anyone approaches them, females with their young hanging from their teats, monkeys that drive other monkeys away, monkeys that dangle from the cornices and balustrades, monkeys that fight or play or masturbate or snatch stolen fruit from each other, gesticulating monkeys with gleaming eyes and tails in perpetual motion, howling monkeys with hairless bright-red buttocks, monkeys, monkeys, hordes of monkeys.

  I stamp my feet on the ground, I shout at the top of my lungs, I run back and forth, I brandish the stick that I have cut down in the place with the pools of water and make it sing like a whip, I lash out with it at two or three monkeys who scamper away shrieking, I force my way through the others, I cross the terrace. I enter a gallery with a complicated wooden balustrade running the length of it, the repeated motif of which is a female monster with wings and claws that calls to mind the sphinxes of the Mediterranean (between the balusters and the moldings there appear and disappear the curious faces and the perpetually moving tails of the monkeys that keep cautiously following me at a distance), 1 enter a room in semidarkness, and despite the fact that I am more or less obliged to grope my way along in the deep shadows I can divine that this enclosed area is as spacious as an audience chamber or a banquet room, and presume that it must have been the main court of the harem or the throne room, I catch a glimpse of palpitating black sacks hanging from the ceiling, a flock of sleeping bats, the air is a heavy, acrid miasma, I go out onto another smaller terrace, how much light there is!, the monkeys reappear at the other end, looking at me from a distance with a gaze in which curiosity is indistinguishable from indifference (they are looking at me from across the distance that separates their being monkeys from my being a man), I am now at the foot of a wall stained with damp patches and with traces of paint, most likely it is a landscape, not that of Galta but another, a green and mountainous one, almost certainly it is one of those stereotyped representations of the Himalayas, yes, these vaguely conical and triangular forms represent mountains, Himalayas with snow-capped peaks, steep crags, waterfalls and moons above a narrow gorge, fairytale mountains where wild beasts, anchorites, and marvels abound, in front of them there rises and falls, swells with pride and humbles itself, a mountain that creates and destroys itself, a sea shaken with violent spasms, impotent and boiling with monsters and abominations (the two extremes, as irreconcilable as water and fire: the pure mountain that conceals within its folds the paths to liberation/the impure, trackless sea; the space of definition/that of the indefinable; the mountain and its petrified surge: permanence/the sea and its unstable mountains: movement and its illusions; the mountain that is the very image and likeness of being, a tangible manifestation of the principle of identity, as immobile as a tautology/the sea that endlessly contradicts itself, the sea critical of being and of itself), between the mountain and the sea ethereal space and in the middle of this empty expanse a great dark form: the mountain has ejected a fiery meteor, there is a powerful body hanging suspended above the ocean, it is not the sun: it is the elephant of monkeys, the lion, the bull of simians!, it is swimming vigorously in the ether, stroking with its arms and legs in a smooth rhythm, like a giant frog, its head thrust forward, a prow cleaving the winds and scattering storms, its eyes are two lighthouse beacons that pierce whirlwinds and drill through space turned to stone, its dazzling-white teeth gleam between the red gums and the dark lips: razor-sharp fangs that gnaw away distances, the rigid upraised tail is the mast of this terrifying skiff, the entire body, the color of burning coals, is a furnace of energy flying over the waters, a mountain of seething molten copper, the drops of sweat dripping from its body are a potent rain that falls upon millions of marine and terrestrial wombs (tomorrow there will be a great harvest of monsters and marvels), as the reddish comet parts the sky in two the sea lifts up its millions of arms to grab it and destroy it, huge lascivious serpents and demons of the deep rise from their slimy beds and rush forth to meet it, eager to devour the great monkey, eager to copulate with the chaste simian, to break open his great hermetically sealed jars full of semen accumulated over centuries and centuries of abstinence, eager to broadcast the virile substance to the four points of the compass, to disseminate it, to disperse being, multiply appearances, multiply death, eager to extract his thought and his marrow, to drain him of his last drop of blood, to empty him, squeeze him, suck him dry, to turn him into the clapper of a bell, a hollow shell, eager to burn him, to scorch his tail, but the great monkey keeps advancing, covering space in giant strokes, his shadow plows the waves, his head pierces mineral clouds, he sweeps like a tropical hurricane into the blur of shapeless stains that disfigure this entire end of the wall, representations perhaps of Lanka and its palace, perhaps there is painted here everything that Hanumn did and saw there after having bounded across the sea in one leap—an indecipherable jumble of lines, strokes, spirals, mad maps, grotesque stories, the discourse of monsoons inscribed on this crumbling wall.