The Monkey Grammarian

by Octavio Paz

  6

  Stains: thickets: blurs. Blots. Held prisoner by the lines, the liane of the letters. Suffocated by the loops, the nooses of the vowels. Nipped by the pincers, pecked by the sharp beaks of the consonants. A thicket of signs: the negation of signs. Senseless gesticulation; a grotesque rite. Plethora becomes hecatomb: signs devour signs. The thicket is reduced to a desert, the babble to silence. Decayed alphabets, burned writings, verbal debris. Ashes. Inchoate languages, larvae, fetuses, abortions. A thicket: a murderous pullulation: a wasteland. Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions. An artist of repetitions, a past master of disfigurations, a maestro of demolitions. The trees repeat other trees, the sands other sands, the jungle of letters is repetition, the stretch of dunes is repetition, the plethora is emptiness, emptiness is a plethora, I repeat repetitions, lost in the thicket of signs, wandering about in the trackless sand, stains on the wall beneath this sun of Galta, stains on this afternoon in Cambridge, a thicket and a stretch of dunes, stains on my forehead that assembles and disassembles vague landscapes. You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I inhabit my demolitions.

  Hanumn, a stone sculpture at the edge of the path to Galta. The devout write out a prayer or trace a sign on a piece of paper and paste it on the stone, which they then cover with red paint (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

  7

  An indecipherable thicket of lines, strokes, spirals, maps: the discourse of fire on the wall. A motionless surface traversed by a flickering brightness: the shimmer of transparent water on the still bottom of the spring illuminated by invisible reflectors. A motionless surface on which the fire projects silent, fleeting, heaving shadows: beneath the ripples of the crystal-clear water dark phantoms swiftly slither. One, two, three, four black rays emerge from a black sun, grow longer, advance, occupy the whole of space, which oscillates and undulates, they fuse, form once again the dark sun of which they were born, emerge once again from this sun—like the fingers of a hand that opens, closes, and opens once again to transform itself into a fig leaf, a trefoil, a profusion of black wings, before vanishing altogether. A cascade of water silently plunges over the smooth walls of a dam. A charred moon rises out of a gaping abyss. A boat with billowing sails sends forth roots overhead, capsizes, becomes an inverted tree. Garments that fly in the air above a landscape of hills made of lampblack. Drifting continents, oceans in eruption. Surging waters, wave upon wave. The wind scatters the weightless rocks. A telamón shatters to bits. Birds again, fishes again. The shadows lock in embrace and cover the entire wall. They draw apart. Bubbles in the center of the liquid surface, concentric circles, submerged bells tolling in the depths. Splendor removes her garments with one hand, without letting go of her partner’s rod with the other. As she strips naked, the fire on the hearth clothes her in copper-colored reflections. She has dropped her garments to one side and is swimming through the shadows. The light of the fire coils about Splendor’s ankles, mounts between her thighs, illuminates her pubis and belly. The sun-colored water wets her fleecy mound and penetrates the lips of her vulva. The tempered tongue of the flames on the moist pudenda; the tongue enters and blindly gropes its way along the palpitating walls. The many-fingered water opens the valves and rubs the stubborn erectile button hidden amid dripping folds. The reflections, the flames, the waves lock in embrace and draw apart. Quivering shadows above the space that pants like an animal, shadows of a double butterfly that opens, closes, opens its wings. Knots. The surging waves rise and fall on Splendor’s reclining body. The shadow of an animal drinking in shadows between the parted legs of the young woman. Water : shadow; light: silence. Light: water; shadow: silence. Silence: water; light: shadow.

  8

  Stains. Thickets. Surrounded, held prisoner amid the lines, the nooses, the loops of the liane. The eye lost in the profusion of paths that cross in all directions amid trees and foliage. Thickets: threads that knot together, tangled skeins of enigmas. Greenish-black coppices, brambles the color of fire or honey, quivering masses: the vegetation takes on an unreal, almost incorporeal appearance, as though it were a mere configuration of shadows and lights on a wall. But it is impenetrable. Sitting astride the towering wall, he contemplates the dense grove, scratches his bald rump, and says to himself: delight to the eye, defeat of reason. The sun burns the tips of the giant Burmese bamboos, so amazingly tall and slender: their shoots reach to a height of 130 feet and they measure scarcely ten inches in diameter. He moves his head, extremely slowly, from left to right, thus taking in the entire panorama before him, from the giant bamboos to the undergrowth of poisonous trees. As his eyes survey the dense mass, there are inscribed on his mind, with the same swiftness and accuracy as when letters of the alphabet typed on a machine by skilled hands are imprinted on a sheet of paper, the name and characteristics of each tree and each plant: the betel palm of the Philippines, whose fruit, the betel nut, perfumes the breath and turns saliva red; the doum palm and the nibung, the one a native of the Sudan and the other of Java, both of them supple trees that bend and sway gracefully; the kitul palm, from which the alcoholic beverage known as “toddy” is extracted; the talipot palm: its trunk is a hundred feet tall and four feet wide, and on reaching the age of forty it develops a creamy inflorescence that measures some twenty feet across, whereupon it dies; the guaco, celebrated for its curative powers under the name lignum vitae; the gutta-percha tree, slender and modest; the wild banana, Musa Paradisiaca, and the traveler’s tree, a vegetable fountain: it stores in the veins of its huge leaves quarts and quarts of potable water that thirsty travelers who have lost their way drink eagerly; the upa-tree: its bark contains ipoh, a poison that causes swelling and fever, sets the blood on fire, and kills; the Queensland shrub, covered with flowers resembling sea anemones, plants that produce dizziness and delirium; the tribes and confederations of hibiscuses and mallows; the rubber tree, confidant of the Olmecs, dripping with sap in the steamy shadows of the forest; the flame-colored mahogany; the okari nut tree, delight of the Papuan; the Ceylon jack, the fleshy brother of the breadfruit tree, whose fruits weigh more than fifty pounds; a tree well known in Sierra Leone: the poisonous sanny; the ram-butan of Malaya: its leaves, soft to the touch, hide fruits bristling with spines; the sausage tree; the daluk: its milky sap causes blindness; the bunya-bunya araucaria (better known, he thought with a smile, as the monkey-puzzle tree) and the South American araucaria, a bottle-green cone two hundred feet high; the magnolia of Hindustan, the champak mentioned by Vlmïki on describing the visit of Hanumn to the grove of Ashoka, on the grounds of the palace of Rv-ana, in Lanka; the sandalwood tree and the false sandalwood tree; the datura plant, the source of the drug of ascetics; the gum tree, in perpetual tumescence and de-tumescence; the kimuska, that the English call “flame of the forest,” a passionate mass of foliage ranging from bright orange to fiery red, rather refreshing in the dryness of the endless summers; the ceiba and the ceibo, drowsy, indifferent witnesses of the spectacle of Palenque and Angkor; the mamey: its fruit a live coal inside a rugby ball; the pepper plant and its first cousin the terebinth; the Brazilian ironwood tree and the giant orchid of Malaya; the nam-nam and the almond trees of Java, that are not almond trees but huge carved rocks; certain sinister Latin American trees—which I shall not name in order to punish them—with fruits resembling human heads that give off a fetid odor: the vegetable world repeats the horror of the shocking history of that continent; the hora, that produces fruits so light that the breezes transport them; the inflexible breakaxe tree; the industrious bignonia of Brazil: it builds suspension bridges between one tree and another, thanks to the hooks with which it climbs and the tendrils with which it anchors itself; the snake wood, another acrobat climber, also skilled in the use of hooks, with markings like a snake skin; the oxypetal coiled up amid blue roots; the balsam fig with its strangling aeria
l roots; the double coconut palm, thus called because it is bisexual (and also known as the sea coconut since its bilobate or trilobate fruits, enveloped in a huge husk and mindful of huge genital organs, are found floating in the Indian Ocean) : the male inflorescence is shaped like a phallus, measures three feet in length, and smells like a rat, whereas the female inflorescence is round, and when artificially pol-lenized, takes ten years to produce fruit; the goda ka-duro of Oceania: its flat gray seeds contain the alkaloid of strychnine; the inkbush, the rain tree; the ombu: a lovely shadow; the baobab; rosewood and the Pernam-buco ironwood; ebony; the bo tree, the sacred fig beneath whose shade the Buddha vanquished Mara, a plant that strangles; the aromatic karunbu neti of the Moluccas, and the amomum that produces the spice known as grains of paradise; the bulu and the twining dada kehel…. The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden—it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows—I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumn smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the Mahantaka describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumn leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket.

  Hanumn, Rajasthan, 18th century.

  Hanumn, Rajasthan, 18th century: detail.

  9

  Phrases that are liane that are damp stains that are shadows projected by the fire in a room not described that are the dark mass of the grove of beeches and aspens lashed by the wind some three hundred yards from my window that are demonstrations of light and shadow based on a vegetable reality at the hour of sunset whereby time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:

  they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;

  they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:

  what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;

  no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:

  a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;

  names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;

  sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?

  if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;

  and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;

  no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;

  and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:

  the tree disappears between my lips as I say it and as it vanishes it appears: look at it, a whirlwind of leaves and roots and branches and a trunk amid the violent gusts of wind, a waterspout of green bronze sonorous leafy reality here on the page:

  look at it over there, on the slight prominence of that stretch of ground: opaque amid the opaque mass of the trees, look at it, unreal in its brute mute reality, look at it unsaid:

  the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality;

  and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness:

  the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it:

  the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities;

  Hanumn emerging out of Surasa’s mouth. Lucknow, 20th century. Surasa: she-devil.

  the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted:

  between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but

  who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?

  at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing wit
h a certain haste in order to reach the end (which end? what end?) without having to rise from my chair to turn on the electric light, still taking advantage of the setting sun that is slipping down between the branches and the leaves of the mass of beeches planted on a slight prominence,

  (it might be said that this little mound is the pubis of this stretch of ground, so feminine is the landscape between the domes of the little astronomical observatories and the gentle undulations of the playing field of the college,

  it might be said that it is the pubis of Splendor that grows brighter and then darker, a double butterfly, as the flames on the hearth flicker, as the tide of the night ebbs and flows),

  at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing, invent the reality of the person who is writing this long phrase; they are not inventing me, however, but a figure of speech: the writer, a reality that does not coincide with my own reality, if it is the case that I have any reality that I can call my own;

  no, no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we;

  our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours,