by Octavio Paz
it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses?
are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write?
we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction,
we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things,
no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write,
inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?
the answer is reversible, the phrases at the end are the reverse of the phrases at the beginning and both are the same phrases
that are liane that are damp spots on an imaginary wall of a ruined house in Galta that are the shadows projected by the fire on a hearth lighted by two lovers that are the catalogue of a tropical botanical garden that are an allegory in a chapter in an epic poem that are the agitated mass of the grove of beeches on the other side of my window as the wind etcetera lessons etcetera destroyed etcetera time itself etcetera,
the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum:
the only thing that remains of the felt, imagined, thought, perceived, and vanished realities, the only reality that these evaporated realities leave behind, a reality that, even though it is merely a combination of signs, is no less real than they are:
the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end,
the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence,
yes, it is as though all these presences woven by the configurations of the signs were seeking its abolition in order that there might appear those inaccessible trees, immersed in themselves, not said, that are beyond the end of this phrase,
on the other side, there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it
10
He saw many women lying stretched out on mats, in diverse costumes and finery, their hair adorned with flowers; they had fallen asleep under the influence of the wine, after having spent half the night disporting themselves. And the stillness of that great company, now that their tinkling ornaments had fallen silent, was that of a vast nocturnal pool, covered with lotuses, with no sound now of swans or of bees…. The noble monkey said to himself: Here there have come together planets which, their store of merits having been exhausted, are fallen from the firmament. It was true: the women glowed like incandescent fallen meteors. Some had collapsed in a heap, fast asleep, in the middle of their dances and were lying as though struck by a bolt oflightning, their hair and headdresses in disarray, amid their scattered garments; others had flung their garlands to the floor, and with the strings of their necklaces broken, their belt buckles unfastened, their skirts thrown back, looked like unsaddled mares; still others, having lost their bracelets and earrings, with their tunics torn to shreds and trampled underfoot, had the appearance of climbing vines trod upon by wild elephants. Here and there lunar reflections cast by scattered pearls crisscrossed between sleeping swans of breasts. Those women were rivers: their thighs the shores; the undulations of their pubes and bellies ripples of water in the breeze; their haunches and breasts the hills and mounds that the current flows round and girdles; their faces the lotuses; their desires the crocodiles; their sinuous bodies the bed of the stream. On ankles and wrists, forearms and shoulders, round the navel or at the tips of their breasts, there could be seen graceful scratches and pleasing purple bruises that resembled jewels…. Some of these girls savored the lips and tongues of their female companions, who returned their kisses as though they were those of their master; their senses awakened though their spirits slumbered, they made love to each other, or lying by themselves, they clung with arms bedecked with jewels to a heap of their own garments, or beneath the dominion of wine and desire, some reclined against the belly of a companion or between her thighs, and others rested their head on the shoulder of a neighbor or hid their face between her breasts, and thus they coupled together, each with another, like the branches of a single tree. These slender women intertwined like flowering vines at the season when they cover the trunks of the trees and open their corollas to the March winds. These women twined together and wound their arms and legs about each other till they formed an intricate sylvan grove. (Sundara Kund, IX)
11
The transfiguration of their games and embraces into a meaningless ceremony filled them at once with fear and pleasure. On the one hand, the spectacle fascinated them and even excited their lust: that pair of giant lovers were themselves; on the other hand, the feeling of excitement that overcame them on seeing themselves as images of fire was allied with a feeling of anxiety, summed up in a question more apprehensive than incredulous: were they indeed themselves? On seeing those insubstantial forms silently appear and disappear, circle round each other, fuse and split apart, grope at each other and tear each other into bits that vanished and a moment later reappeared in order to form another chimerical body, it seemed to them that they were witnessing not the projection of their own actions and movements but a fantastic spectacle with no relation whatsoever to the reality that they were living at that moment. The ambiguous staging of an endless procession, made up of a succession of incoherent scenes of adoration and profanation, the climax of which was a sacrifice followed by the resurrection of the victim: yet another avid apparition that opened another scene different from the one that had just taken place, but possessed of the same insane logic. The wall showed them the metamorphosis of the transports of their bodies into a barbarous, enigmatic, scarcely human fable. Their actions were transformed into a dance of specters, this world reborn in the other world: reborn and disfigured: a cortege of bloodless, lifeless hallucinations.
The bodies that are stripped naked beneath the gaze of the other and their own, the caresses that knot them together and unknot them, the net of sensations that traps them and unites them as it disunites them from the world, the momentary bodies that two bodies form in their eagerness to be a single body—all this was transformed into a weft of symbols and hieroglyphs. They were unable to read them: immersed in the passionate reality of their bodies, they perceived only fragments of that other passion depicted on the wall. But even if they had paid close attention to the procession of silhouettes as it passed by, they would not have been able to interpret it. Despite having scarcely seen the cortege of shadows, they nonetheless knew that each one of their gestures and positions was inscribed on the wall, transfigured into a tangled jumble of scorpions or birds, hands or fish, discs or cones, transitory, shifting signs. Each movement engendered an enigmatic form, and each form intertwined with another and yet another. Coils of enigmas which in turn intertwined with others and coupled like the branches of a grove of trees or the tendrils of a creeping vine. In the flickering light of the fire the outlines of the shadows followed one upon the other, linked together in a chain. And just as they did not know the meaning of that theater of signs and yet were not unaware of its dark, passionate theme, so they knew that even though it was composed of mere shadows, the bower formed by its interweaving bodies was impenetrable.
/> Black clusters hanging from a ragged rock that is indistinct yet powerfully masculine, suddenly cracking asunder like an idol split apart with an axe: bifurcations, ramifications, disintegrations, coagulations, dismemberments, fusions. An inexhaustible flow of shadows and forms in which the same elements kept appearing— their bodies, their garments, the few objects and pieces of furniture in the room—combined each time in a different way, although, as in a poem, there were repetitions, rhymes, analogies, figures that appeared and reappeared with more or less the regularity of a surging sea: beds of lava, flying scissors, violins dangling from a noose, vessels full of seething letters of the alphabet, eruptions of triangles, pitched battles between rectangles and hexagons, thousands of dead victims of the London plague transmuted into clouds on which the Virgin ascends changed into the thousands of naked bodies locked in embrace of one of the colossal orgies of Harmony dreamed of by Fourier turned into the towering flames that devour the corpse of Sardanapalus, seagoing mountains, civilizations drowned in a drop of theological ink, screw propellers planted on the Mount of Calvary, conflagrations, conflagrations, the wind perpetually amid the flames, the wind that stirs up the ashes and scatters them.
Splendor leans back on the mat and with her two hands presses her breasts together but in such a way as to leave, down below, a narrow opening into which her companion, obeying the young woman’s gesture of invitation, introduces his rod. The man is kneeling and Splendor’s body lies outstretched beneath the arch of his legs, her torso half erect in order to facilitate her partner’s thrusts. After a few vigorous assaults the rod traverses the channel formed by the young woman’s breasts and reappears in the shadowy zone of her throat, very close to her mouth. She endeavors in vain to caress the head of the member with her tongue: its position prevents her from doing so. With a gesture that is swift but not violent, the man pushes upward and forward, making her breasts bound apart, and his rod emerges from between them like a swimmer returning to the surface, in reach now of Splendor’s lips. She wets it with her tongue, draws it toward her, and guides it into the red grotto. The man’s balls swell. A great splash. Concentric circles cover the surface of the pool. The clapper of the submerged bell tolls solemnly.
Hanumn devouring the Sun and being followed by Indra. Al-war, Rajasthan.
On the wall the body of the man is a bridge suspended over a motionless river: Splendor’s body. As the crackling of the fire on the hearth diminishes, the shadow of the man kneeling above the young woman increases in size until it covers the entire wall. The conjoining of the shadows precipitates the discharge. Sudden whiteness. An endless fall in a pitch-black cave. Afterwards he discovers himself lying beside her, in a half-shadow on the shore of the world: farther beyond are the other worlds, that of the objects and the pieces of furniture in the room and the other world of the wall, barely illuminated by the faint glow of the dying embers. After a time the man rises to his feet and stirs up the fire. His shadow is enormous and flutters all about the room. He returns to Splendor’s side and watches the reflections of the fire glide over her body. Garments of light, garments of water: her nakedness is more naked. He can now see her and grasp the whole of her. Before he had glimpsed only bits and pieces of her: a thigh, an elbow, the palm of a hand, a foot, a knee, an ear nestling in a lock of damp hair, an eye between eyelashes, the softness of backs of knees and insides of thighs reaching up as far as the dark zone rough to the touch, the wet black thicket between his fingers, the tongue between the teeth and the lips, a body more felt than seen, a body made of pieces of a body, regions of wetness or dryness, open or bosky areas, mounds or clefts, never the body, only its parts, each part a momentary totality in turn immediately split apart, a body segmented, quartered, carved up, chunks of ear ankle groin neck breast fingernail, each piece a sign of the body of bodies, each part whole and entire, each sign an image that appears and burns until it consumes itself, each image a chain of vibrations, each vibration the perception of a sensation that dies away, millions of bodies in each vibration, millions of universes in each body, a rain of universes on the body of Splendor which is not a body but the river of signs of her body, a current of vibrations of sensations of perceptions of images of sensations of vibrations, a fall from whiteness to blackness, blackness to whiteness, whiteness to whiteness, black waves in the pink tunnel, a white fall in the black cleft, never the body but instead bodies that divide, excision and proliferation and dissipation, plethora and abolition, parts that split into parts, signs of the totality that endlessly divides, a chain of perceptions of sensations of the total body that fades away to nothingness.
Almost timidly he caresses the body of Splendor with the palm of his hand, from the hollow of the throat to the feet. Splendor returns the caress with the same sense of astonishment and recognition: her eyes and hands also discover, on contemplating it and touching it, a body that before this moment she had glimpsed and felt only as a disconnected series of momentary visions and sensations, a configuration of perceptions destroyed almost the instant it took shape. A body that had disappeared in her body and that at the very instant of that disappearance had caused her own to disappear: a current of vibrations that are dissipated in the perception of their own dissipation, a perception which is itself a dispersion of all perception but which for that very reason, because it is the perception of disappearance at the very moment it disappears, goes back upstream against the current, and following the path of dissolutions, recreates forms and universes until it again manifests itself in a body: this body of a man that her eyes gaze upon.
On the wall, Splendor is an undulation, the reclining form of sleeping hills and valleys. Activated by the fire whose flames leap up again and agitate the shadows, this mass of repose and sleep begins to stir again. The man speaks, accompanying his words with nods and gestures. On being reflected on the wall, these movements create a pantomime, a feast and a ritual in which a victim is quartered and the parts of the body scattered in a space that continually changes form and direction, like the stanzas of a poem that a voice unfolds on the moving page of the air. The flames leap higher and the wall becomes violently agitated, like a grove of trees lashed by the wind. Splendor’s body is racked, torn apart, divided into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten parts—until it finally vanishes altogether. The room is inundated with light. The man rises to his feet and paces back and forth, hunching over slightly and seemingly talking to himself. His stooping shadow appears to be searching about on the surface of the wall—smooth, flickering, and completely blank: empty water—for the remains of the woman who has disappeared.
A sdhu of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).
12
On the wall of the terrace the heroic feats of Hanumn in Lanka are now only a tempest of lines and strokes that intermingle with the purplish damp stains in a confused jumble. A few yards farther on, the stretch of wall ends in a pile of debris. Through the wide breach the surrounding countryside of Galta can be seen: straight ahead, bare forbidding hills that little by little fade away into a parched, yellowish expanse of flat ground, a desolate river valley subjected to the rule of a harsh, slashing light: to the left ravines and rolling hills, and on the slopes or at the tops piles of ruins, some inhabited by monkeys and others by families of pariahs, almost all of them members of the Bal-mik caste (they sweep and wash floors, collect refuse, cart away offal; they are specialists in dust, debris, and excrement, but here, installed amid the ruins and the rubble of the abandoned mansions, they also till the soil on neighboring farms and in the afternoon they gather together in the courtyards and on the terraces to share a hookah, talk together, and tell each other stories); to the right, the twists and turns of the path that leads to the sanctuary at the top of the mountain. A bristling, ocher-colored terrain, sparse thorny vegetation, and scattered here and there, great white boulders polished by the wind. In the bends of the path, standing alone or in groups, powerful trees: pipáis with hanging aerial roots, sinewy, supple ar
ms with which for centuries they have strangled other trees, cracked boulders, and demolished walls and buildings; eucalyptuses with striped trunks and aromatic leaves; neem trees with corrugated, mineral-hard bark—in their fissures and forks, hidden by the acrid green of the leaves, there are colonies of tiny squirrels with huge bushy tails, hermit bats, flocks of crows. Imperturbable skies, indifferent and empty, except for the figures delineated by birds: circles and spirals of eaglets and vultures, ink spots of crows and blackbirds, green zigzag explosions of parakeets.
The muffled sound of rocks falling into a torrent: the cloud of dust raised by a flock of little black and tan goats led by two young shepherd boys, one of them playing a tune on a mouth organ and the other humming the words. The cool sound of the footsteps, the voices, and the laughter of a band of women descending from the sanctuary, loaded down with children as though they were fruit-bearing trees, barefoot and perspiring, their arms and ankles decked with many jangling bracelets—the dusty, tumultuous throng of women and the brilliant colors of their garments, violent reds and yellows, their coltlike gait, the tinkle of their laughter, the immensity of their eyes. Farther up, some fifty yards beyond the round fortified tower in ruins that once marked the outer limit of the city, invisible from here (one must branch off to the left and go around a huge rock that stands in the way), the terrain becomes more broken: there is a barrier of boulders and at the foot of them a pool surrounded by heterogeneous buildings. Here the pilgrims rest after performing their ablutions. The spot is also a shelter for wandering ascetics. Among the rocks grow two much-venerated pipal trees. The water of the cascade is green, and the roar it makes as it rushes down makes me think of that of elephants at their bathtime. It is six o’clock; at this hour in the late afternoon the sdhu, the holy man who lives in some nearby ruins, leaves his retreat and, naked from head to foot, heads for the sacred pool. For years, even in the coldest days of December and January, he has performed his ritual ablutions as dawn breaks and as twilight falls. Although he is over sixty years old, he has the body of a young man and his gaze is clear. After his bath in the late afternoon, he recites his prayers, eats the meal that the devout bring to him, drinks a cup of tea and inhales a few puffs of hashish from his pipe or takes a little bhang in a cup of milk—not in order to stimulate his imagination, he says, but in order to calm it. He is searching for equanimity, the point where the opposition between inner and outer vision, between what we see and what we imagine, ceases. I should like to speak with the sadhu, but he does not understand my language and I do not speak his. Hence I limit myself to sharing his tea, his bhang, and his tranquillity from time to time. What does he think of me, I wonder? Perhaps he is now asking himself the same question, if perchance he thinks of me at all.
