The Monkey Grammarian (19 page)

The vision of poetry is that of the convergence of every point. The end of the road. This is the vision of Hanum
n 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. Hanum
n wrote on the rocky cliffs of a mountain the
Mahan
taka
, based on the same subject as the
R
m
yana;
on reading it, V
lmïki feared that it would overshadow his poem and begged Hanum
n to keep his drama a secret. The Monkey yielded to the poet’s entreaty, uprooted the mountain, and threw the rocks into the sea. V
lmïki’s pen and ink on the paper are a metaphor of the bolt oflightning and the rain with which Hanum
n 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.

All poems say the same thing and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others and each part is different. As I began these pages I decided to follow literally the metaphor of the title of the collection that they were intended for, the Paths of Creation, and to write, to describe a text that was really a path and that could be read and followed as such. As I wrote, the path to Galta grew blurred or else I lost my bearings and went astray in the trackless wilds. Again and again I was obliged to return to the starting point. Instead of advancing, the text circled about itself. Is destruction creation? I do not know, but I do know that creation is not destruction. At each turn the text opened out into another one, at once its translation and its transposition: a spiral of repetitions and reiterations that have dissolved into a negation of writing as a path. Today I realize that my text was not going anywhere—except to meet itself. I also perceive that repetitions are metaphors and that reiterations are analogies: a system of mirrors that little by little have revealed another text. In this text Hanum
n contemplates the garden of R
vana like a page of calligraphy like the harem of the same R
vana as described in the
R
m
yana
like this page on which the swaying motions of the beeches in the grove opposite my window accumulate on this page like the shadows of two lovers projected by the fire on a wall like the stains of monsoon rains on a ruined palace of the abandoned town of Galta like the rectangular space on which there surge the wave upon wave of a multitude contemplated from the crumbling balconies by hundreds of monkeys like an image of writing and reading like a metaphor of the path and the pilgrimage to the sanctuary like the final dissolution of the path and the convergence of all the texts in this paragraph like a metaphor of the embrace of bodies. Analogy: universal transparency: seeing in this that.