The Monkey Grammarian (2 page)

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.

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

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 Hanum
n, painting, Jammu, 18th century.

Beneath the arch of the beeches the light has deepened, 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.

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.