The Monkey Grammarian (13 page)

The grove of trees has turned black and become a gigantic pile of sacks of coal abandoned in the middle of the plot of ground by some unknown person for some unknown reason. A brute reality that says nothing except that it is (but what is it?) and that bears no resemblance to anything at all, not even to those nonexistent sacks of coal with which, ineptly, I have just now compared them. My excuse: the gigantic sacks of coal are as improbable as the grove of trees is unintelligible. Its unintelligibility—a word like a train always just on the point of going off the rails or losing one of its freight cars—stems from its excess of reality. It is a reality irreducible to other realities. The grove of trees is untranslatable: it is itself and only itself. It does not resemble other things or other groves of trees; neither does it resemble itself: each moment it is different. Perhaps I am exaggerating: after all, it is always the same grove of trees and its constant changes do not transform it into either a rock or a locomotive; moreover, it is not unique: the world is full of groves of trees like it. Am I exaggerating though? This grove does indeed resemble others, since otherwise it would not be called a grove of trees but would have another name; yet at the same time its reality is unique and would really deserve to have a proper name. Everyone deserves (we all deserve) a proper name and no one has one. No one has ever had one and no one ever will have one. This is our real eternal damnation, ours and the world’s. And this is what Christians mean when they speak of the state of “fallen nature.” Paradise is governed by an ontological grammar: things and beings are its names and each name is a proper name. The grove of trees is not unique since it has a name that is a common noun (it is a fallen nature), but at the same time it is unique since it has no name that really belongs to it (it is innocent nature). This contradiction defies Christianity and dashes its logic to bits.

The fact that the grove of trees has no name, not the fact that I see it from my window, as the afternoon draws to a close, a blur against the bold sky of early autumn, a stain that little by little creeps across this page and covers it with letters that simultaneously describe it and conceal it—the fact that it does not have a name and the fact that
it can never have one
, is what impels me to speak of it. The poet is not one who names things, but one who dissolves their names, one who discovers that things do not have a name and that the names that we call them are not theirs. The critique of paradise is called language: the abolition of proper names; the critique of language is called poetry: names grow thinner and thinner, to the point of transparency, of evaporation. In the first case, the world becomes language; in the second, language is transformed into a world. Thanks to the poet, the world is left without names. Then, for the space of an instant, we can see it precisely as it is—an
adorable azure
. And this vision overwhelms us, drives us mad; if things are but have no name:
on earth there is no measure whatsoever
.

Garuda, watercolor, Rajasthan, 19th century.

A moment ago, as it was burning in the solar brazier, the grove of trees did not appear to be an unintelligible reality but an emblem, a configuration of symbols. A cryptogram neither more nor less indecipherable than the enigmas that fire inscribes on the wall with the shadows of two lovers, the tangle of trees that Hanum
n saw in the garden of R
vana in Lanka and that V
lmlki turned into a fabric woven of names that we now read as a fragment of the
R
m
yana
, the tattoo of monsoons and suns on the wall of the terrace of that small palace in Galta or the painting that describes the bestial and lesbian couplings of the n
yik
as an exception to (or an analogy of?) universal love. The transmutation of forms and their changes and movements into motionless signs: writing; the dissipation of the signs: reading. Through writing we abolish things, we turn them into meaning; through reading, we abolish signs, we extract the meaning from them, and almost immediately thereafter, we dissipate it: the meaning returns to the primordial stuff. The grove does not have a name and these trees are not signs: they are trees. They are real and they are illegible. Although I refer to them when I say:
these trees are illegible
, they do not think of themselves as being referred to. They do not express anything, they do not signify: they are merely there, merely being. I can fell them, burn them, chop them up, turn them into masts, chairs, boats, houses, ashes; I can paint them, carve them, describe them, transform them into symbols of this or of that (even symbols of themselves), and make another grove of trees, real or imaginary, with them; I can classify them, analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or a mathematical equation and thus translate them, transform them into language—but
these
trees, the ones that I point to, the ones that are over there just beyond, always just beyond, my signs and my words, untouchable unreachable impenetrable, are what they are, and no name, no combinations of signs says them. They are unrepeatable: they will never again be what they are at this moment.

The grove is already part of the night. Its darkest, most nightlike part. So much so that I write, with no compunction, that it is a pile of coal, a sharp-pointed geometry of shadows surrounded by a world of vague ashes. It is still light in the neighbors’ patio. An impersonal, posthumous light, for which the word
fixity
is most appropriate, even though we know that it will last for only a few short minutes, because it is a light that seems to resist the ceaseless change of things and of itself. The final, impartial clarity of this moment of transparency in which things become presences and coincide with themselves. It is the end (a provisory, cyclical end) of metamorphoses. An apparition: on the square cement blocks of the patio, astonishingly itself, without ostentation and without diffidence, the dark wooden table on top of which (as I only now discover) there is visible, on one corner, an oval spot with tiger markings, thin reddish stripes. In the opposite corner, the garbage can with the lid half open burns with a quiet, almost solid glow. The light runs down the brick wall as though it were water. A burned water, a water-that-is-fire. The garbage can is overflowing with rubbish and it is an altar that is consuming itself in silent exaltation: the refuse is a sheaf of flames beneath the coppery gleam of the rusty cover. The transfiguration of refuse—no, not a transfiguration: a revelation of garbage as what it really is: garbage. I cannot say “glorious garbage” because the adjective would defile it. The little dark wooden table, the garbage can: presences. Without a name, without a history, without a meaning, without a practical use: just because.