The Monkey Grammarian (15 page)

Opposite:
The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke, oil by Richard Dadd, 1855-1864 (Tate Gallery, London, photograph courtesy the gallery).

Detail of The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke.

We are able to see the faces of all the other figures. Some of them peek out of cracks and crevices in the ground and others form a mesmerized circle around the fateful hazelnut. Each of them is rooted to the spot as though suddenly bewitched and all of them create between them a space that is totally empty yet magnetized, the fascination of which is immediately felt by anyone contemplating the painting. I said
felt
when I should have said anticipated, for this space is a place where an apparition is imminent. And for that very reason it is, at one and the same time, absolutely empty and magnetized: nothing is
happening
except anticipation. The figures are rooted to the spot, and both literally and figuratively, they are plants and stones. Anticipation has immobilized them—the anticipation that does away with time but not anxiety. The anticipation is
eternal:
it abolishes time; the anticipation is
momentary
, an awaiting of what is imminent, what is about to happen from one moment to the next: it speeds up time. Fated to await the masterstroke of the woodcutter, the fairies gaze endlessly at a clearing in the forest that is nothing more than the focal point of their gaze and in which nothing whatsoever is happening. Dadd has painted the vision of the act of vision, the look that looks at a space in which the object looked at has been annihilated. The axe which, when it falls, will break the spell that paralyzes them, will never fall. It is an event that is always about to happen and at the same time will never happen. Between
never
and
always
there lies in wait anxiety, with its thousand feet and its single eye.

In the rough and trackless stretches of the way to Galta the
Monkey Grammarian
appears and disappears: the monogram of the Simian lost amid his similes.

No painting can tell a story because nothing happens in it. Painting confronts us with fixed, unchangeable, motionless realities. In no canvas, not even excepting those that have as their theme real or supernatural happenings and those that give us the impression or the sensation of movement, does anything
happen
. In paintings things simply
are;
they do not
happen
. To speak and to write, to tell stories and to think, is to experience time elapsing, to go from one place to another: to advance. A painting has spatial limits, yet it has neither a beginning nor an end; a text is a succession that begins at one point and ends at another. To write and to speak are to trace a path: to create, to remember, to imagine a trajectory, to go toward…. Painting offers us a vision, literature invites us to seek one and therefore traces an imaginary path toward it. Painting constructs presences, literature emits meanings and then attempts to catch up with them. Meaning is what words emit, what is beyond them, what escapes from between the meshes of the net of words and what they seek to retain or to trap. Meaning is not in the text but outside it. These words that I am writing are setting forth in search of their meaning, and that is the only meaning they have.

The palace of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

Hanum
n: a monkey/a
gramma
of language, of its dynamism and its endless production of phonetic and semantic creations. An ideogram of the poet, the master/servant of universal metamorphosis: an imitative simian, an artist of repetitions, he is the Aristotelian animal that copies from nature but at the same time he is the semantic seed, the bomb-seed that is buried in the verbal subsoil and that will never turn into the plant that its sower anticipates, but into another, one forever different. The sexual fruits and the carnivorous flowers of otherness sprout from the single stem of identity.

Is it vision that lies at the end of the road? The neighbors’ patio with its little dark wooden table and its rusty garbage can, the grove of beech trees on a prominence of the playing field of Churchill College, the spot with the pools of stagnant water and the banyan trees a hundred yards or so from what was once the entrance to Galta, are visions of reality irreducible to language. Each one of these realities is unique and to truly express it we would require a language composed solely of proper and unrepeatable names, a language that would not be a language: the double of the world, that would be neither a translation of it nor a symbol of it. Thus seeing these realities, truly seeing them, is the same as going mad: losing all names, entering the realm of the incommensurable. Or rather: returning to it, to the world before language exists. Hence the path of poetic writing leads to the abolition of writing: at the end of it we are confronted with an inexpressible reality. The reality that poetry reveals and that appears behind language—the reality visible only through the destruction of language that the poetic act represents—is literally intolerable and maddening. At the same time, without the vision of this reality man is not man, and language is not language. Poetry gives us sustenance and destroys us, it gives us speech and dooms us to silence. It is the necessarily momentary perception (which is all that we can bear) of the incommensurable world which we one day abandon and to which we return when we die. Language sinks its roots into this world but transforms its juices and reactions into signs and symbols. Language is the consequence (or the cause) of our exile from the universe, signifying the distance between things and ourselves. At the same time it is our recourse against this distance. If our exile were to come to an end, language would come to an end: language, the measure of all things,
ratio
. Poetry is number, proportion, measure: language—except that it is a language that has turned in upon itself, that devours itself and destroys itself in order that there may appear what is other, what is without measure, the dizzying foundation, the unfathomable abyss out of which measure is born. The reverse of language.