The Monkey Grammarian (16 page)

Writing is a search for the meaning that writing itself violently expels. At the end of the search meaning evaporates and reveals to us a reality that literally is meaningless. What remains? The twofold movement of writing: a journey in the direction of meaning, a dissipation of meaning. An allegory of mortality: these phrases that I write, this path that I invent as I endeavor to describe the path that leads to Galta, become blurred, dissolve as I write: I never reach the end, and I never shall. There is no end, everything has been a perpetual beginning all over again. What I am saying is a continual saying of what I am about to say and never manage to say: I always say something else. A saying of something that the moment it is said evaporates, a saying that never says what I want to say. As I write, I journey toward meaning: as I read what I write, I blot it out, I dissolve the path. Each attempt I make ends up the same way: the dissolution of the text in the reading of it, the expulsion of the meaning through writing. The search for meaning culminates in the appearance of a reality that lies beyond the meaning and that disperses it, destroys it. We proceed from a search for meaning to its destruction in order that a reality may appear, a reality which in turn disappears. Reality and its radiance, reality and its opacity: the vision that poetic writing offers us is that of its dissolution. Poetry is empty, like the clearing in the forest in Dadd’s painting: it is nothing but the
place
of the apparition which is, at the same time, that of its disappearance.
Rien n’aura lieu que le lieu
.

On the square-ruled wall of the terrace the damp stains and the traces of red, black, and blue paint create imaginary atlases. It is six in the afternoon. A pact between light and shadow: a universal pause. I breathe deeply: I am in the center of a time that is fully rounded, as full of itself as a drop of sunlight. I feel that ever since I was born, and even before, a before that has no when, I have been able to see the banyan tree at the corner of the esplanade growing taller and taller (a fraction of an inch each year), multiplying its aerial roots, interweaving them, descending to the earth by way of them, anchoring itself, taking root, rising again, descending again, and thus, for centuries, growing larger in a tangle of roots and branches. The banyan tree is a spider that has been spinning its interminable web for a thousand years. Discovering this causes me to feel an inhuman joy: I am rooted in this hour as the banyan tree is rooted in time immemorial. Nonetheless time does not stop: for more than two hours now Splendor and I have been walking through the great arch of the Gateway, crossing the deserted courtyard, and climbing the stairway that leads to this terrace. Time goes by yet does not go by. This hour of six in the afternoon has been, from the beginning, the same six o’clock in the afternoon, and yet minutes follow upon minutes with the same regularity as always. This hour of six in the afternoon little by little draws to a close, but each moment is transparent, and by the very fact of this transparency dissolves or becomes motionless, ceasing to flow. Six o’clock in the afternoon turns into a transparent immobility that has no depth and no reverse side: there is nothing behind it.

The notion that the very heart of time is a fixity that dissolves all images, all times, in a transparency with no depth or consistency, terrifies me. Because the present also becomes empty: it is a reflection suspended in another reflection. I search about for a reality that is less dizzying, a presence that will rescue me from this abysmal now, and I look at Splendor—but she is not looking at me: at this moment she is laughing at the gesticulations of a little monkey as it leaps from its mother’s shoulder to the balustrade, swings by its tail from one of the balusters, takes a leap, falls at our feet a few steps away from us, looks up at us in terror, leaps again and this time lands on the shoulder of its mother, who growls and bares her teeth at us. I look at Splendor and through her face and her laugh I am able to make my way to another moment of another time, and there on a Paris street corner, at the intersection of the rue du Bac and the rue de Montalembert, I hear the same laugh. And this laugh is superimposed on the laugh that I hear here, on this page, as I make my way inside six o’clock in the afternoon of a day that I am creating and that has stopped still on the terrace of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Galta.

Hanum
n flying over the mountains, Jaipur, 19th century.

The times and the places are interchangeable: the face that I am now looking at, the one that, without seeing me, laughs at the monkey and its panic, is the one that I am looking at in another city, at another moment—on this same page. Never is the same when, the same laugh, the same stains on the wall, the same light of the same six o’clock in the afternoon. Each when goes by, changes, mingles with other whens, disappears and reappears. This laughter that scatters itself about here like the pearls of a broken necklace is the same laugh as always and always another, the laugh heard on a Paris street corner, the laugh of an afternoon that is drawing to a close and blending with the laugh that silently, like a purely visual cascade, or rather an absolutely mental one—not the idea of a cascade but a cascade become idea—plunges down onto my forehead and forces me to close my eyes because of the mute violence of its whiteness. Laughter: cascade: foam: unheard whiteness. Where do I hear this laughter, where do I see it? Having lost my way amid all these times and places, have I lost my past, am I living in a continuous present? Although I haven’t moved, I feel that I am coming loose from myself: I am where I am and at the same time I am not where I am. The strangeness of being here, as though here were somewhere else; the strangeness of being in my body, of the fact that my body is my body and that I think what I think, hear what I hear. I am wandering far, far away from myself, by way of here, journeying along this path to Galta that I am creating as I write and that dissipates on being read. I am journeying by way of this here that is not outside and yet is not inside either; I am walking across the uneven, dusty surface of the terrace as though I were walking inside myself, but this inside of myself is outside: I see it, I see myself walking in it. “I” is an outside. I am looking at Splendor and she is not looking at me: she is looking at the little monkey. She too is coming loose from her past, she too is in her outside. She is not looking at me, she is laughing, and with a toss of her head, she makes her way inside her own laughter.

From the balustrade of the terrace I see the courtyard below. There is no one there, the light has stopped moving, the banyan tree has firmly planted itself in its immobility, Splendor is standing at my side laughing, the little monkey is terrified and runs to hide in its mother’s hairy arms, I breathe in this air as insubstantial as time. Transparency: in the end things are nothing but their visible properties. They are as we see them, they are what we see and I exist only because I see them. There is no other side, there is no bottom or crack or hole: everything is an adorable, impassible, abominable, impenetrable surface. I touch the present, I plunge my hand into the now, and it is as though I were plunging it into air, as though I were touching shadows, embracing reflections. A magic surface, at once insubstantial and impenetrable: all these realities are a fine-woven veil of presences that hide no secret. Exteriority, and nothing else: they say nothing, they keep nothing to themselves, they are simply there, before my eyes, beneath the not too harsh light of this autumn day. An indifferent state of existence, beyond beauty and ugliness, meaning and meaninglessness. The intestines spilling out of the belly of the dog whose body is rotting over there some fifty yards away from the banyan tree, the moist red beak of the vulture ripping it to pieces, the ridiculous movement of its wings sweeping the dust on the ground, what I think and feel on seeing this scene from the balustrade, amid Splendor’s laughter and the little monkey’s panic—these are distinct, unique, absolutely real realities, and yet they are also inconsistent, gratuitous, and in some way unreal. Realities that have no weight, no reason for being: the dog could be a pile of stones, the vulture a man or a horse, I myself a chunk of stone or another vulture, and the reality of this six o’clock in the afternoon would be no different. Or better put:
different
and
the same
are synonyms in the impartial light of this moment. Everything is the same and it is all the same whether I am who I am or someone different from who I am. On the path to Galta that always begins over and over again, imperceptibly and without my consciously willing it, as I kept walking along it and kept retracing my steps, again and again, this now of the terrace has been gradually constructed: I am riveted to the spot here, like the banyan tree trapped by its populace of intertwining aerial roots, but I might be there, in another now—that would be the same now. Each time is different; each place is different and all of them are the same place, they are all the same. Everything is now.

The path is writing and writing is a body and a body is bodies (the grove of trees). Just as meaning appears beyond writing, as though it were the destination, the end of the road (an end that ceases to be an end the moment we arrive there, a meaning that vanishes the moment we state it), so the body first appears to our eye as a perfect totality, and yet it too proves to be intangible: the body is always somewhere beyond the body. On touching it, it divides itself (like a text) into portions that are momentary sensations: a sensation that is a perception of a thigh, an earlobe, a nipple, a fingernail, a warm patch of groin, the hollow in the throat like the beginning of a twilight. The body that we embrace is a river of metamorphoses, a continual division, a flowing of visions, a quartered body whose pieces scatter, disperse, come back together again with the intensity of a flash oflightning hurtling toward a white black white fixity. A fixity that is destroyed in another black white black flash; the body is the place marking the disappearance of the body. Reconciliation with the body culminates in the annihilation of the body (the meaning). Every body is a language that vanishes at the moment of absolute plenitude; on reaching the state of incandescence, every language reveals itself to be an unintelligible body. The word is a disincarnation of the world in search of its meaning; and an incarnation: a destruction of meaning, a return to the body. Poetry is corporeal: the reverse of names.