The Monkey Grammarian (14 page)
Hanum
n, drawing on paper, Rajasthan, 19th century. (J. C. Ciancimino Collection.)
Things rest upon themselves, their foundation is their own reality, and they are unjustifiable. Hence they offer themselves to our sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell—not to our powers of thought. Not to think; to see, rather, to make of language a transparency. I see, I hear the footsteps of the light in the patio: little by little it withdraws from the wall opposite, projects itself onto the one on the left and covers it with a translucent mantle of barely perceptible vibrations: a transubstantiation of brick, a combustion of stone, an instant of incandescence of matter before it flings itself into its blindness—into its reality. I see, I hear, I touch the gradual petrification of language that no longer signifies but merely says: table, garbage can, without really saying them, as the table and the garbage can disappear in the patio that is now totally dark…. The night is my salvation. We cannot
see
without risking going mad: things reveal us, without revealing anything, simply by being there in front of us, the emptiness of names, the incommensurability of the world, its quintessential muteness. And as the night accumulates in my window, I feel that I am not from here, but from there, from that world that has just been obliterated and is now awaiting the resurrection of dawn. I come from there, all of us come from there, and we shall one day return there. The fascination held for us by this other face, the seduction of this nonhuman side of the universe: where there is no name, no measure. Each individual, each thing, each instant: a unique, incomparable, incommensurable reality. To return, then, to the world of proper names.
a rose and green, yellow and purple undulation, wave upon wave of women, a surf of tunics dotted with little bits of mirrors like stars or spangled with sequins, the continual flowering of the pinks and blues of turbans, these thin long-shanked men are flamingos and herons, the sweat runs down the basalt of the cheekbones in rivers, wetting their mustaches that curve dangerously upward like the horns of an attacking bull, making the metal hoops they are wearing in their ears gleam, men with grave eyes as deep as a well, the flutter of feminine fabrics, ribbons, gauzes, transparencies, secret folds that conceal gazes, the tinkle of bracelets and anklets, the swaying of hips, the bright flash of earrings and amulets made of bits of colored glass, clusters of old men and old women and children driven along by the violent gust of wind of the feast-day, devotees of Krishna in pale green skirts, with flowers in their hair and huge dark circles under their eyes, roaring with laughter, the main courtyard seethed with sounds, smells, tastes, a gigantic basket filled to overflowing with bright yellow, ocher, pomegranate, cinnamon, purple, black, wrinkled, transparent, speckled, smooth, glistening, spiny fruits, flaming fruits, cool refreshing suns, human sweat and animal sweat, incense, cinnamon, dung, clay and musk, jasmine and mango, sour milk, smells and tastes, tastes and colors, betel nut, clove, quicklime, coriander, rice powder, parsley, green and red peppers, honeysuckle, fetid pools, burned cow dung, limes, urine, sugarcane, spit bleeding from betel, slices of watermelon, pomegranates and their little cells: a monastery of blood; guavas, little caverns of perfume; peals of laughter, spilled whitenesses, ivory ceremonial rattles and exclamations, sighs of woe is me and shouts of get a move on, gongs and tambourines, the rustle of leaves of the women’s skirts, the pattering rain of the naked feet on the dust, laughter and laments: the roar of water flinging itself over a precipice, the bound and rebound of cries and songs, the mingled chatter of children and birds, childgabble and birdprattle, the prayers of the beggargrims, the driveling supplications of the pilgrim-mendicants, the glug-glug of dialects, the boiling of languages, the fermentation and effervescence of the verbal liquid, gurgling bubbles that rise from the bottom of the Babelic broth and burst on reaching the air, the multitude and its surging tides, its multisurges and its multitudes, its multivalanche, the multisun beating down on the sunitude, povertides beneath the sunalanche, the suntide in its solity, the sunflame on the poverlanche, the multitidal solaritude
A mendicant (sdhu) dressed up as Hanumn at a fair in Ram-tirth at Amritsar.
A quiet brightness projects itself on the wall across the way. Doubtless my neighbor has gone upstairs to his study, turned on the lamp next to the window, and by its light is peacefully reading
The Cambridge Evening News
. Down below, at the foot of the wall, the little pure-white daisies peep out of the darkness of the blades of grass and other tiny plants on the miniature meadow. Paths traveled by creatures smaller than an ant, castles built on a cubic millimeter of agate, snowdrifts the size of a grain of salt, continents drifting in a drop of water. The space beneath the leaves and between the infinitesimal plant stems of the meadow teems with a tremendous population continually passing over from the vegetable kingdom to the animal and from the animal to the mineral or the fantastic. That tiny branch that a breath of air faintly stirs was just a moment ago a ballerina with breasts like a top and a forehead pierced by a ray of light. A prisoner in the fortress created by the lunar reflections of the nail of the little finger of a small girl, a king has been dying in agony for a million seconds now. The microscope of fantasy reveals creatures different from those of science but no less real; although these are visions of ours, they are also the visions of a third party: someone is looking at them (is looking at himself?) through our eyes.
I am thinking of Richard Dadd, spending nine years, from 1855 to 1864, painting
The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke
in the madhouse at Broadmoor, England. A fairly small painting that is a minute study of just a few square inches of ground—grasses, daisies, berries, tendrils of vines, hazelnuts, leaves, seeds—in the depths of which there appears an entire population of minuscule creatures, some of them characters from fairy tales and others who are probably portraits of Dadd’s fellow inmates and of his jailers and keepers. The painting is a spectacle: the staging of the drama of the supernatural world in the theater of the natural world. A spectacle that contains another, a paralyzing and anxiety-filled one, the theme of which is expectation: the figures that people the painting are awaiting an event that is about to take place at any moment now. The center of the composition is an empty space, the point of intersection of all sorts of powers and the focal point on which all eyes are trained, a clearing in the forest of allusions and enigmas; in the center of this center there is a hazelnut on which the stone axe of the woodcutter is about to fall. Although we do not know what is hidden inside the hazelnut, we know that if the axe splits it in two, everything will change: life will commence to flow once more and the curse that has turned the figures in the painting to stone will be broken. The woodcutter is a robust young man, dressed in coarse cotton (or perhaps leather) work clothes and wearing on his head a cap from which there tumble locks of curly, reddish hair. With his feet firmly planted on the stony ground, he is grasping, with both hands, an upraised axe. Is this Dadd? How can we tell, since we can see the figure only from the back? Although it is impossible to be certain, I cannot resist the temptation to identify the figure of the woodcutter as being the painter. Dadd was shut up in the insane asylum because during an outing in the country, in a violent fit of madness, he hacked his father to death with an axe. The woodcutter is readying himself to repeat the act, but the consequences of this symbolic repetition will be precisely the contrary of those that resulted from the original act; in the first instance, incarceration and petrification; in the second, on splitting the hazelnut apart, the woodcutter’s axe breaks the spell. One disturbing detail: the axe that is about to put an end to the evil spell of petrification is a stone axe. Sympathetic magic.