The Monkey Grammarian (6 page)

n leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket.

Hanum
n, Rajasthan, 18th century.

Hanum
n, Rajasthan, 18th century: detail.

Phrases that are liane that are damp stains that are shadows projected by the fire in a room not described that are the dark mass of the grove of beeches and aspens lashed by the wind some three hundred yards from my window that are demonstrations of light and shadow based on a vegetable reality at the hour of sunset whereby time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:

they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;

they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:

what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;

no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:

a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;

names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;

sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?

if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;

and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;

no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;

and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:

the tree disappears between my lips as I say it and as it vanishes it appears: look at it, a whirlwind of leaves and roots and branches and a trunk amid the violent gusts of wind, a waterspout of green bronze sonorous leafy reality here on the page:

look at it over there, on the slight prominence of that stretch of ground: opaque amid the opaque mass of the trees, look at it, unreal in its brute mute reality, look at it unsaid:

the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality;

and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness:

the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it:

the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities;

Hanum
n emerging out of Surasa’s mouth. Lucknow, 20th century. Surasa: she-devil.

the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted:

between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but

who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?

at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing with a certain haste in order to reach the end (which end? what end?) without having to rise from my chair to turn on the electric light, still taking advantage of the setting sun that is slipping down between the branches and the leaves of the mass of beeches planted on a slight prominence,

(it might be said that this little mound is the pubis of this stretch of ground, so feminine is the landscape between the domes of the little astronomical observatories and the gentle undulations of the playing field of the college,

it might be said that it is the pubis of Splendor that grows brighter and then darker, a double butterfly, as the flames on the hearth flicker, as the tide of the night ebbs and flows),