The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz Page A

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.
     

26
     
    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.
     

27
     
    a rose and green, yellow and purple undulation,