The Monkey Grammarian Read Free Page A

group of lively children dressed in rags. They are watching over a dozen skinny cows resigned to the martyrdom inflicted on them by the flies and cattle ticks. There are also two kid goats and a multitude of crows. The first band of monkeys makes its appearance. The children throw stones at them. Green and gleaming beneath the steady light, two huge pools of pestilential water. Within a few weeks the water will have evaporated and the pools will be beds of fine dust on which the children and the wind will toss and tumble.
     

4
     
    Fixity is always momentary. But how can it
always
be so? If it were, it would not be momentary—or would not be fixity. What did I mean by that phrase? I probably had in mind the opposition between motion and motionlessness, an opposition that the adverb
always
designates as continual and universal: it embraces all of time and applies to every circumstance. My phrase tends to dissolve this opposition and hence represents a sly violation of the principle of identity. I say “sly” because I chose the word
momentary
as an adjectival qualifier of
fixity
in order to tone down the violence of the contrast between movement and motionlessness. A little rhetorical trick intended to give an air of plausibility to my violation of the rules of logic. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
We
ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and from corrupting us. (The trouble is that a-diet-of-bread-and-water is a figurative expression, as is the-corruption-of-language-and-its-contagions.) It is necessary to unweave (another metaphor) even the simplest phrases in order to determine what it is that they contain (more figurative expressions) and what they are made of and how (what is language made of? and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?). Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. (Two metaphors.) Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of metaphor—that which is on the other side of language? (Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.) Perhaps reality too is a metaphor (of what and/or of whom?). Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things. With whom and of what do word-things speak? (This page is a sack of word-things.) It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself. (“Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”) * Certain realities cannot be expressed, but, and here I quote from memory, “they are what is manifested in language without language stating it.” They are what language does not say and hence says. (What is embodied in language is not silence, which by definition says nothing, nor is it what silence would say if it were to speak. If it were to cease to be silence, and instead be …) What is said in language without language saying it is saying (that is to say?): what is really said (that which makes its appearance between one phrase and another, in that crack that is neither silence nor a voice) is what language leaves unsaid (fixity is always momentary).
     

     
    Hanumn, Western India, 17th century
     
    To return to my initial observation: by means of a succession of patient analyses and in a direction that is the opposite of that of the normal activity of a speaker, whose function is to produce and construct phrases, whereas here it is a question of taking them apart and uncoupling them (de-constructing them, so to speak) we ought to make our way back upstream against the current, retrace our path, and proceeding from one figurative expression to another, arrive back at the root, the original,