The Monkey Grammarian Read Free Page B

primordial word for which all others are metaphors.
Momentary
is a metaphor—for what other word? By choosing it as the adjectival qualifier of fixity, I fell into that frequent confusion whereby spatial properties are attributed to time and temporal properties to space, as when we say “all year long,” “the march of time,” “the sweep of the minute hand,” and other expressions of this sort. If I substitute direct statement for the figurative expression, the result is nonsense or a paradox: fixity is (always)
movement
. Fixity in turn thus proves to be a metaphor. What did I mean by that word? Perhaps this:
that which does not change
. Hence the phrase might have been: that which does not change is (always) movement. This is not satisfactory either however: the opposition between nonchange and movement is not clear, and the ambiguity reappears. Since movement is a metaphor for
change
, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of
becoming
. When
becoming
is substituted for
change
, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by
permanence
, which is a metaphor for
fixity
, as
becoming
is for
coming-to-be
, which in turn is a metaphor for
time
in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
     
    I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is
always
momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it
never
is. This morning’s sunlight has fallen uninterruptedly on the motionless surface of the little table made of dark wood that is standing in one corner of the neighbors’ patio (it finally has a function in these pages: it is serving me as an example in a dubious demonstration) during the brief period when the cloudy sky cleared: some fifteen minutes, just long enough to demonstrate the falsity of the phrase: fixity is never momentary. Perched on a thin wire of shadow, the silver and olive-colored thrush, itself a tapered shadow transformed into light standing out between and against the various glints of broken shards of bottles set into the top of a wall, at the time of day when reverberations depopulate space, a reflection among other reflections, a momentary sharp brightness in the form of a beak, feathers, and the gleam of a pair of eyes; the gray triangular lizard, coated with a powder so fine that its green tint is scarcely visible, quietly at rest in a crack in another wall on another afternoon in another place: not a variegated stone, but a bit of animal mercury; the coppice of cool green foliage on which, between one day and the next, without forewarning, there appears a flame-colored stain that is merely the scarlet armorial emblem of autumn and that immediately passes through different states, like the bed of coals that glows brightly before dying away, from copper to wine-red and from tawny to scorched brown: at each moment and in each state still the same plant; that butterfly I saw one noon in Kasauli, resting motionless on a sunflower, yellow and black like itself, its wings spread, a very thin sheet of Peruvian gold in which all the sun of the Himalayas might well have been concentrated— they are fixed: not there, but here in my mind, fixed for an instant. Fixity is always momentary.
     
    My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”). In this monologue one of the terms finally devours the other: either motionlessness is merely a state of movement (as in my phrase), or else movement is only an