Free The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz

could never get all the way inside myself: there was always someone else there. Should I do away with him, exorcise him, kill him? The trouble was that the moment that I caught sight ofhim, he vanished. Talk with him, win him over, come to some agreement? I searched for him here and he turned up there. He had no substance, he took up no space whatsoever. He was never where I was; if I was there he was here; if I was here he was there. My invisible foreseeable, my visible unforeseeable. Never the same, never in the same place. Never the same place: outside was inside, inside was somewhere else, here was nowhere. Never anywhere. Great distances away: in the remotest of places: always way over yonder. Where? Here. The other has not moved: I have never moved from my place. He is here. Who is it that is here? I am: the same self as always. Where? Inside myself: from the beginning I have been falling inside myself and I still am falling. From the beginning I am always going to where I already am, yet I never arrive at where I am. I am always myself somewhere else: the same place, the other I. The way out is the way in: the way in—but there is no way in, it is all the way out. Here inside is always outside, here is always there, the other always somewhere else. There is always the same: himself: myself: the other. I am that one: the one there. That is how it is; that is what I am.
     

     
    Hanumn, Kalighat painting (Bengal), 20th century.
     
    With whom could I reconcile myself: with myself or with the other—the others? Who were they, who were we? Reconciliation was neither an idea nor a word: it was a seed that, day after day at first and then hour after hour, had continued to grow and grow until it turned into an immense glass spiral through whose arteries and filaments there flowed light, red wine, honey, smoke, fire, salt water and fresh water, fog, boiling liquids, whirlwinds of feathers. Neither a thermometer nor a barometer: a power station that turns into a fountain that is a tree with branches and leaves of every conceivable color, a plant of live coals in winter and a plant of refreshing coolness in summer, a sun of brightness and a sun of darkness, a great albatross made of salt and air, a reflection-mill, a clock in which each hour contemplates itself in the others until it is reduced to nothingness. Reconciliation was a fruit—not the fruit but its maturity, not its maturity but its fall. Reconciliation was an agate planet and a tiny flame, a young girl, in the center of that incandescent marble. Reconciliation was certain colors interweaving so as to form a fixed star set in the forehead of the year, or floating in warm clusters between the spurs of the seasons; the vibration of a particle of light set in the pupil of the eye of a cat flung into one corner of noon; the breathing of the shadows sleeping at the foot of an autumn skinned alive; the ocher temperatures, the gusts of wind the color of dates, a yellowish red, and the green pools of stagnant water, the river basins of ice, the wandering skies dressed in regal rags, the drums of the rain; suns no bigger than a quarter of an hour yet containing all the ages; spiders spinning translucent webs to trap infinitesimal blind creatures that emit light; foliage of flames, foliage of water, foliage of stone, magnetic foliage. Reconciliation was a womb and a vulva, but also the blinks of an eye, provinces of sand. It was night. Islands, universal gravitation, elective affinities, the hesitations of the light that at six o’clock in the late afternoon does not know whether to go or to stay. Reconciliation was not I. It was not all of you, nor a house, nor a past or a future. It was there over yonder. It was not a homecoming, a return to the kingdom of closed eyes. It was going out into the air and saying:
good morning
.
     

17
     
    The wall was about two hundred yards long. It was tall, topped with parapets. Save for certain stretches that still showed traces of