The Monkey Grammarian Read Online Free PDF Page B

English call “flame of the forest,” a passionate mass of foliage ranging from bright orange to fiery red, rather refreshing in the dryness of the endless summers; the ceiba and the ceibo, drowsy, indifferent witnesses of the spectacle of Palenque and Angkor; the mamey: its fruit a live coal inside a rugby ball; the pepper plant and its first cousin the terebinth; the Brazilian ironwood tree and the giant orchid of Malaya; the nam-nam and the almond trees of Java, that are not almond trees but huge carved rocks; certain sinister Latin American trees—which I shall not name in order to punish them—with fruits resembling human heads that give off a fetid odor: the vegetable world repeats the horror of the shocking history of that continent; the hora, that produces fruits so light that the breezes transport them; the inflexible breakaxe tree; the industrious bignonia of Brazil: it builds suspension bridges between one tree and another, thanks to the hooks with which it climbs and the tendrils with which it anchors itself; the snake wood, another acrobat climber, also skilled in the use of hooks, with markings like a snake skin; the oxypetal coiled up amid blue roots; the balsam fig with its strangling aerial roots; the double coconut palm, thus called because it is bisexual (and also known as the sea coconut since its bilobate or trilobate fruits, enveloped in a huge husk and mindful of huge genital organs, are found floating in the Indian Ocean) : the male inflorescence is shaped like a phallus, measures three feet in length, and smells like a rat, whereas the female inflorescence is round, and when artificially pol-lenized, takes ten years to produce fruit; the goda ka-duro of Oceania: its flat gray seeds contain the alkaloid of strychnine; the inkbush, the rain tree; the ombu: a lovely shadow; the baobab; rosewood and the Pernam-buco ironwood; ebony; the bo tree, the sacred fig beneath whose shade the Buddha vanquished Mara, a plant that strangles; the aromatic karunbu neti of the Moluccas, and the amomum that produces the spice known as grains of paradise; the bulu and the twining dada kehel…. The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden—it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows—I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumn smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the
Mahantaka
describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumn 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.
     

     
    Hanumn, Rajasthan, 18th century.
     

     
    Hanumn, Rajasthan, 18th century: detail.
     

9
     
    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