Read The Monkey Grammarian for Free Online Page B

the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things,
     
    no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write,
     
    inexact expressions once again:
I began, I write
, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write:
who is writing what I am reading?
     
    the answer is reversible, the phrases at the end are the reverse of the phrases at the beginning and both are the same phrases
     
    that are liane that are damp spots on an imaginary wall of a ruined house in Galta that are the shadows projected by the fire on a hearth lighted by two lovers that are the catalogue of a tropical botanical garden that are an allegory in a chapter in an epic poem that are the agitated mass of the grove of beeches on the other side of my window as the wind etcetera lessons etcetera destroyed etcetera time itself etcetera,
     
    the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum:
     
    the only thing that remains of the felt, imagined, thought, perceived, and vanished realities, the only reality that these evaporated realities leave behind, a reality that, even though it is merely a combination of signs, is no less real than they are:
     
    the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end,
     
    the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence,
     
    yes, it is as though all these presences woven by the configurations of the signs were seeking its abolition in order that there might appear those inaccessible trees, immersed in themselves, not said, that are beyond the end of this phrase,
     
    on the other side, there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it
     

10
     
    He saw many women lying stretched out on mats, in diverse costumes and finery, their hair adorned with flowers; they had fallen asleep under the influence of the wine, after having spent half the night disporting themselves. And the stillness of that great company, now that their tinkling ornaments had fallen silent, was that of a vast nocturnal pool, covered with lotuses, with no sound now of swans or of bees…. The noble monkey said to himself:
Here there have come together planets which, their store of merits having been exhausted, are fallen from the firmament
. It was true: the women glowed like incandescent fallen meteors. Some had collapsed in a heap, fast asleep, in the middle of their dances and were lying as though struck by a bolt oflightning, their hair and headdresses in disarray, amid their scattered garments; others had flung their garlands to the floor, and with the strings of their necklaces broken, their belt buckles unfastened, their skirts thrown back, looked like unsaddled mares; still others, having lost their bracelets and earrings, with their tunics torn to shreds and trampled underfoot, had the appearance of climbing vines trod upon by wild elephants. Here and there lunar reflections cast by scattered pearls crisscrossed between sleeping swans of breasts. Those women were rivers: their thighs the shores; the undulations of their pubes and bellies ripples of water in the breeze; their haunches and breasts the hills and mounds that the current flows round and girdles; their faces the lotuses; their desires the crocodiles; their sinuous bodies the bed of the stream. On ankles and wrists, forearms and shoulders, round the navel or at the tips of their breasts, there could be seen graceful