Not a word in the dictionary to rest your head on. How can a true lover of language endorse it? How can a Grammarian escape himself? Hanuman watches the city he will destroy - first by naming and then by fire; Paz observes the Noble Monkey and destroys him by writing about him; and then sets himself down on paper, to be destroyed by the reader as he reads. The words flowing into meaning, the meanings flowing out as they do. Paz reads about Valmiki who had read Hanuman's readings of the battle of Lanka. Valmiki erases, Hanuman erases, Paz erases. Only Splendor survives.This is one of those books that is humbling and infuriating at the same time. The reader becomes the author and then the actor and then again a mere reader. Then a review is to be written that makes no sense to anyone else. That is the end of this reading. Thank You.
Octavio Paz in his philosophical writings is a mad irreverent lone-ranger prophet of words, sounds and the stuff of robust, far-ranging euro-indocentric myth-meddling glutton of ideas. In Conjunctions and Disjunctions, you get the sense that for the author, the only ancient worlds that existed were indo/sino/saxon/aztec. Perhaps thats all there is??!! For Paz, these were intellectual civilizations whose underpinning is eroticism and exorcism with himself as the magicien alchemist, a true peddlar of words with the self-directed task of delivering to us--however rambling--the beautiful rule underneath order and chaos. That said, The Monkey Grammarian is a true find. As poet, Octavio Paz is the artificer of cool, hyperintellectual mental poems.
