AGAINST
I
try to recall rain or crying. The obstacle of things that don’t want to go down
the path of innocent desperation. Tonight I want to be made of water, want you
to be made of water, want things to slip away like smoke, imitating it, showing
the final signs—gray, cold. Words in my throat. Stamps that can’t be swallowed.
Words aren’t drinks for the wind, it’s a lie what they say, that words are
dust—I wish they were—then I wouldn’t now be saying the prayers of an incipient
madwoman dreaming of sudden disappearances, migrations, invisibilities. The
taste of words, that taste of old semen, of an old womb, of lost bone, of an
animal wet with black water (love forces me to make the most hideous faces
before the mirror). I don’t suffer, I’m only expressing my disgust for the
language of tenderness, those purple threads, that watered-down blood. Things
hide nothing, things are things, and if someone comes up to me now and tells me
to call a spade a spade I’ll start to
howl and beat my head against every deaf, miserable wall in the world. The
tangible world, prostituted machines, an exploited world. And the dogs
insulting me with their proffered fur, slowly licking and leaving their saliva
in the trees that drive me mad.
[1961]
DESCRIPTION
Falling until you touch the absolute
bottom, desolate, made of an ancient silencing and figures that keep saying
something referring to me, I can’t understand what, I never understand, no one
could.
These figures—drawn by me on a
wall—instead of displaying the motionless beauty that was once their
prerogative now sing and dance since they’ve decided to change their nature (if
nature exists, if change, if decision...).
This is why my nights are filled
with voices coming from my bones, and also—and this is what makes it
hurt—visions of words that are written
yet still move, fight, dance, spurt blood, and then I see them hobbling around
with crutches, in rags, cut from the miracles of a through z, alphabet of
misery, alphabet of cruelty. The one who should have sung arcs through silence
while it whispers in her fingers, murmurs in her heart, in her skin a ceaseless
moan...
(You have to know this place of
metamorphosis to understand why it hurts in such a complicated way.)
[1965]
DISTRUST
Mama told us of a white forest in
Russia: “... and we made little men out of snow and put hats we stole from
great-grandfather on their heads ...”
I eyed her with distrust. What was
snow? Why did they make little men? And above all, what’s a great-grandfather?
[1964]
A
MYSTICAL BETRAYAL
Behold
the idiot who received letters from the outside.
—Paul Éluard
I’m
talking about a betrayal. I’m talking about a mystical deception, about passion
and unreality and the reality of mortuaries, about bodies in shrouds and
wedding portraits.
Nothing proves they didn’t stick
needles in my image. It’s almost strange I didn’t send them my photo along with
needles and an instruction manual. How did this story begin? That’s what I want
to investigate, but in my own voice and with no poetic design. Not poetry but
policy.
Like a mother that doesn’t want to
let go of the child that’s already been born—that’s how its silent takeover is.
I throw myself into its silence, drunk with magic premonitions of uniting with
silence.
I remember. A night of screams. I
rose up and there was no possibility of going back; I rose higher and higher,
not knowing if I’d arrive at a point of fusion or stay with my head nailed to a
post for the rest of my life. It was like drinking waves of silence, my lips
moved like they were underwater, I was drowning, it was as if I were drinking
silence. Inside me were myself and silence. That night I threw myself from the
highest tower. And when we were at the top of the wave, I knew that this was
mine, and even what I’ve looked for in poems, in paintings, in music, a being
that was brought to the top of the wave. I don’t know how I gave myself over,
but it was like a great poem: it couldn’t not be written. And why didn’t I stay
there and why didn’t I die? It was a dream of the highest death, the dream of
dying while making the poem in a ceremonial space where words like love, poetry, and freedom were
actions in living flesh.
This is what her silence intends.
It creates a silence in which I
recognize my resting place when the litmus test of her affection must have been
to keep me far from silence, to bar my access to this region of exterminating silence.
I understand, understanding is
useless, no one has ever been helped by understanding, and I know that now I
have to go back to the root of that silent fascination, this gulf that opens
for me to enter, me the holocaust, me the sacrificial lamb. Her person is less
than a ghost, than a name, than emptiness. Someone drinks me from the other
side, someone sucks me dry and discards me. I’m dying because someone created a
silence for me.
It was a masterful job, a rhetorical
infiltration, a slow invasion (the tribe of pure words, hordes of winged
discourse). I’m going to try to extricate myself, but not in silence, for
silence is a dangerous place. I must write a lot, capture expressions so that
little by little her silence will grow quieter and then her person will fade
away, that person I don’t want to love, it has nothing to do with love but
rather with unimaginable and therefore unspeakable fascination (getting closer
to the harsh, to the soft fog of her distant person, but the knife sinks in, it
tears, and a circular space made from the silence of your poem, the poem you’ll
write afterwards, in place of the slaughter). It’s nothing more than a silence,
but this need for real enemies and mental lovers—how did she know that from my
letters? A masterful job.
Now my nervous she-wolf footsteps
around the circle of light where they slip the correspondence. Her letters
create a second silence even denser than that of her eyes from the window of
her house facing the port. The second silence of her letters gives rise to a
third silence made of the absence of letters. There’s also the silence that
oscillates between the second and third: encrypted letters in which she speaks
in order not to speak. The entire range of silences while from the other side
they drink the blood I feel myself lose on this one.
Nevertheless, if this vampiric
correspondence didn’t exist, I’d die from the lack of such a correspondence.
Someone loved me in another life, in no life, in all lives. Someone to love
from my place of reminiscence, to offer myself up for, to sacrifice myself to
as if with that I could provide a fair return or restore the cosmic order.
Her silence is a womb, it is death.
One night I dreamt of a letter covered in blood and feces; it was in a
wasteland and the letter moaned like a cat. No. I’m going to break the spell.
I’m going to write like a child cries, that is: it doesn’t cry because it’s
sad; rather, it cries to inform, peacefully.
[Published in La Gaceta de Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, February 22, 1970.]
[COMMENTARY. Flora
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was born to Russian Jewish parents in an
immigrant district of Buenos Aires. During her short life, spent mostly between
Buenos Aires and Paris, Pizarnik produced an astonishingly powerful body of
work, including poetry, tales, paintings, drawings, translations, essays, and
drama. From a young age, she discovered a deep affinity with writers and
artists who, as she would later comment, sacrificed everything in order to
“annul the distance society imposes between poetry and life.” She was
particularly drawn to “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the
premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of
Lautréamont,” and, perhaps most importantly, the “unparalleled intensity” of
Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering” (“The Incarnate Word,” 1965).
Like Artaud, Pizarnik understood writing
as an absolute demand, offering no concessions, forging its own terms, and
requiring that life be lived entirely in its service. “Like every profoundly
subversive act,” she wrote, “poetry avoids everything but its own freedom and
its own truth.” In all of Pizarnik’s writing, this radical sense of “freedom”
and “truth” emerges through a total engagement with her central themes:
silence, estrangement, childhood, and—most prominently—death. An orphan girl’s
love for her little blue doll pumps death gas through the heart of her avatar.
The garden of forgotten myth is a dagger that rends the flesh. A grave opens
its arms at dawn in the fusion of sea and sky. Every intimate word spoken feeds
the void it burns to escape. Pizarnik’s writing exists on the knife’s edge
between intolerable, desolate cruelty and an equally intolerable human
tenderness. As she remarks of Erzébet Báthory in “The Bloody Countess:” “the
absolute freedom of the human is horrible.” And the writer’s task, she added in
a late interview with Martha Isabel Moia, is “to “rescue the abomination of
human misery by embodying it.”]
N.B. Additional
poems by Alejandra Pizarnik appeared here
on Poems and Poetics, and her important essay on Antonin Artaud appeared here.
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