Ouch! Oh Zoe… Or was it Bios.. and you are right, in her kind of company we are urgently in need of a Judith or a Giorgio (Agamben), in order to spare us our blushes and cover our confusions, since, in criticality speak, this is no way to carry on an interrogation, and it is also certainly not what the ‘colonels’ had in mind when they gave us our certificates, and pinned those stars to our chest.
So Whistle for Judith or Giorgio. For Carson or Kristeva… Or agent Pizarnik!
Pizarnik, Who are you? We have been authorised to ask at the outset, but before the words are even out of our mouths the question seems to have bounced back and smacked us between the eyes, or, should I better say, whacked us in the crutch. However, even as we double over and fall to the ground, we keep our comic edge, crawling about in the dirt, the air whistling through our pursed lips, there is nothing else for it, Keep smiling through the tears, like your remark last week, ‘We don’t do torture in this country’.
Ah Zoe! – We also called her ‘The Face’, when it was dark and about my bedtime and 1966, and I was sat watching Top of the Pops. Wheels of Fire – Whistle, and I will come to you. And do you remember, in 1966 it was still just possible to be Roy Rogers, and call for a horse with an innocent name like Trigger, a chestnut mare with a white star on her forehead. And the soft drumming of hooves after.
Only here on the pampas in 1966 the horse is white, and her name is Alejandra, alejandra / debayo estoy yo / alejandra :
Nocturnal Singer
To Olga Ovozco
Joe, macht die Musick von damals nacht…
She who died of her blue dress is singing. Imbued with death she sings to the sun of her drunkenness. Inside her song there is a blue dress, there is a white horse, there is green heart tattooed with the echoes of the beating of her dead heart. A prey to all perditions, she sings beside the lost girl who is herself: her lucky charm. And in spite of the green fog on her lips and the grey cold in her eyes, her voice corrodes the distance opening between thirst and the hand in search of a glass. She sings.
(Alejandra Pizarnik. Selected Poems, tr Cecilia Rossi. 2010, Waterloo Press, Hove. P 135)