Everything makes love with silence

“Everything makes love with silence,” a line from Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Signs,” names a paradox at the heart of poetry: words emerge from silence, yet the silence behind them is not necessarily welcoming or protective. The phrase describes neither a successful union of something and nothing nor a peaceful ground for speech. Its force lies in the failure of that encounter, where silence becomes an impersonal presence that can deny the poet a voice.

Source and Form

The line appears in “Signs,” a poem in Pizarnik’s later collection The Musical Hell, published in 1971. It joins a cluster of fragments that the discussion reads as parts of a connected argument rather than as isolated, deliberately obscure statements. The phrase’s apparent intimacy is therefore a point of departure for examining poetry’s difficult relation to what cannot be spoken.

The sentence gives silence an active role: it is not merely the absence surrounding words. Yet its personification does not promise mutuality. The image of lovemaking suggests a relation, while the interpretation insists that the relation fails. The tension between those two terms makes the line’s claim more unsettling than a simple opposition between speech and silence.

Silence as a Created Opening

The account reverses the familiar idea that silence is a calm condition waiting to be broken by a first word. It begins instead with Noise: an indistinct murmur of the Real in which figure and background have not yet separated. On this view, the first creative act is the creation of silence. Silence interrupts that continuous murmur and opens a clearing in which words can be spoken.

That opening is made rather than given. The effort required to establish it is compared to a vase that encircles a central void: form does not fill the emptiness but gives it a boundary. Poetry depends on this distinction between the continuous murmur and the space that allows articulation. The line’s intimacy with silence thus points to a necessary condition of speech, not to a guarantee that silence will sustain or answer it.

Failed Relation and Poetic Cost

The phrase’s lovemaking is explicitly interpreted as failed: it does not describe a sexual relationship between Something and Nothing. The silence behind the poems is not a caring support for the poet’s words. It is a brutally neutral presence that ignores the poet and denies or chokes the voice. What appears, at first, to be a reciprocal bond is instead marked by nonresponse and obstruction.

That failure also connects the poem to the account’s discussion of the death drive and sublimation. The murmur of the Real must first be erased or interrupted for sublime formations to take shape. In poetry, the relevant division is not simply between one poem and another, but between poems and the song that must remain unsung: the song of silence. The line holds both sides of this process together. Silence makes the possibility of words, yet the silence that poetry approaches cannot itself be converted into a reassuring message.