Risa y penitencia - Luz Aurora Pimentel

physical but to temporal and cultural unity. Paradoxically, this is done in a patchy,fragmentary way (the photographs) in which, nonetheless, the poetic imagination is theunifying principle. In the second paragraph, as the fragmentary origin of the little head isaffirmed, the opposite movement is initiated: in a kind of secondary ekphrasis, with a help ofassorted photographs, the little head is “embodied,” restored in time and imagination to heroriginal wholeness. In this poetic, imaginary unity, one motif coalesces: the virgule, a clearmovement towards the identification of the poet with the little clay head. The motif has anactual presence in the little head and a fictional one as imaginary ornaments on the skirt of herequally imaginary body: winding lines, more virgules, and a spider monkey coiling its tail.The central configuration of this unifying motif is the word virgule which, as has been noted(note 4), is a punctuation mark having, precisely, the shape of a coil (the word as such,virgule, means a comma in French). Virgule is an especially happy choice, for in one and thesame word the visual and the verbal are activated, hence symbolically and potentiallyunifying the poet and the laughing clay head in this iconotextual reading. Furthermore, inprehispanic art a virgule-like coil is the conventional iconic sign for speech; so, the virgules inthe little head’s forehead could be interpreted as a sign of speech. This potential verbaldimension in the plastic object is fully actualised in the closing paragraph of the essay in anapotheosis of identity, as the voice of the little head is assimilated to the poet’s, projectingitself out into the cosmos, becoming one with the earth, one with and in time, one with theself—“Each mask, a name; each name, a date. My name is time…”