The living body

Francisco Segovia once wrote about the book Pausas , by Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal (Mexicali, 1974), and he raised a concern that I am interested in rescuing: what was missing from the book. Segovia speaks of that material of the poet: desire, fracture, all that which is not said. And that the poet, at least there, is a mature being. I will not dwell on what one poet says about another. I do want, however, to note that Gutiérrez Vidal's poetry has a dynamic that goes from the erudite to the colloquial, from the abstract and closed to the open and simple. A crossroads where many can get lost: it is not easy to be a sleepwalker in the kitchen of language and form. (Form: it is impossible not to name it.) Form is content and corset, word and reference and a click of image and sound and foam and cloudy day; rain, water, passport, airplane window. The unconnected is never completely so. That's what language is for: even if we get lost, we can go out and breathe.

These nineteen sonnets are evidence of something. In the Kabbalah, the nineteenth arcane is the reference to sexuality and success, inspiration. “What is suddenly seen is the loneliness of the clay,/ The increased helplessness of the masks/ The orange muteness in the stripping of its shells,/ The somnambulist isolation of some junk.”

The poet stops asking. Nor does he search, as the youngest and most naive usually do. In this case the evidence is from what is observable. Gutiérrez Vidal sees and makes the catalogue, the list, the sensation, the instant, the time, the sea, the window, the object, the cup of coffee, the lover's body. In all of them a past time permeates, and the poet gathers that time like the seamstress gathers the hem: with experience and an eye, with dedication and an eye, with the hand and the eye. Nothing is done alone. The sonnets, for example, are texts that fit into counted syllables; his room is tiny. How those rooms are decorated is another matter. Light changes everything. We know this because the mood depends on whether the sky is clear or if the day will be grey and dark. There is no way to imagine the London climate in Vidal's work. His poems are made of two materials: light and body. Both are instances of struggle, death and life at the same time.

In 1994, Gutiérrez Vidal wrote:

the branches commit suicide

in the transparency of the courtyard

They love each other and drag their hands

towards the dream until the leaves fall

And now, in this year of grace from the binary lord and owner of all sexes, tell us:

And while time forgets what happens,

We remember the caress of the lily,

Naked and withered, like a scorching sun.

It is the same voice that speaks. But it is not the same one who releases it. The voice is a net and falls slowly on the water. What is existence, the day, about? The everyday only resists if we can make it a poetic instance: stirring the clothes and, in the background, the cry of the gas man:

And if one has to wake up between investigations

It is good for the voice to clear up early,

Before, perhaps, shuffling the shirts

And a little after the butane man.

Something punishes, there between the cornices,

What is not yet the consistency of what is healthy.

Various themes run through this book, made to measure for the game, the trick, the technique, but I will focus on what jumps out at you: daily life with its exact weight; routine, tiredness, life that goes away, life that is missed; and what will always jump out and is inevitable: what is thought and felt about the body, what is not presumed about the body of the other. It is inevitable to talk about eroticism because there are poets who when they say “tomorrow” or “light” or “telephone” want to say something about desire, but something happens to them: they remember in that instant that desire cannot be or do everything and they make a rosary of scenes to distract themselves. But underneath and at the center of everything, like a Mexicali sun, dry and hard, without mercy, is the desiring body. The living body.

Whoever exercises desire brings with him pleasure but also guilt. A Catholicism made of whip and honey in the wound. A Catholicism of sex. Of the moment. One enjoys in order to learn to let go. “Where there are six hands ready for pleasure,/ All of life is postponed/ Until the right time when there are twelve.”

This is not a book, ladies and gentlemen, binary beings and carnivorous plants: this is an exercise in dislocation of the spirit. The body is concentrated on a single function: touch, taste, sight.

It could be said, then, that it is the skin that clouds

The same view as the clear skies,

And in the turbidity of our dear kisses

That which is clouded is calming down.

The poet vanishes and reconfigures himself in nineteen scenes of the day. These sonnets do not only speak of cooking, daily life and vain sex; they speak and gesticulate and dance, between the surprise of knowing oneself to be alive and, therefore, desire and the inevitable time that passes and crushes and forces us into imperfection.

Copyright © 2019 Brenda Ríos. All rights reserved.

A book of poems from the perspective of an inhabitant of the Mexico-United States border. A sort of personal manifesto on the limits of cultural, hybrid and exiled existence. Javier Hernández Quezada has said that “In “Bordos” we speak of a conscious look at things that, most of the time, refers to the aspects of what is close and personal, is a text slowly decanted over the years, where priorities refer to the rescue of images of the personal universe."

From the stark geography of northern Mexico to the skin itself that transgresses the mandates, the words of Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal draw the map of a challenging poetic road movie. In it, the images are needles that stick into the center of meaning. The body naked of loneliness carries orphanhood as an inevitable tattoo. The other is always an absent other. Betrayal? Punishment? The celebration of desire will not go unpunished; the stone of the desert and the concrete of the rooftop room will be the witnesses.

In the distance you can hear the sea; its song is also the chance hidden in a software. That is why pearls cannot enclose nostalgia, and they have to let it flow even at the risk of ridicule, even dressed in irony. What good are images? Faded, blurred, they are simple remains, memories of the shipwreck.

For Carlos, the legacy collapses in every sentence and there is no religion other than language. Only then does it make sense to hope for a new revelation. Perhaps it will appear at a crossroads between Mexicali and a thousand times underlined verse by Oscar Wilde.

Copyright © 2008 Sandra Lorenzano. All rights reserved

The law of the desert

I don't know if I'll be able to say what I want to say about Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal's Pausas , but I find it somewhat comforting to suspect that he himself doesn't quite say what he wants to say in his Pausas . It happens to me with his poems as with abstract painting; that is, I don't know if I ask the painter for something that he refuses to give me, or if he asks me for something that I, for some reason, refuse to give him. In any case, the first thing I notice when reading his poems is that there is something I miss. I will return to this lack later. For now it will suffice to point out that there is something left out (outside of what is written or outside of what is read) and that this omission leaves me with the certainty that I construct my reading around a void. The certainty of this void is so strong that I cannot resist the idea that the omission is not a mere construction of my reading but that the author himself put it there; who built his work surrounding that void. And then I think of the blacksmith in the joke, the one who is asked how cannons are made, to which he answers: “Well, it's easy: you take a hole and line it with iron.”

Since it is difficult to say anything about the hole itself, I will begin by talking about the iron that surrounds it; that is, the most obvious thing in the poems. Not about its basic details (periods and commas, syllables and verses; things that, by the way, are very important to Gutiérrez Vidal) but about something more general: the landscape, which is almost the only firm hold that the book leaves us. It is a landscape that we could also call abstract, but for a different reason than that which leads us to classify a painting as abstract, because in the case of these poems the abstraction does not obey an intention of the author, or even an interpretation of the reader, but appears as a disembodiment of nature itself. There is a burning, uninhabitable, flayed and flaying light throughout the book. Not a red-hot light but a white-hot light, capable of incinerating —or, better, of sublimating— in an instant anything that enters it. It is not for nothing that the poem that opens the book is titled “Dog Days.” Intense and relentless light, yes, but also metaphysical in its own way. More than light, a spectrum of light; a will-o’-the-wisp that illuminates a world of things that only live in the brief instant of their own incandescence. That is, I suppose, the sudden and brief incandescence in which things and souls burn, what Gutiérrez Vidal calls pauses . Because in the landscape that his poems portray, the normal thing is the stiff desolation of the desert, so that its interruptions, its pauses, represent the moments in which emptiness briefly gives way to presence, although not to give life the momentary consolation of flesh but the opposite: to make it suffer the hell of its scorching light.

A metaphysical landscape, I said. Yes. Or are not all deserts metaphysical? Domain of Xipe-Totec, Our Lord the Flayed, who only stands precariously because the salt of his desert crusts over his living flesh before finally corroding it, eating away at it, and turning it into dust and more desert sand… But I exaggerate. Although it is true that there is something wild in the landscape of these poems, it is also true that they do not point simply to the cosmic but immanent sacrifice of the Mesoamerican gods. In a certain way they point to it, yes, but not in the way that the mention of Xipe-Totec seems to suggest, but in the way that sacrifice refers to sin and guilt; that is, in the manner of Christianity, which makes each person guilty—personally, intimately guilty—of the cosmic drama… Light of the desert: God’s gaze that sees that … A gaze that strips, that flays… “Canícula,” the poem I mentioned before, says it like this: “Fury that drags away impurity and populates the summer as an innocent replica”…

I don’t think it’s a mere coincidence that these Pauses will be followed by a book—almost finished, as far as I know—entitled Omissions . Both share the same landscape and both underline the lack, although in somewhat different ways. Pauses interrupt what happens or is presented; omissions, on the other hand, conceal it; or, better said, obliterate it. In any case, both focus on something that is made to disappear or not allowed to appear, but that is , and that in some way even exists . If I don’t say that both books underline the presence of an absence, it’s not only to spare myself a fashionable paradox but because I prefer to say that they cross out the presence. They don’t erase it: they cross it out. They impose one, two, three lines that cover it, like the arrows that add up one to the other and gradually hide the scorned flesh of Saint Sebastian; a flesh that “has its thorns in it,” as Gutiérrez Vidal himself says. What is crossed out is the body, as is common in sacrifices and even in martyrologies. But in this case the crossed out body does not symbolize the sacrifice of a life in the name of all other lives, as in paganism, nor the sacrifice of the life of an incarnate god to redeem the sins of all humanity, as in Christianity. Here it is the body itself, a concrete body, which atones for its desire on the altar of order, whether this order concerns the family, the community, or religion itself. By this I mean that if there is a body that is immolated in the desert, it must be that which gives itself over to passion for another body and burns with it until incandescence, not that of one who loves his neighbor as himself.

Between the two books, between Pausas and Omisiones , there is, if not a progress, a progression. The second one sees more clearly what the core of its subject is. I mean that it sees its subject with more humility and maturity and that therefore what it shows the reader seems clearer, sometimes even anecdotally clear. In a certain sense it is as if its author had succeeded, in the expression , in ridding himself of the taboo that his subject imposes on him. I don't know if I am explaining myself. The pauses in Pausas are not only the subject of the book but are carried out in bulk, expressively; the omissions in Omisiones , on the other hand, are referred to, sometimes even recounted. The latter is an advantage, especially for us, simple bewildered readers. But it would be completely useless if the mature poet did not succeed in being faithful to what his crazy, senseless adolescence loved. The expression, now freed from the obvious illustration, would not be fully fulfilled if the poet were suddenly to become an old man who smiles disdainfully, good-naturedly excusing the furious love of the young man he himself once was. For this is the way of the inquisitor, the way of those who betray their incorruptible adolescent dream and - since they cannot hunt down the dream itself - then dedicate themselves to hunting down the dreamer. That is their prey, the prey of every inquisitor.

Gutiérrez Vidal distances himself from the comfort with which maturity rewards the faint-hearted. Because his must be a maturity that does not renounce the dreams that his desire has given him, nor his desire itself, even if he has to starve it and reduce it to being only desire for itself, to being only desire for itself. Because, when the time comes, Gutiérrez Vidal will gnaw at his elbows, as the bushes of the desert gnaw at them. But one should not see in this either mere narcissism or simple onanism but rather proof that desire does not need to go out in search of prey to satisfy itself (or rather, not to satisfy itself) but that it is enough to be faithful to hunger to gorge itself at will in the void, biting the air. I believe that is what those lines from “Cosecha” allude to: “A man must return to his offering to discern the vision of a seed that breaks curiously between thirst and the ground.” The offering, the seed, the thirst, the soil and the man… who must return to that… But it must be noted that here the seed does not break (does not germinate) when it reaches the soil but before, when it is still halfway between thirst and soil, suspended, in the air, in a pause… An infertile seed, then? Yes, sown in thirst and in silence. And yet, curious… It is a seed that seeks… Between the silence above and the desert below there is a suspended seed, a promised life, perhaps a hope, a pause… The pause in silence does not really break the silence; it is only a promise, not a fait accompli. What I mean by this is that the pause of silence is also silence and dissolves in silence, like a wisp of air in the air. However, even if only fleetingly, silence is a seed, silence is pregnant, it is pregnancy… In reality, Gutiérrez Vidal takes things even further, because he is not satisfied – as I am – with saying that silence is a wisp of air in the air, but makes it palpable, concrete: silence is a pearl. But for that pearl you have to pay a very high price. One of his verses says: “Silence is a pearl that protects itself at the cost of its enjoyment”… The pearl of silence pays for its materiality at the price of its enjoyment; that is, enjoyment is offered as a sacrifice to defend the corporeality of silence. And it is then also offered as a penance… This is how silence relates to guilt; or, as a poem from Omisiones says: “here where something is missing / pain founds its temple”… Silence: suspended joy that a threat crystallizes in pain…

I don’t have to dwell on this matter too much, especially when Gutiérrez Vidal sums it up frankly in a single line: “Guilt comes at the behest of desire”… It is true that this is perhaps just another way of expressing the lack of the Platonic soulmate, but it is notable that what for Plato was a gap, a deficiency and an incompleteness, is here frankly transformed into guilt – the original mark of Christianity. That is why I would say that it is not desire itself that crystallizes in silence but guilt, but it is not difficult to guess that, in any case, what is “protected” by the pearl of silence is a secret. What matters here is that which is kept silent because it entails the sin in which innocence is atoned for. Have I said it well? Innocence is atoned for in sin. Or at least that is what I understand in these four verses, taken from “Desde la extenuación”: “The necklace of the penitent. / The drop that corrupts. / The skin of the other. / Innocence that runs down the back.” Yes, the crime is sexual; the sin is original sin… What is unusual about the case is that here guilt and silence are not imposed from outside, from the social or family environment, but rather they seem to be consubstantial with the sexual act itself. One thus understands that it is not sex that inaugurates sin—as the philosophy and morality of the naive believe—but sin that inaugurates sex—as religions have always known, although they often withhold this knowledge from us. What is unusual about the case, I say, is that the precedence of this original sin is not expressed a priori , from the commandments that have been engraved in stone, but only a posteriori , from the experience of the flesh itself; that is, that it is expressed in the voice of a sinner. Not in the voice of a repentant person but in the voice of a sinner, conscious of his guilt. That is why these poems, although acutely religious, do not conform entirely to Catholic piety. They accept guilt, but do not agree to ask for forgiveness. They do not want to be exonerated of their guilt. It is this fidelity to guilt that makes the young poet of Pausas and the mature poet of Omisiones united. The former suffers guilt in the raw, but almost without awareness that it is a guilt; the latter sees guilt clearly, but does not retract it, does not turn against himself. What he does is investigate it and review the way in which he has expressed it. And here, I believe, begins the true adventure of Gutiérrez Vidal, in which three constant reflections coincide: one on the awareness of guilt (which recognizes that the sacred is only sacred insofar as it is prohibited), another on eroticism (which is the exercise of forbidden love) and the third on the body and the flesh of the poem. An ethic, an eroticism, a poetics. Or so I think I guess in these complex and even abstruse books, where sometimes certain scenes can be guessed, especially love encounters, although they are encrypted, hushed up, or simply silenced… I say that one guesses and that nothing can be assured. But there is always something that confirms our suspicion. For example, the last poem of Pausas , entitled “Addendum”, where it is declared that the poems spring from real scenes, which guilt then encrypts in verses. “Addendum” says it like this: “The delight of a fable clarifies the vulgarity of the flesh, the perplexity of the gods, the game that discerns the hollowness.” Delight, fable, hollowness… Ethics, poetry and eroticism. All this under the intense, blinding light of the desert, which chars everything and makes everything abstract…

Copyright © 2018 Francisco Segovia. All rights reserved

Starting from the common value of culture, the author Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal, exposes the order of this, through his own experiences with language, communication and the arts. In a beautiful, varied and abundant, but attentive text in his analyses; spontaneous and full of fertile ideas that inspire and await a broader exegesis.

- Jolanta Klyszcz

The word “endecha” has two known meanings: a song of lamentation and a stanza of four verses, generally, hexasyllables or heptasyllables with assonance. These two definitions are not mutually exclusive. In tradition there exists the so-called “endecha real” which, in the brief explanation of Tomás Navarro Tomás, is the name of a “quartet of three heptasyllables and a final hendecasyllable with assonance in the pairs, abcB…”. The now very forgotten Spanish scholar —except, perhaps, for our dear colleague David Huerta, always attentive to these stories— gives as an example this stanza from “Pintura de la noche” by Francisco Trillo Figueroa: “I will sing of the night/ the shadows confused/ in pale horrors,/ sad silence, lugubrious harmony.”

When visiting Endechas, by Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal, it is obvious that the title of the book responds to the first of the meanings referred to. That is, to the conversion into poetry of a mourning for the death of a loved one; in this case, Manuel, the author's brother. It is obvious that he has completely dispensed with the formal aspects evoked by the old word "endecha."

Although the etymology of the word given by the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, as derived from the Latin indicta, “the announced one”, is uncertain and highly debatable, it can help to grasp the meaning of Gutiérrez Vidal’s book. Indeed, it could be assumed that the truth announced and enunciated in the laments is death.

In reality, the birth of every human being is the announcement and the first step towards the consummation of death. This is an obvious fact that we learn late and with pain. This book by Gutiérrez Vidal, published in 2007 by the Fondo Editorial de Baja California, is offered as the fruit and sublimation of this traumatic learning. Beyond desolation, although it is based on it, there is the realization that “reason does not inhabit the place you leave me” (p. 40), that is, the record that no explanation truly accounts for the unacceptable event, the eagerness of the body and soul to cover with their reserves of life the annihilation of a venerated and longed-for life. These laments result from this effort because they are an inherent part of it.

Judging by what these poems by Gutiérrez Vidal reveal, this sublime mourning has taken place during the course of a fugue, at the intersection of time that indolently follows its necessary course with the space treaded by the feet of the mourner-poet, in search of the soothing effects of the world of life, discovering and realizing itself—that is, becoming real—every day, at every step. The foundation that allows this experience to be sustained, in this case, is memory. Once death has been experienced—and this is something that, according to all indications, only survivors do—“there is no light left but memory,” as the poet himself warns (p. 74).

But memory has at least two edges. On the one hand, it connects the present with the past and, thus, supports the projection towards the future. It acts, at times, as the foundation of hope and meaning. But it is also the source of a sordid and persistent torment. That is why we humans are given to using that placebo called forgetfulness. Now, there is no poetry where forgetfulness reigns supreme. The word, in the hands of the poet, then tries to distill precisely the unbearable facet of memory through poetry, leaving aside the tendencies and incitements to forget. There are dirges by Gutiérrez Vidal where this distillation is effectively concretized, with all that it has that is both terrible and redemptive. For example, the one found on page 26: “Manuel, a emaciated body in a bedchamber alone/ a yellow room Manuel/ there our borders one/ on the other side the body humanity of the divine.” Other poems in this book, for example, those marked by the recording of emblematic places – such as Madrid's Prado Museum, Puerta del Sol, and some parts of Atocha or certain points in Asian geography – confirm this tension between joyful memory and a sense of loss, which is resolved in poetry.

In the diatribe on the origin of the word “endecha” another equally fruitful option has been presented, in addition to the aforementioned: the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of 1743 refers the word in question to the antecedent “in o dicta”, which would express the well-known phenomenon of the mourner who fails to pronounce words with the due precision, meaning and correctness, at the moment of uttering his laments.

I bring up this possibility because it allows me to make a couple of observations about the way in which Gutiérrez Vidal faces his main responsibility as a poet, which is to give an appropriate form to his pain.

The poet has tried to give an appropriate channel to his voice, forging a type of textual composition that is in keeping with the accepted modes in the domains of contemporary poetry. It is clear, then, that these poems by Gutiérrez Vidal are not the record of a defective diction, which would reveal the lacerations of the soul with a tortuous, halting or stuttering expression. But if I exhume here the eighteenth-century etymology that I have already cited, it is in order to notice the work carried out by Gutiérrez Vidal in the field of language. His laments are not distinguished by a dazzling lexical richness. On the contrary, they display a sobriety in keeping with the gravity to which an ad hoc operation is attached in the plane of syntax. It should be emphasized, even if only in passing, that one of the merits of this book by Gutiérrez Vidal lies in the fact that it makes no concession to pathos or sentimentality, even though it can never hide the authenticity and depth of the suffering that motivated it.

Most of these compositions by Gutiérrez Vidal embody a structure that integrates two moments. The first is dedicated to narrating, describing situations or taking a census of the objects and events that constitute them. The second offers a forceful statement, often with a sententious tone, in which the essence of the experience, the concrete feeling, that the poem arouses is summarized. But the key to the articulation of these two components is found in the rupture of conventional syntax: perhaps the recourse to a “paratactic” writing, freed from the commitments of apophantic enunciation, therefore, stripped of many verbs, adjectives and functional words or formulas, as well as of almost all punctuation marks. In support of this discursive procedure, the poet places the blank space in favor of the expressive intention, in this case, the main signifier of the pauses and the patterns – that is, the rhythms – without which the poetic meaning cannot occur. Lyrical discourse thus attempts to flow on the back of pure expression, that is, of that which is strictly meant in spite of the word: in spite of pre-existing vocabulary and grammar: in spite of language. I hope that this example will help me understand: “the duration of pain/ the limit/ something else/ words that have always existed awareness of what is dispersed/ divine coincidence someone has died and their place no longer matters reason for the distance/ a bottle breaks the course of the waters” (p. 27). As can be seen, there is no stammering here, no equivocation in diction or uncontrolled stammering, but rather a desire to make the verb coincide as closely as possible with the feeling.

Gutiérrez Vidal's poetry - strongly related to the border narrative in La Frontera, to the plastic arts, audiovisual media and chaotic cybernetic discourse - has not proposed, at least until now, great eloquence - which is not the same as grandiloquence. But, as can be seen in these Endechas, it is not alien to transcendence. Finally, death is the great teacher of its own fundamental lesson and, despite the fact that we poor humans resist learning it, we always take advantage of something from it, even if it is with difficulty, and we keep it in some corner of our fragile souls. It may seem strange to some that the author of the formal audacity, bordering on scandalous and deliberately absurd frivolity, of Berlin 77 (2003), and the same one who in Befas (2001) applied himself thoroughly to recording the insufferable triviality of being, now offers intuitions of a total reality, as when he speaks of the “spirit/ that unites our fate with the serpent” (p. 84) or that “the world/ is concentrated in the hair of a goat” (p. 81) or when he concludes that “nothing remains/ your body/ the touch of the breeze on my shoulder I understand/ that life is a matter for the rest/ of the days that will transcend this minute/ this abyss…” and even more so “your lips are a door to the world/ your eyelids close so that life can continue/ the crest of your breath officiates the flight of the night” (p. 71).

Death, the tireless one, the one that never stops haunting us - whether it likes it or not, perhaps, or in the end that is its greatest contribution - also gives us those lights and these dirges by Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal are a good testament to that.

Copyright © 2008 Josu Landa. All rights reserved

“the impure and the sacred / are barely distinguishable // a joy against nature / runs down his thigh / a holocaust awaits him / under his chest / a gentle death / announced // in the sap of the vine / glory of the flesh”

The Nasty Boy From Mexicali

In a review of Berlín 77 (Crash publishing house, 1997) by poet Adriana Sing (Yubai, January-March 1998), it was said that its author, Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal (Mexicali, 1974), was “a writer lost in his own nightmare: a Fellini-esque journey to the surroundings of the middle-class modus vivendi seen through the eyes of three kidnappers as unlikely as reality itself.” And then she points out that Carlos Adolfo is “our Mexican saico, our approach to the pervert, to the constant, repeated obsession with revealing our social and human miseries,” a Mexicali nasty boy who navigates the “seas of pop culture and the realm of kitsch.”

Seven years after the first publication of Berlín 77, Gutiérrez Vidal published this short novel together with two other already known nouvelles: El cínife (1996) and Golden Showers (Platero y tú) (1998), under the title Berlín 77 (y otros relatos) (Colección de Literatura, Fondo Editorial de Baja California, 2003), so now, as re-readers of this triad of farces-tragicomedies-homages in a tone of complicit play with the reader, we can contemplate that his work is, as Alejandro Espinoza states on the back cover of the book, “an anomalous voice within Baja Californian prose,” which coincides with Sing, who assures that we are before “the parody of our days,” with its “fascination with the creepy.”

However, I disagree with this analysis. I believe, from the distance that comes from reading Berlin 77 in a harsher, more chaotic and vulnerable reality than that of 1996-1998, that Carlos Adolfo's narrative cannot be circumscribed to a radical work due to its scandalous subject matter, its sexual violence and its exhibitionist amorality, which today has lost much of its media edge and its morbid cynicism. Instead, what emerges more clearly today is the experimental stance of a writing that aims to subvert, through catastrophic theories and fractal universes, the very game of language.

It is worth pointing out here that Gutiérrez Vidal's work was certainly an anomaly in Baja Californian literature of the second half of the last decade of the twentieth century, since with the exceptions of Fran Ilich and Rafa Saavedra, he is the only Baja Californian author who had taken contemporary life and its rituals of consumption and mating to create literary texts that sampled such fashions and ways of life with such shamelessness. But Carlos Adolfo had gone beyond recounting the life of young border dwellers in the midst of a raid or apañón (Ilich) or chronicling the clubs where electronic music is seen as the ten commandments on the dance floor (Saavedra). In his three short novels, Gutiérrez Vidal cares less about the subject matter than about the way of structuring a fragmentary narrative that can jump in all directions and return to itself in order to keep the attention of his readers occupied.

For our author, who belongs to a generation that has been characterized by maintaining a cool attitude towards the cultural environment and who feels that the world needs to be digitalized in order to function properly, literature can only exist as a simulation of reality, as a pastiche of other texts that it cannibalizes (be it the novels of Kathy Acker or Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez) to regurgitate them as a crime report, email, trademark, a distortion of the senses or a multiple-choice exam. For Carlos Adolfo, all narrative is an “absurd and shameful game” but one that he cannot escape, a spectacle “where everyone finds their answers” ​​without needing to know the questions. After all, as he himself indicates, “as a child I hated the fabulists that we all carry within us. All the children are insane. Beautiful friend.” And Carlos Adolfo does not want to be a fabulist but the fable itself, the never-ending story. A child who is dual in his malicious innocence and who tells macabrely funny, confessionally ridiculous stories, to see how many people he scares, how many readers he seduces with his attractive characters and his dangerous games, with his hooks of pleasure and his adrenaline-pumping stories.

In a way, Gutiérrez Vidal is a salesman of strong emotions and fortified wines, a dandy of the plot who plays hide and seek with those who dare to read him. A nasty boy who hides, behind his ordinarily freakish scenarios — Or what is more freakish than our middle class and its dreams of consumption and greed? — the hateful certainty that literature continues to be the grandmother's question with a wolf's smile: Do you want me to tell you again? And Carlos Adolfo thus returns to his old ways with Berlin 77 (and other stories) and once again launches himself against the windmills that his generation abhors with wicked indifference: family routines, city drowsiness, tedious jobs and impeccable existences. That set of mirrors that so well define them and so accurately reflect them as children of an era where death has become a news item repeated ad nauseam and the private is a space in extinction. Hence, Gutiérrez Vidal is part of a new literature where the writer no longer seeks the originality of modernism or the uncompromising relativity of postmodernism and is content to be a beep on the computer screen, a background glow among the prevailing static.

We can conclude that Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal was an anomaly in Baja California literature in the nineties of the last century. Today, when Mexican literature is made up of countless anomalies, we glimpse the role of herald that Carlos Adolfo played in the state and national literary milieu. A writer from the poetic field and visual poetry who jumped and assaulted Mexican narrative with a fun mix of hypertext, pastiche, academic essay and film script. A fabulist only interested in the mythopoeic process of creating new fables with old waste materials. A young master of contemporary prose who has managed to create incredibly likeable monsters, class-conscious child killers, predators with the heart of cupid, border sybarites a la Wal Mart, who represent the good customs of the best families in our consumer society. By avoiding any moralistic consideration, Gutiérrez Vidal's short novels are a virtual experience of contemporary costumbrismo, a lesson in aristocratic wit in a world where nothing like us ever was. Hence its creative relevance, its narrative effectiveness. The surprising lyricism that sings, without inhibitions, to the shopping way of life, to the idealization of desire as an ephemeral whim, piracy at random, mental zapping. That utopia of the expanding self that is neither born nor dies but is infinitely sold and bought, offered and demanded. Eternal return; perpetual recycling; prose that glosses prose.

Copyright © 2004 Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz. All rights reserved

Carlos Gutierrez Vidal's Desert

These serious “sneers” are very fine poems by a very fine poet, and the commentary to follow can hardly do them justice. I will touch on only a handful of themes, all of which grow from the one fact that Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal is a Mexicali poet.

A comparison of a tendency in the poetry of Tijuana and Mexicali may help explain what this means in practice.

One of the most striking differences between the poetry of Tijuana and Mexicali is the relative absence of reference to a non-human landscape in the poetry of Tijuana. There is a certain logic to this. In much of Tijuana the gaze is limited by sharp changes in elevation, so that the world seen at any moment is within the confines of the man-made. Mexicali, by contrast, sits in the middle of a featureless desert plane, one of the least hospitable places on earth, dusty, unwatered, with sparse vegetation and subject to extremes of climate. So that it's difficult to forget the natural environment. One has the feeling there that the human environment is fragile and contingent, as if the next wind could blow it away. All that would be left is desert and sky, with nothing to cushion one's own fragility.

Desert, when it appears at all in the poetry of Tijuana, usually enters as a rhetorical figure in a moral discussion, drawn not so much from the local environment as from the stock of imagery that the discussion has carried with it from other times and places . It appears as the consequence of an idea rather than as a thing in itself. In the poetry of Mexicali, and overwhelmingly in the poems of Carlos Gutiérrez, the desert is the first premise, the moral discussion its consequence.

One's sense as a newcomer to the desert (and everyone with a memory of elsewhere, which in the Californias means all but the remnant indigenous population, is a newcomer) is that nothing is hidden-one stands in isolation in a spiritual vacuum. There is also the sense that one's self is mercilessly open to scrutiny because there's no place to hide from sight. So the uncomfortable truth of one's vulnerability, one's visibility, one's transience and one's isolation become undeniable. As Carlos tells us repeatedly, consolation is at best questionable.

The three great religions of the desert, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were the invention of people from cities walled to deny the desert's presence who found themselves suddenly outside the walls, and, at the moment that the moral became the metaphysical, they filled the void in which they found themselves with a hidden power—the only hidden thing—that could act as an intermediary and a shelter against the evidence that the landscape presented of their own futility. Three yet very austere religions, at least in the form they took in the deserts of their origins. These are strikingly unpopulated universes, with few of the comforts of the local and the animist familiar in other religions. Their early adherents often turned their backs to human society to walk off into a void that they populated with angels and demons of their own imagining. What they sought to discover was their place as individual consciousnesses. Nothing supported them in the face of what they found there but the obstinacy of their belief.

The landscape of the desert is not Carlos' theme: he is not a poet of nature, and he presents the desert to us by means of surprisingly few details, given its vividness. Rather, the desert is the essential situation of his poetry. It is a radically visual poetry, with constant reference to the gaze. Even sound, which at least in “El Cuervo” plays a dominant role, is treated as an aspect of landscape, the voice of the raven as palpable as rock and sand, and as isolated in the sparse environment. But also, like all voices in these poems, it is spatially dynamic, presented as varying through time and space, and, unlike the existence of the visible, ephemeral. Surrounded by silence, it returns to silence.

Even the intensely social world glimpsed briefly in section three of “Transpasos” is a world more of glances than sounds, brief communications between figures in isolation, finally rendered in visual terms as “a faithful echo of what the wind / writes in the desert at all hours.” Doubly ephemeral-an echo briefly prolonging the visible, the sign, which, we don't need to be told, that the desert will have begun to erase even as it writes.

All figures are in isolation in these poems. The unseen raven is solitary, and “the song is alone and outside the temple.” The mermaid is the only one of her kind. And the speaker of “Naranja” tells us that “we are…an archipelago.”

The poems themselves are built of isolated fragments, making the book its own bleak landscape. It is the site of the moral struggle become metaphysical. If the early mystics went into the desert armed with the certainty that they were made in the image of God Carlos' radical process is to go there unarmed, “leave the skin of the other/ break all the mirrors/ forget the wrong one” (“ Release the brake…"). “We are the bodies of God / the new clothes of another emperor,” he tells us in “Naranja,” as if his irony were designed as an answer to those earlier mystics.

That these poems are theological in intent, or rather, antitheological, is clear from the constant invocation of the terminology of religion: dogma, sin, pride, laziness, exhaustion, refuge, prayer, paradise, doubt, angel, agripnia, God, the fall, communion, epiphany, transfer, and, more coherently, the epigraph that begins “Transfers” and the poem's last thirty lines.

Very few consolations, beyond the sharp beauty of language and image, are offered: “sometimes the sun shines in and they are happy, sometimes a bird is an epiphany” (Transpasos). And “Traspasos,” and the book, end with a great coda of denial, with the mere whisper of a difficult and ambiguous hope:

An open bible implores us for new bonds

What other parents wrote

We are the postponement of what we are

The city gives us a new winter

Copyright © 2001 Mark Weiss. All rights reserved.

If anyone represents the most recent Baja California poetry, it is Carlos Gutiérrez Vidal (Mexicali, 1974). If there is a representative work of the generation of the end of the millennium, that is Nortes (1994). Perhaps because Nortes , the second collection of poems by Gutiérrez Vidal, takes the risk of taking poetic creation as a fragmentary structure, as a video clip of consciousness. In these poems, the images jump, without logic, from one scene to another with a frenetic rhythm. Aesthetics of babbling, of half-finished graffiti, of verses that collide with each other to create sparks of illumination.

Here, in Nortes , words have weight, they mean something more than what they say. Gutiérrez Vidal does not play (although the game exists) with nonsense , with meaninglessness, because even this, the syntactical meaninglessness and the rhythmic counterpoint, have a purpose in the total structure of the poem. Poetry of a disenchanted generation, that lives the crisis of the country as if it were watching a television set on the wrong channel. Poetry of static, of the collective trance, of the daily deal. Its message does not pass through politics but through words that lie. Nothing is certain. Nothing is permanent. Relativity taken to its ultimate consequences.

Nortes is the voice of a youth that neither screams nor despairs, that only waits, with astonishing coldness, for its moment to leap onto the stage of national life. To express what? To express its boredom, its apathy, its sole interest in itself. Gutiérrez Vidal has written, like few Mexican poets, a manifesto of non-desire, a proclamation of non-responsibility, the chronicle of the rebel whose cause is not to rebel, not to reveal. Verbal hermeticism, perfect symbolism.

For Baja California literature, Nortes is a leap forward, a shock. The first sign of a poetry that does not need to cover itself with the prestigious mantle of the border or be the spokesperson for a specific community. Carlos Gutiérrez's collection of poems has broken with such creative schemes. These poems only respond to poetry itself. Its battlefield is not history (as in José Javier Villarreal) or painful spirituality (as in Gloria Ortiz), but language, its games, its traps, its riddles. Language as a mirror where the poet measures himself against the world. Language as a puzzle: to be assembled and disassembled and put back together again. And so on to infinity. Or at least until Gutiérrez Vidal manages to reach another poetic stage, another greater creative space. For now, Nortes is an exemplary achievement, a challenge for his entire generation.

Text taken from Baja Californian Literature of the 20th Century. Editorial Larva, Mexicali, 1997.

Copyright © 1997 Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz. All rights reserved.

From the sarcophagus

In him there is no immediate contagion that would give rise to countless more or less eventual simulations. His concept of the poetic enigma is articulated in reflection. His poems are accidental coffins where death, enigma of enigmas, is still subject to a thousand transformations. Death is the inverse metaphor of reality because it is the ultimate refuge of knowledge. There, rather than opening, doors break, doubts and regrets crack, and revenge against the miseries and appearances of the real world begins. I would dare to say that Gutiérrez Vidal's poetry is a posteriori.

Disillusionment prevails perhaps because the poet has established a distance between himself and his objects, which allows him to interpret his visions without altering or minimizing them. However, the symbol of death is not the product of weariness or of a renunciation whose resistance is based on a principle of spiritual emancipation. Rather, Gutiérrez Vidal accesses another dynamic. He needs to make accounts but from a metaphysical distance. He yearns, however, for a candid rebirth where the visions are once again quite dazzling. Meanwhile, the turbidity persists and reason freezes the most memorable memories.

There is no mirror in which to look at oneself, no experience that does not result in a frenzied disillusionment. That is why its images are static and concentric, and are complemented by a random concept that, rather than defining, unleashes new stigmas and new darkness. Light is a bygone idea that only acquires meaning when it is preceded by a flagrant dark impact.

In Gutiérrez Vidal there remains a demonic pleasure for beauty understood as a counterpoint to the substance of horror. Beliefs systematically collapse, dreams become abysses and life passes only at the expense of memory. Death, so close and so far away at the same time, is a possible state of recovery from which one yearns because primary visions are reinvented. Nostalgia reigns in the face of the imminence of return.

From the sarcophagus, supreme image of non-time and non-presence, the possibility of a subtle, perhaps more emancipated blossoming is induced. The enigma is there, because it is there that it is delimited or amplified forever. Everything else is an illusion, an intangible appearance that disappears when trying to capture it. Ordinariness, then, becomes nothing more than an illusory game that arouses beliefs while hiding evidence.

I must confess that there is no example in young Mexican poetry similar to that of Gutiérrez Vidal in defining and limiting the field restricted exclusively to his subject matter, especially in his first venture. Nor do I care to know what the guidelines of his art will be. What I do know is that Sarcófagos is a closed universe that possesses sufficient conceptual and imaginative richness that, without a doubt, places it as an exceptional case.

Text read during the presentation of Sarcófagos and published in the Nostromo supplement of the newspaper Siglo 21, on Sunday, November 28, 1993.

Copyright © 1993 Daniel Sada. All rights reserved