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Carlos Obregón, or the silent vision of a submerged world

14 januari 2011
Carlos Obregón is a rara avis in Colombian poetry. He has not been duly acknowledged, and his corpus is particular, both in terms of expression and of concerns. Obregón is a writer who embodies the angst of being, celebrating “the daily gravitation”. His poetry reflected his inner turbulence, that ceaseless quest amidst the debris of a terrifying culture, a Colombia torn by its political and murderous stolidity.
In 1948, when Obregón was nineteen, the liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was killed. Within the context of a Catholic tradition, the young poet already carried a burden of angst and questions, which would increase his desire for nothingness and his return to the vast landscape of spectres that was his childhood. His name is associated with the generation of poets associated with Mito magazine – a generation which some have called “the truncated generation”, since its representative poets, Jorge Gaitán Durán and Eduardo Cote Lamus, both died young (and both tragically – Gaitán Durán in a plane crash and Cote Lamus in a car accident), leaving work in progress, yet being very difficult to surpass, especially in the case of Gaitán Durán, within Colombian poetry. Carlos Obregón also left this world at a very young age (he committed suicide at the age of 33), while in voluntary exile in Majorca, Spain.

His work shows an obsessive concern with nothingness, time, the void, the dance of the shapes that lurk in his visions. He is a poet focused on introspection, and for whom writing and the poem were salvation, the only tool for discovering the way towards thought’s lost shape. His philosophical concerns morphed into a poetic language whose poems have a peculiar presence. His writing is like nobody else’s. He stands alone before a “tradition” seeped in a versified rhetoric, and his inner trepidation is existential.

His first work was the result of great inner conjectures about the sacred and the divine. Its very title, Distancia destruida (Destroyed Distance), shows a metaphysical concern with presence, with the space which, joined to extension, invokes eternity and the void. Published in 1957 in Madrid (Spain), it is a 27-poem sequence which constitutes a free-verse book, whose impeccable poems display an elevated, mystically inclined spirit, attuned to very peculiar tunes and rhythms, without precedent in Colombia. In the first poem, he tells us:

        Silent vision of a submerged world
        the shape of my thought I have lost


And further into the same poem:

        I am the poet who looks on nothingness,
        I look on people – vague and sleepy –
        and, looking on people, I look on nothingness.
      
       . . .

        I see a dancing fire flower
        and a singing bird,
        singing and dancing
        to the aboulic rhythm, the acronical rhythm of nothingness
        and I feel in my being that anguish, that rhythm, that nothingness.


All his visions merge into a longed-for night, a night in which abolishing the distance is possible. It is a night for the initiated only, or in fact perhaps the other side of the night, a place where several poets have arrived through painful experience that distances them from the immediate world. They experience the heartbeats of that other night, the night of a bottomless, shoreless night, from which one returns to be wounded by the day’s tricks and afflictions. In his poems, Obregón asks about that night:

        Where is the night that my night sought?
        Where was the being in the night that is?


Distancia destruida is a navigational chart of the poet’s vision-filled eye, a temple of language attuned to the nerves of light. It is the voice of a mystic, of a poet asking himself the essential questions.

       Full night of the soul,
       borderless silence possessed in his body
       and the voice abducted
       between the last bays of the true name
      
In face of the quest for the true name, there is only one possible panorama: silence. And the poet demands:

        Silence, name for silence

         . . .

       This is the day for the highest alliance


In the night of Carlos Obregón there is a silvery, lightning-like light, arising from the tempests of a question-ridden being. This posing of questions, which brings him close to philosophy and metaphysics, acquires its light in the poem. The poet thinks through writing poetry or writes poetry  as he thinks, because he has entered into “the highest alliance” with the mystery, with divinity, with the body.

The poetry of Carlos Obregón is the song of the exile that tells us: “Returning is travelling towards the perennial shape / lying in the dark side of stones. / Each instant brings with it its exile”.

This exile has come to the earth to sing, in other words, to talk to us about essential issues, “to praise the hidden liturgy of things / and continue singing, without purpose, alive for the angel”. It is the message of someone placed “at the borders of language”, who prepares himself for listening to the song of the naked women in the river: “Holy is the wind, / holy is the earth when the sun gilds it”. This awareness of the sacred runs through Distancia destruida. It is the awareness of a poet for whom “Sacred is the border of the night: / to be lost forever and to find oneself now”.

After completing Distancia destruida in 1956, there was a time of deeper inner trepidation out of which his next collection, Estuario (Estuary), grew, with poems written in Deyá, Ibiza, Morocco, Paris, Poblet and Toledo, between 1957 and 1960. It was published in 1961 in Palma, Majorca. Save for the poems in ‘Cantos’, all the poems are short, unlike those published in Distancia destruida.

In Estuario we witness a fulguration – it is a fiery book, in which again burn the night, the soul, the angel, light, love, time, absence, the sea, space and the body – essential archetypes which shape his imagery and experience:

        Love, like fire, is born
        of itself and in itself
        unfolding towards the eternal
        recreating its substance
        in perpetual ecstasy
        dawn of shining discovery
        love that is a fire blossom


There is a cosmology underlying his deep verses, a perception of the universe from high contemplation, which in the sidereal night invades the soul’s chambers like a swift wind pushing through swing doors:

        The contemplated night falls upon the eyes
        with the patience of stars
        seeks its dwelling on the flesh’s border
        and abandons in the soul its destiny
        of defeated sea among angels and abysses.


Estuario is a profound and demanding book. It invites the reader to sharpen his or her senses and let him- or herself be carried away by the stream of its similes and carefully described perceptions: a sacred phenomenology, “because only this full and vibrant spring source remains / when the body recedes into the wind / and sinks into the sun ritual that makes it up”. It is his great poetry collection; it is, together with Distancia destruida and other unpublished and uncollected poems, his great legacy.

Obregón’s brief corpus was sublimely made and shining in its spirituality. Its imagery reveals the dimension of a great man, through whose writing poetry in Colombia became  authentic, and presents us with a peculiar landscape, an inner geography “forged on the anvil of the most solid spirit”.
© Jairo Guzmán
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