Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

To do this he chose to use an old 4×5 camera.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"The detail that is attained by using such large negatives would provide an extraordinary view into the emotional and spiritual lives of the last indigenous peoples of the world."

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"At the same time, it would glorify their varying and unique cultural creativity with their painted faces, scarified bodies, jewellery, extravagant hairstyles and ritual language.”

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

He called the book, "Before they pass away."

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Lost Steps

 

Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps (Los Pasos Perdidos) tells the story of a mestizo who forsakes his roots in Latin America and how he strives - and ultimately fails - to reconnect with them.

 

He is a composer, who as a student dreamt of discovering the forgotten source of music - theorizing that music came from imitating the sounds of nature - birdsong, animal cries, running water, wind and thunder. In essence he loses his soul to Hollywood. He takes the money, but feels empty and unfulfilled.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Through the intervention of his old tutor, he reluctantly accepts a commission to journey from the mouth to the source of the Orinoco. In undertaking this journey, he moves through time as well as space. His guide is an old man called the Adelantado, from whom he begins to acquire an altered perspective on past, present and future. In an obscure village at the headwaters of the river, he discovers a "lost" tribe who in physiology seem closer to Neanderthals than ourselves. He hears their music, and confirms his theory.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

He falls in love with a woman of the tribe, and begins to compose a symphony he entitles Threnody which he describes as “a magic song intended to bring a dead person back to life.” He is of course describing himself.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 23, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

Then, absurdly, he runs out of paper - which means he will be unable to complete his symphony. Then he makes a terrible, tragic mistake. He feels he must return to New York to sever his ties there before returning permanently to the tribe and the woman he loves. And now he sees the city - civilization - with different eyes. Carpentier describes his reaction in a wonderful passage of lyrical prose...

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"The Adelantado had taught me that the greatest challenge a person can meet is that of forging his or her destiny. Because here, amidst the multitudes that surrounded me and rushed madly and submissively, I saw many faces and few destinies."

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"And this was because, behind these faces, every deep desire, every act of revolt, every impulse was hobbled by fear."

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"Fear of rebuke, of time, of the news, of the collectivity that multiplied its forms of slavery. There was fear of one’s own body, of the sanctions and pointing fingers of publicity; there was fear of the womb that opens to the seed, fear of the fruits and of the water; fear of the calendar, fear of the law, fear of slogans, fear of mistakes, fear of the sealed envelope, fear of what might happen…"

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"…I was here tonight as a bird of passage, remembering the future, the vast land of possible Utopias, the possible Icarias."

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"Because my trip had upset my ideas of past, present, future. This could not be the present, which would be yesterday before humanity had been able to live and contemplate it; this chill geometry without style, where everything grew weary and old a few hours after birth, could not be the present."

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"Now I believed only in the present of the intact; in the future of that which was created face to face with the planets of Genesis."

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But when he returns (with a suitcase full of blank paper), he finds that the woman and the tribe, have vanished.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

These are the lost steps.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]