- Eddy + Karl ?
Source : Hugo Dumas
Biography of the cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and a review of his book Journey Back To The Source.
"Can modern man, knowing it is possible to do so, escape the pitfalls of his epoch?", is Carpentier's formulation of the central question of his novel, The Lost Steps. His protagonist, loosely based on the author himself, is a failed musician and out-of-work musicologist trapped in an empty passionless marriage who eventually decides to join a budding community on the fringes Amazon river.
Before deciding to take his journey into Amazon in search of primitive instruments as part of a research grant, the protagonist offers this description of his lament to his reader:
"Like the sinner who empties into the confessional the dark sack of his iniquities and lusts, deriving from talking ill of himself a kind of pleasure that verges on self-abomination, I painted for my teacher, in the foulest colors, with the blackest dyes, the uselessness of my life, its tumultuous days, its reckless nights"
Does the life offered in the middle of the South American wilderness, with the tribes which border the Amazon river, provide a valid alternative to an aesthetically focused effete or is an outsider bound by temperament to his or her original setting and historical consciousness?
And what exactly is the difference between his life in the jungle and his life "back there"? He describes their philosophical position as a kind de-stigmatized fatalism. A fatalism that does not have, as part of its conception, a sense of "failure to live up to one's potential" as laborer, employee, or citizen.
βThere was no doubt that the nature surrounding us was implacable, terrible, in spite of its beauty. But those whose life was spent with it found it less evil, more friendly, than the terrors and alarms, the cold cruelties, the never-ending threats of the world back there. Here the plagues, the possible sufferings, the natural dangers were accepted as a matter of course; they formed part of an Order that had its severity. Creation is no laughing matter, and they all knew this instinctively and accepted the role each of them had been assigned in the great tragedy of livingβ
Another element of the protagonists' conception of these tribes is a kind of totemic, atavistic, mythology based solely on the personal conscious experience of nature. This is not an experience that is somehow irrevocably lost to an outsider. Here is an example of the renewed consciousness available to those neo-luddites who deny the excessively rationalistic society engendered by the intellectuals of the 19th and
... keep reading on reddit β‘
DOI/PMID/ISBN: 10.1136/heartjnl-2020-317202
I'm in September 1971 in my Territory Daze save as WWWF. At the start of the save in January 1970, I brought in 44-year-old former (disputed) NWA World Heavyweight Champion Edouard Carpentier to the promotion for a bit of star power. Pretty quickly I booked him to win the WWWF World Junior Heavyweight Championship, and he went on a 5 month run as champion.
He was due to drop the belt to up and comer Pedro Morales a month or two later, but I wasn't quite ready for him to drop the belt just yet. However, during a routine title defense against Sputnik Monroe on live television he suffered a C5 Cervical Spinal Cord Rupture, an audible was called and Monroe quickly ended the match, becoming the new champion.
Carpentier was sidelined for 14 months. He's an incredible worker, so I didn't want to drop him as I often do if a lesser worker gets shelved for a long time. Have faith, I said. Eddie C will be back eventually and he will get his redemption arc.
The game offered me surgery but it said it was at extreme risk. I didn't want to kill the guy, or make him a paraplegic for life by botching the surgery, so I let time heal things. Eddie could have as long as he needed.
In the meantime I brought in the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Champion, Peter Maivia, on an exclusive contract and 'stole' the belt by creating a new one with the same name and awarding it to Maivia. This belt is now on Ivan Koloff, and Carpentier's title is on Pat Patterson.
His recovery period was almost over. I added him back in the Junior Heavyweight title storyline. He was going to go over both Koloff AND Patterson at the next event and unify the two Junior Heavyweight belts. I'd been preparing for his return for months.
On the day he was due to return to active competition, Edouard Carpentier instead retired from the ring due to injury.
I wish there was a way I could make him retire from life right now.
