...envelopped by the waves, dragged by the streams of the rivers, sucked by the gloomy overflowings of the lakes the echo of the up and down of many female souls repeats itself an infinite number of times, we've heard that dirge, we've made of it some songs and we are repeating the same tune like the echo of an echo to you, oh listener...
Ondine were nymphs of the streams, of the marshes, of the lacustrine surfaces, they were both women and Goddesses, a medley far from perfection, Ondine could kill dragging us in the whirlpool of their pain and death, always consumed by water, Ondine could love passionately, just like women, with all the sublime burden of the primordial instinct coming from the water and the earth.
Ondine it's also a curse, the neurologists describe it as an apnoea that happens while sleeping, if someone doesn't wake-up in time it will probably wake-up somewhere else, anchored to the seaweeds braids of a deep sea or stranded on a branckish smell beach.
We've caught the lament of so many mermaids who feed themselves spasmodically and greedily with their own pasts, when they were of bones and flesh and now you're going to listen to the tragic legend of who is born (just after death) like an Ondina many centuries ago, in reality, someone really existed, someone else was portrayed in some books or simply perceived in our dreams.
The first is Medusa whose hair of snakes creates figures in movement, then there's Sybil a young woman persecuted by religion and thrown with burdens at her feet in the cold waters of a river, after you'll meet Blanche who spent only one ecstatic wedding night before dying and Annabell Lee who rests buried in the billows with the beloved husband at her side, you can meet Astimelusa victim of a shipwreck or Flora who is born again modulating herself in the womb of the earth, June has become a star while Lubna is wandering blue like her house the sea, Ophelie made of a river her first wedding bed and Lucretia, conscious of the perpetrated iniquities, serves the never ending punishment, Ligeia, cynically, puts death above all as a mechanicistic necessity that unifies the human race while Ondine, the last, is just the pure spirit of the sea, the spirit of the endless movement of a female soul, our waving restless spirit...
There is our chant of pity and remembrance for all those lost spirits, this is our chant of regret to smooth the struggle of all those female souls, may they rest in peace...
We have been deeply inspired by the book "Dialogues with Leuco" of the Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese. It's an emblematic representation of the contrasting feelings, suffering and tedium of the human beings all filtered through the imaginary of the classic Greek mithology. The most striking passages are the ones in which the suicidal Sappho (dead because she had chosen to love) has a dramatic dialogue with the 'emotionally-dead' water nimph Britomarti who had decided to die just because he had preferred a sort of emotional frozen calmness that makes her similar to a coral-shell.