...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 she
had preferred a sort of emotional frozen calmness that makes
her similar to a coral-shell.
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