Band Of Susans
The Word And The Flesh

I happened to wake up for two months in a row with a neon light giving me the feeling of being locked in one of those cells where they keep you strapped in a straitjacket. I also had shaved hair and the sensation of being a bit sick, anemic. I hoped my hair would grow back. The artificial glow of a room entirely "comfrot chiamadonne" made me wake up with a start, with my left rib cage deformed by the fraudulent pulsations of a heart over which I had lost all control. I always forgot not to do it, damn it, yet it happened: after realizing I was somehow still alive, I'd curse, pull my shriveled four bones up and head toward the window, open the curtain, and an anthracite gray nebula would whir violently against the glass. Outside, you couldn't see a damn thing. For me, there was so much darkness inside and outside that I thought the neon was a punitive mirage.

I was in the middle of winter on a Northern European island, no one knew, I had closed all connections with Italy, I was twenty-one and already felt the urgency to come to terms with myself. I hadn't had who knows what, but I had managed to procure so much from life that I was fairly bored with everything and everyone. Not knowing what I wanted or what to do with myself, I called home to inform them of my immediate departure without adding anything else. An hour later, I was on board a plane departing at zero cost (really zero) on September 13, 2001. Just see how many circumstances revolved around two fallen towers.

So there I was. I knew no one would look for me. It wasn't disinterest; it was just that they knew me well: when I made drastic decisions, there was only to await a definitive answer. That's how I operated. This choice had been difficult to make. It cost me several pounds, many tears, a lot of willingness to live: I was under the barrel and scraping to try to smash through the bottom and get back inside. But I didn't understand what the roots of my inner sickness were, the sudden absence of stimuli, the gnawing worm that ate me up inside.

I lived with that worm for a good while. Of course, I took it with me and heard it gnawing hungrily when, after only two days of stay, I had procured a very respectable contract to work the usual eight hours a day with truly extraordinary overtime in my paycheck at the end of every month.

The recruiter in front of me told me I had to immediately transfer my university enrollment there because I'd make a career. The sign atop the building was one of those names known across the entire world. After a month, I was sure of it; I was working well and earning even better. I could stay here, I told myself. But it wasn't what I wanted. I had given myself a sharp demonstration of somehow being able to manage, but the worm had fattened, and I, instead, had lost weight. The mirror continually gave more negative responses. Above all, the eyes: although in that icy-whipped land they were still seductive, they no longer had the usual effect on me. I saw nothing of my past twenty years without hardly ever sleeping, of the people, all the people, I had known. The last ones had seen me on the very evening of departure, and then I was no longer there. Who knows what the hell they thought. The only escape was the weekend when I'd rent a salmon-colored Opel Corsa for a pittance and roam this island where human presence was indeed something unusual. The roar of waters, wind, sparse grass, and a tremendous fog. You had to go out well dressed if you didn't want to be devoured by nothingness. I had no other escapes. The midweek ones were, more than anything else, deceptive emergency exits that you took at five in the afternoon leading directly to some strange type of inn where you could do nothing but get badly drunk and then call a taxi to take you back. This had become my life. A spiral staircase to a bottomless cave that I descended with my head down. At least that. I have always faced my problems, even those of unknown causes. I had nothing behind me that could mentally lead me back to familiar people. I neither wrote nor called anyone. I wanted to get out of it alone, but I couldn't manage.

It was precisely on my worst days on this island, which bore the weight of my drift, that the person who had chosen me, at precisely four fifty-nine, stopped me and told me to stop drinking, with a face that threw "you're-disgusting-yourself" face. As he walked away, I muttered something like tell me everything you think to my face. But he had just done it. For the first time, I would have wanted the emptying corridor to be full. That evening I went home immediately. With great coldness, I prepared a dinner that would have been perfect by candlelight. The guest was that other part of me. When everything was ready, I was a dirty rag to be thrown away. I wanted to vent somehow. I let myself be seized by the utmost unconsciousness and decided I needed a woman. I tried calling a foreign colleague who seemed good and dressed in the most modest clothes of the entire show. I didn't really know her, but it seemed she'd been waiting for that call for a long time. I acted gallantly and sent her a taxi. Of all the Italian cooking I had improvised, what she liked most was the only family item I had brought with me. A daguerreotype with my great-great-grandparents that is still intact with me. In short, the dinner was trash, but there were openings to say something to each other. Like how my great-great-grandfather looked very gruff with mustaches weighing three kilos per whisker. To myself, I thought aloud, wondering what her Viking must have been like. Chatting took us to the time to turn on the stereo and put on the rock radio of that area. They played a track by Band Of Susans. I asked her to change it as it brought me down. She did and said, what are you doing here?

The next day, there was a disc for me on my desk. Band Of Susans - The Word And The Flesh.

Finally, a stimulus, obviously met with all the diffidence, negativity, shock, and annoyance possible, but finally something to take in. I worked terribly that day. Because I spent it thinking about that anthracite gray nebula outside the window, which was the first thing that came to mind after listening to a few seconds of a track. A track that seemed to animate that tortured swirl of watery air. I didn't see her that day. I would only see her again on my penultimate day on the island.

Returning home, everything was okay. I had become tidy. I decided to fill my stomach to prevent gastritis from hitting hard. In the end, I even drank a big Italian liter snagged from the most expensive shop in the city. I entered the trip, and it really was one: if gastritis reactivated, I didn't even feel it.

It has been, to date, my most intimate and personal listening of an album. Maybe now, so much time later, I don't even think about it with the same intensity as in the early years, but as soon as I dig a little, everything comes flooding back. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this review. It was a convulsive yet still listening, I was on the couch as I understood that many things would soon change in my life.

The Word And The Flesh hit me hard. It seemed like a four-chord album to me, who thought of entirely different music, and yet it was such a well-thought-out album it felt like a discourse by my philosopher uncle. Maybe the chords for the guitar are four in total, but there was (I like to use here the "infantile" imperfect identified by Gianni Rodari - see Grammar of Fantasy) a clear project inside, a cyclic scientificity of recalls to sadness in various forms. I managed to see all of mine and had so many things clearer. It's an album that revolves around high abstractions grabbing at the guts, having something archaic and ancestral within. I don't know why, but it made me think of the aborigines, those seemingly simple and primordial populations that have a very direct contact with the truth. Inside, there's a multiplicity of textures that laid a warm plot over me. And to say that I expected it cold. With the fragile guitar walls, Band Of Susans went to clash with that fog they apparently evoked, crossing it and creating a passage I had to take advantage of. These damn guitars engaged in high-engineering passages bringing me back to the kraut, while in other instances they downright melted taking a very first hint of shoegaze flavor. It's cataloged as a noise / alternative album, and that's acceptable. But on the noise side, there's a restraint that is only sporadically violated, and it stands firm, like in an incessant marathon, reminding you that despite everything, the finish line might be just behind the last ounce of solid fog, and for this, you can't see it. Never trust truckloads of feedback and reverb. There's almost always something behind it. And that something no longer scared me. That melancholy sung became the awareness of being sad and unable to stay in those shoes anymore. Those ballads for little struggling me became fuel for my following days.

Finally, let's start from the day after. I called the landlord and settled all the bills, leaving a generous amount for any additional costs and upcoming bills. I called work. I had the HR office explain how to leave without making a big mess. I prepared all the documents at home. Then I spent about five hours on the phone. Five hours. I swear. Making that call and always hanging up. Always. But after five hours, I did it and let it ring. I said only and all in one go: I'm leaving here. make me a return ticket for day so-and-so send me the details by email bye and sorryyyyyyyyyy. I hung up. I received all the necessary instructions for a truly hallucinatory flight the next day. I hadn't made the ticket because I didn't want to wander around too much. I wanted to prepare, turn on the last lights, give explanations to those who surely had been very worried about me.

The day before leaving, I went to say goodbye to the shelter and had dinner with her again. It only happened that I discovered having, from that day, a Nordic perspective on the events of my life. And I assure you that's quite a fortune, as it still lasts today.

Then I left. There was no need for explanations. Two days later, I was already in a position to recover. I slowed down myself. The step back was still harder than the one taken to leave. From that album, I only know I derived an immense love for all music, which since then I've always listened to without prejudice, and the best life lesson that wasn't mine but my father's. Zero words, just a beautiful support. If I hadn't listened to that album, who knows what I would be today.

Fuck depression. I didn't understand it, but I tore it to pieces in about an hour, just as long as the album lasts.