Renato Zero
Ed io ti seguirò

THE REVIEW

There are moments in life when anything can truly happen, despite your resistance and your struggle to understand.

You find yourself in situations that seem to push you back into the arms of your twenties, alone, with no more certainties, less enthusiasm, and far fewer years ahead to find a solution.

Today I went for a run; thank heavens, recently, I have been getting back into shape after the physical decline of the early pandemic period.

Don't ask me why, but lately, I've started listening to old tracks from, believe it or not, Renato Zero (actually, I know why, it ties into the story hinted at earlier, but I’ll stop here) and I did so again this morning, running with headphones on the seafront.

An excellent app installed on the phone is an ideal support to monitor your physical activity.

Now I'm listening to “Ed io ti seguirò”, in my opinion one of the most “suggestive” songs of our "Marc Bolan contaminated by the Gospel" (as I have defined elsewhere on this site), from the album “Artide e Antartide”, from 1981, when I was a sixteen-year-old kid.

We are at the 3:11 mark:

“Stay here, a man is too alone, I was that gold seeker, for me every conquest is uncertainty but what bitterness if after pain you don’t know ...”.

Exactly simultaneously, a voice begins:

“Covered.. 3.. kilometers in..24.9.. minutes, average..8.3.. minutes per …”.

An acceptable result given my not so youthful age, but it so happens that the part of the song I like the most is covered by this mechanical voice that silences and contrasts incredibly annoyingly, those ellipses intensify the problem further, with Renato Zero's full-of-passion singing.

But the most exciting part of the song is yet to come, I wait with anticipation for the last ellipses to find a resolution.

“..Kilometer!”.

"..Love".

It's done, by a hair. These also are the magical circumstances, one must know how to recognize and appreciate them.

I have always adored the chorus of this song, that “Ed io ti seguirò nuotando nel tuo mare” which seems like throwing oneself into flight from the top of a mountain after having reached its snowy peak.

And that final guitar solo, those notes up and down in the air, seem like the song of a flock of birds accompanying that flight.

In a book by Daniel Dennett read recently, the author describes the magic of recognizing, in some special circumstances, the perfect harmony that sometimes governs the universe.

He was in his house reading in front of a window opening to a tree and its leaves moved by the wind.

I discovered one this morning, just as the mechanical voice, also part of the Universe like all things, stopped speaking and the chorus could take flight.

Let's allow the implicit (and often invisible) harmony of the Universe and everything (perhaps) will resolve.

Greetings to all.