When summer arrives , in addition to the heat, the sense of pause and suspension, leisure, fun, escape, one of the things that accompanies us, from the 60s of the twentieth century to today, is the so-called catchphrase, or the ( or, in the richer periods) songs that accompany those weeks that are theoretically 'carefree'.
'A summer at the sea' by Giuni Russo - text by Franco Battiato and music by Giusto Pio - was one of these and contains, in the words he uses and in the atmosphere he evokes ('This summer we will go to the seaside for the holidays / A summer at the sea / Feel like rowing / Swimming off the coast / To see umbrellas from afar) all the characteristic elements of the summer imagination, especially after a winter and a spring of lockdown and restrictions.
Even in that moral fable that is ' Autumn, spring, summer and more autumn' , Kim Ki-duk 's 2003 film that tells the formation of a Buddhist monk through the seasons of his life, summer is that of transgression, in which the young monk gives in to temptation and then flees from the hermitage The changing of the seasons has marked the life of man since ancient times and for this reason their succession, indeed their own creation, is attributed to the gods: Thot, the time measurer, in Egypt, in Greece Zeus , who naturally gives birth to someone, in this case the goddess Temi, and the demiurge Prajapati in India, who instead creates them through the word. This alternation marks the cycle of death and rebirth and traditionally starts with spring which is precisely primus ver (from Sanskrit vas), which means to shine, to illuminate.
In this context, summer, at least in the northern hemisphere, that is, the portion of Earth north of the equator, is the season of the explosion, of the full and dazzling light and of the heat that precedes the fall of autumn. On the other hand, its etymology leaves no doubt: the word derives from the Latin aestus which, like the Greek aitho, ardo, descends from the Indo-European root idh which means to burn, ignite, inflame. Aithos means tanned by the heat and the sun and Aithiopos, Ethiopian is the man with the burnt face. It is not difficult to think what Etna's derivation is, for example. The images that literally assault us when we pronounce these expressions are those of the ears of golden wheat, the verse of the cicadas or the throbbing scales of the sea under the bright sun recalled by Eugenio Montale in 'Meriggiare pallido e assorto' .
But, as we have often said, etymology is not everything. So, for once, before the summer break precisely, before letting the words rest and laze in the warm summer afternoon sun, at least for a few weeks, let's try to play a bit with the word, more than we have done till now. There are in fact words that resemble each other, almost by magic, even without deriving from the same root. At the beginning of Into the wild , Sean Penn's film based on the true story of a boy who runs away from his family and civilian life to look for himself in Alaska, there is a poem by George Byron, the Pilgrimage of young Aroldo: ' There is a joy in the unexplored woods, there is an ecstasy on the lonely beach '. Here is the word that looks like summer: ecstasy .
And Byron is not the only one who approaches them, the list would be very long (and on the other hand what is Meriggiare pale and absorbed if not a form of rural ecstasy?). Me is an irregular Italian scholar, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli , who died at the age of 60 in 1989, psychically relating them in a book called The ecstatic mind and which opens with the chapter On the beach , in which Fachinelli puts to fire that instant at the same time of torpor and lucid lighting favored by being at rest on a deckchair hypnotized in front of what he defines 'the ribbon of the sea'. We used the expression 'carefree' before.
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/40094662
Speaking of traces of the closeness between ecstasy and summer, in 'The things they think', a song by the so-called according to Battisti , that of the collaboration with Pasquale Panella , which we have already mentioned here, is said and sung with the usual calembours: ' On a sweet tedium on a deckchair / Love I ignored you / Instead I skirted / The lungomai / M'estasiai / you will extinguish '. A more traditional approach to summer, which summarizes many of the pleasant clichés that we know, just like the song by Giuni Russo, is that of a vintage Renato Zero , Spiagge , where there is also space between so much 'blue' for a 'whore' summer.
