this must be the place
*on new-old belonging
Hey—happy New Year!
I always find the idea of the new year so exciting. I like it because a new year always comes with a reset—a reset of resolutions, ideas, good habits in, bad habits out. A reset of purposes. But what I find most comforting about the new year’s reset is noticing how the new patterns are just extended versions of the previous ones. Every “new” is based on an “old.” A new thought won’t exist if you haven’t thought the old thought enough to realize you needed a newer version of it. A new style wouldn’t emerge if you hadn’t realized that the previous one no longer suited you. Even a groundbreaking, innovative movie wouldn’t exist without the cinematic heritage that others have explored before. The two side of the same coin, isn’t it?
And then there are things that keep coming back—they always feel new, even if they’re old. Like songs. Some songs are old, but they always feel new somehow. Or maybe just right at different times. Either way, they feel new.
Among those songs, one stands out—always feeling new yet carrying me back to an old, cherished story. Whenever I hear it, I don’t think of my own connection to the song. Instead, I’m reminded of a story a dear friend once shared with me - the old story that they have with the song. So I asked them to write down their story—not just for me, but for us, for this collective belief that “kindness is not dead.” And this is what they wrote.
“This Must Be the Place”—or as I see it, a good old reset for the new year. Like a ritual for a new-old season of belonging. Belonging to new places, while grounding with ourselves and our people.
I hope you will enjoy as much as I did - several years ago, just like today.
When I was invited to write about (the short sentence? the idea? the feeling?) 'this must be the place' I knew exactly what I was asked about.
It was June 2014, and I was attending a school ‘best students’ award ceremony (best in maths, best in French, ...). We (I wonder, now, if all of us or only the students expected to win) were asked to choose a song to be played in case we'd been called on stage to collect an award.
I chose This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), the 1983 (in 2014 I was 17, in 1983 not even a plan) song by The Talking Heads and, in the middle of the night, the song was played. I remember the feeling of getting up from my chair and walking towards the podium to collect the award vibing to the song. I remember the sense of confusion of my peers who had only chosen commercial successes of the moment, wondering what unfamiliar song was playing and who had made such an unpopular choice. I also remember how strongly I wanted to be and be perceived as different from anyone else in the room.
Ten years later (while writing this, I realise bigger celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the 'This Must be the Place Prize' should occur) I often think about that episode and the desire to adapt the soundtrack of my life to how I wanted it to be (or be perceived, at least). And, to be honest, I still feel the need to create fictions that meet and exceed the reality I live. I still think that, with a little creative effort, I can rethink and reshape events and bring more excitement to them.
It is a time in which I'm writing a lot. For work (a lot), for pleasure (a little). I'm editing other people's writing a lot (for work but it is often also a pleasure), too. This leads me to find myself often translating into text what I'm experiencing in real life. Not just linguistically - we all do that, language is the first tool we use to make sense of the physical world we experience and act within - but into proper, structured, and stylistically glossy texts. Something, eventually trivial, that I recently found myself thinking about is that reality is dense, full, even saturated with events that seem to be inspired by or might eventually inspire fiction.
One morning, a few weeks ago, I woke up and my spotify premium account was disabled. We later found out my friend managing our spotify family had been suspended for recording an entire audiobook for her (now ex) partner trying to have them learning Italian without owning, of course, any reproduction rights. I recently (tipsily) walked into an exhibition opening and met a friend who I hadn't seen in ages and we have been hanging out all the time since then doing all the things we missed in the last year: we had dinners; we went to the movies and the theatre; I saw him performing a butô-inspired (a Japanese contemporary dance style associated with the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno) duet; we went for drinks; I introduced him to all my friends; we talked breakups and current projects and future hopes. In a perfect Elena Ferrante character's style, another friend told me she couldn't stand the feeling of being pregnant and knowing another human was inside of her (she is a wonderful mother, I swear). Another friend (I’m lucky, I have many) temporarily moved to the other side of the city to take care of someone else's parrot while they were on vacation. Somebody climbed the rooftop terrace of my house and now a Palestinian flag waves on the windiest days.
The thing is, I needed (and still need) fiction to decipher reality, both because there is no reality in fiction and everything in fiction is about reality. While I was making so much effort to fictionalise reality, I realised it was already better (better as in the 'fiction' category) than any fiction I could think of. The truth is there is so much beauty and horror and pain and love in the pieces of fiction we consume that sometimes I find it hard to recognise all the beauty and horror and pain and love which reality is full of. Here, in the physical world, they are not told, they need to be experienced. And it is way harder, more beautiful, and complex.
This is where the question of place returns, but 'this must be the place' is not a question. It is a statement, almost an order (I like to think it that way). Remember - this must be the place. Even before fiction: this has always been the place.