I am lying in bed, waiting for Clara. I am positively esurient. My senses are all atumble. I taste the music and hear the quilts blazing on the walls and see Clara on my skin. So does hunger rearrange one, to say nothing of how it loosens the mind in the way it devours thoughts. I get up from the bed and then am nearly tossed back onto it by what the Shostakovich cello sonata does to my feet. It sounds like a piece of this fractured city that’s been torn out and cast up to this peaceful halidom, bullets shot at the pavement to make you dance. Its anarchy is perfect for me now. I am free of everything but desire. And there are those who believe that this was the last piece Shostakovich himself wrote as a free artist, before his music was condemned as “fidgeting, screaming, neurasthenic, and messy” because it was created to no political purpose. And to this I say, it would have been political had he never written it down but merely heard it in his head.
