Sieve of Melody

I began writing piano music when I was a student at the conservatory for a few girls in my class, the ones who captivated me with their severity & those cunning glances they passed to one another. I named each piece after their initials. I never knew if they played them or hummed them aloud in the shower or burnt them in steel baskets. You should have played them, he said. No, I was too shy, besides, getting any one of those girls alone in a room was impossible unless you were the teacher in which case you had full possession of their time. They would hardly speak to anyone else. I entered a competition my last year there with a sonata. I played it blindfolded before the committee & stood up afterwards & bowed before a portrait of Stalin on the classroom wall. I was disqualified & almost expelled. I kept writing pieces & using the paper later on to roll cigarettes. When I got married, I lost my ear for melody if I ever had one to start with. He asked him if he ever wrote a piece for his wife & he shook his head & said no & told him that he wrote a piece for his son while he was dying. A lullaby. He played it at his bedside on a toy piano. Sometimes when I'm walking in the afternoon, I'll hear a melody trembling as it tries to take shape, but nothing ever coheres because the space I wander through transforms with every step & the music cannot hold. Nothing coheres in this city. No center on which to stand. Only boundaries within which to wander. Unheimlich. That's what they call it. The sensation of realizing that your origin has no beginning & that your memory has no end. Music needs some center of gravity from which it first strays & eventually orbits. When the ruins of a city slowly disappear, the inspiration therein follows. The organist asked him if he wrote songs & he said he never wrote anything down, all the songs piled together in his head, the ones he'd heard & the ones he'd imagined, the lyrics intermingled, each refrain fueled by irredeemable desire.