Shostakovich lived it all before us, long before. He lived it all – the bureaucratic madness, the Blairite double-speak madness, the nothing-means-anything-anymore officialdom madness. A life stripped of every semblance of meaning where you too are one of the meaning-reducers and meaning-smashers, where you have been made to speak exactly like them, and doesn't that mean, too, that they're exactly like you, that there's an interior life there somewhere, in some hidden part of their lives?
Exactly like them: only – and this is the other part – that wild, free side has been captured, eaten up, it's become wholly domestic and nothing but that. The private and then the public; the public face and the private face: it fits together, it's harmonised, it all works, it forms part of a whole, a horrible topsy-turvy whole …
Only with Shostakovich, there is something left over – no, not the mythical anti-communist side, not the man of his 'memoirs', not Macdonald's freedom-lover and freedom-fighter. The wild, free side of his music – no, not that either, unless it could be understood to be twisted within the other strands of his music – with irony, say, but an irony so bitter, so contorted, so flattened it can hardly be called irony.
Smashed irony, a desert landscape, a post nuclear landscape of ash and blackness. That with freedom – that with wildness, a wildness that has to grow into the most twisted and gnarled of plants. Ancient from the first, never born, aging its way into existence, already broken, yet whole.
Whole – and broken in its wholeness, nothing but broken even though it is whole. Shostakovich – the fifteenth symphony, the fifteenth quartet – who prised apart the public, the private, who let it live again, that wild, free side that speaks with the same words as the Blairite, that speaks of the same meanings, but by already having baked them to charcoal, reduced them down as bones reduced down in the funeral fires of India. Stubs of bones among ash, indigestible, unsmashable. All that's left in the bureaucracy, in the madness of this new 'accountable' public world …
Lars Iyer's Blog 