Читать книгу The Trouble with Rose - Amita Murray - Страница 14

The Sufi poet Rumi says it isn’t for us to run after love, but instead to look within, to see what is stopping us from loving. He says that our task in life is to find all the obstacles we place around us, the shields we build that keep us from love.

Rilla’s notes

‘A coherent narrative, Rilla,’ my supervisor said a month ago when she gave me the warning about my MA. ‘That is what you need, and that is what you don’t have yet, not after three whole years here.’ Professor Grundy sat behind her desk, looking thoughtfully at me, tapping her fingers. ‘The thing is, I do like you. You’re a good teaching assistant, the students respect you. They like your honest feedback about their work.’

She looked around her like she was searching for something more to say. We were sitting in her office, her walls covered with old invites for conferences, framed certificates, pictures of her receiving awards from important-looking people. On her desk there was a statue of Michel Foucault wearing a turtle-neck and a pair of seventies-style trousers, his head an egg, his lower lip cheeky but sensual, his hands crossed behind his back. She looked at him for many moments before she spoke again.

‘You don’t really like people, do you,’ she said finally.

I flinched. ‘That’s a little harsh.’

‘Oh, it’s not meant to be. I am the same way. To be a philosopher, you have to be a little removed.’

My breath caught in my throat. Not liking people was one thing, but being like Professor Grundy, that was too much. She once made a student wait for six months to hear if he had passed a re-sit of his dissertation. She had known all along that she would pass him; I later saw a dated confirmation of this. But she didn’t tell the student. She made him wait, she made him cry, she turned him into a shadow of his former self. And all because she didn’t like him. ‘He needs to learn respect,’ she said at the time.

And she thought I was like her. This made me die inside.

‘You are making no progress in your work.’ Professor Grundy was caressing Foucault, her thumb slowly stroking his egg-head back and forth.

‘I like this stuff,’ I muttered. ‘I want to make sense of it.’

‘Rilla. Are you going to complete your MA? Can you? Do you even want to?’ She sat back in her chair and looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say.

When I applied for an MA, with Tyra’s encouragement, I wanted to explore the connections between what a culture thinks about love and what it thinks about other things like life, work, and war. I had imagined finding a kernel that was at the heart of a culture, its most basic beliefs around which everything else was organized. I had thought at the time that it was a good, concrete idea, that it was something I could focus on and develop for three years. But recently the idea seems to have evaporated.

The more I read about what other people have said about love, all I can think about is how little I know about it myself. How there is a blankness in my brain where there should be an understanding of love.

Why do we form an attachment to another? Who attracts us? How do we form the bonds of love? And when love is lost, then what happens, how do we go on living?

After three years doing an MA, I am nowhere near answering these questions, and in fact I am further away than I was when I started writing my thesis.

Well, I say writing my thesis, but at the moment I am reading it more than I am writing it. I do a lot of reading and I make a lot of notes. But that’s what you are meant to do, isn’t it? You’re meant to read what everyone else has written on your subject before you can say what you want to say. If there’s nothing else I’ve learned from my father, surely I’ve learned the art and craft of methodical application. Having grown up in a family of artists and academics in Bombay, he should know how it’s done.

The only thing is there is a heck of a lot written on the subject of love. Every poet, philosopher, mathematician, mother, baker of treacle tarts, damaged teenager turned death-row inmate – everyone seems to have said something about love. Until I’ve read it all, how am I supposed to know what my take on it is? How do I know when I’ve learnt enough about love?

Federico says love is the same as breath, that as humans we are programmed to go after it, the same way we have to go on breathing to be alive. ‘And such a basic thing, it is not something one can analyse, is it? Why don’t you do something else?’

Do something else, says Federico-the-fixer. But what else can I do? I have no other skills.

Tyra helped me deal with the aimlessness I felt after university. She didn’t know about Rose, of course she didn’t, but that’s the thing with Tyra. She doesn’t push, she doesn’t try to draw out anything about you that you don’t want to tell. She saved me. She got me out of my room and into the world, she got me out of myself, and she pointed me in a direction. Now, three years later, I don’t know if it is the right direction or not. But it is a direction, the direction of the books that have saved me in the past.

And I need a direction right now.

‘I can do it. I know I can,’ I told Professor Grundy.

I tried to keep at bay the trickle of panic that was trying to climb up my skin. I couldn’t go back to having no direction. I couldn’t.

‘Hmm,’ Professor Grundy said. ‘The thing is, we ask you to do a report on something you’ve read, you can do that. You can do a critique. When pushed, you can deliver a summary, a decent one. But we ask you to develop your own writing on the subject, and, well, how much of that have we seen so far?’

‘Not enough?’

‘No, Rilla. We haven’t seen anything. Not a page, not a word. We can’t have you be a student here for life. You can’t just be here in this programme so you can take notes. You have to make a choice. Either write something or leave. You’re not a romantic, you know how things work. Which is it going to be, Rilla? Sink or swim?’

You’re not a romantic.

My professor says I’m not a romantic, and Tyra says I’m too much of one. So, which is it? You know, I just don’t know.