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Jasmin

She and another lecturer are running through their course introduction for their first year classes. Both are dressed in black, as they must. She explains to the students that while some fields of study are hardly esoteric, the general public (this term meaning nothing sensible) hasn’t heard of them. Their own, for instance.

The faces this early in the year are facing the front. Two women taking turns to speak with energy and conviction. All these eager faces. She knows how quickly this will change.

Simply never spoken of. Not even given a populist treatment like Alain de Botton’s choir-boy philosophy. Baldy Baton, or what­ever his name is, passing on the ideas of others. (A few nervous chuckles.) Yet Jasmin feels everyone is capable, if they only think about it, of understanding the various layers of semiotics she and Jill are about to springload this course with.

They show just how applicable the ideas are. How everyone is ‘reading’ signs and symbols every day, in books and TV programmes, on blogs and Facebook, in the works of genre in film and entertainment, popular culture, everywhere. How celebrity ‘icons’ like Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus – through their constant PR stunts – are providing signs we the public, but especially the fans, are reading all the time. That is, we are doing it whether we know it or not.

What is a man who wears a turban? Well, perhaps he’s a Sikh and thus the slippage when a Sikh is attacked and bashed in a northern suburb because he is a ‘terrorist’. Meaning Arab/Moslem/Al-Qaeda/etc etc.Words and their thrown-down relationships to things, to meanings, the patterns of judgment, and reaction, hatred even. The students are dazzled and worried. They applaud because they know it’s a great performance and don’t know you don’t applaud at University.

After the lecture she leads Jill back to her office. The trick is to say as much as possible in the lecture then clear out fast. First lecture especially. Further questions can be asked in the tutorials. Otherwise some sticky students rush to the front and do not detach easily. Some people will not take a hint.

I think that went pretty well, Jill announces, easing herself into the chair on the student side of the main desk. She is Jasmin’s new PhD post grad, already lecturing and tutoring since the year before when she was rounding off her Masters. Jasmin opens a cupboard behind her desk and pulls out a bottle of whiskey.

This is called Starward, she says, reading the label then turning it to Jill. It’s distilled in Essendon.

Essendon, you’re joking? A single malt?

They look at each other, then at the bottle. Jasmin laughs.

It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s not bad. In fact it’s better than not bad.

Good enough for a minor celebration, she adds, as Jill’s eyes widen. But I’ll have to nick some of that ice I saw in the staff fridge. Just a bit.

She walks outside and after looking along both reaches of the corridor she sneaks into the tiny staff room where a fridge and kettle are set up.

When she comes back she closes her office door.

Don’t want anyone watching this, she grins, not at 11.30. My expert status will be shot and I don’t want that.

Expert?

As an academic she gives public talks whenever the suggestion comes up. She loves being part of the University’s ‘Expert on call’ campaign, not because the Uni is flogging its staff as a community resource, which it is, but from a desire to make her field more widely understood. This term ‘expert’ loaded with University authority and male power now also means flunky (no public capital letter) of the Institution, and this duty is obligatory.

Give me a break! she explains to Jill… I tell them what I have is expertise. As for what I am…? Jesus, who knows what I am?

She pours them both a shot and then takes a sip.

Of course, one of my male colleagues told me not to rock the boat. They always say that.

And what did you say?

I said I’m not in the bloody boat.

Jasmin invites herself around beside Jill and pulls up a second chair to consult the pages of notes her thesis might pursue.

They talk for half an hour and Jasmin swings her arms about and points and laughs and cannot hold back one jot from her own field of mockery to the field of genuine objectivity. Already there is forming an idea she might put to Angus, the man of public spaces. The party gardener.

Jill’s new thesis isn’t formed fully and she needs a case study… As usual, Jasmin says too much, shoots off a monologue of opinion backed by theory which, in better balance, Jill should be discov­ering for herself. Even so, Jasmin will return to re-writing her first lecture – on football – within seconds of the student leaving and forget the content if not the context of what she has been saying.

Jasmin is overwhelming. She gets passionate. She is impossible, and impossibly generous; when so many academics guard their thoughts, she supervises like an open aorta.

When she closes her door after this session she stands there dumb with fecundity. Briefly. Jill, on the other side, stands in a daze stronger than anything brought on by single malt.

Then the door opens and Jasmin walks out, locks it and says:

I’m coming downstairs with you. She holds up a cigarette and lighter.

I didn’t know you smoked.

I don’t. Just feel like the occasional ciggie.

That night, as she watches the TV news, Jasmin is more subdued: no interaction for an interaction maniac means silence, even faintly calm. The 7.30 Report and some right-wing prick of a leader comes on to infuriate her again. And when water and land-use interviews begin and some patronising dill rants on… It all gets too much for her and the weather changes in a flash. Talk talk talk.

Stretched across her lap is her black Burmese, sleepy beyond purring. Moss. If she moves, Moss holds onto her with his claws extended, to let her know getting up isn’t allowed. Even her cat talks too much.

She is so thoroughly used to being alone now that Richard the partner (that dull word) has all but faded from the rooms. She has laboured past the waking at night stage, wondering if he has another woman over in England. His reluctant (sounding) phone calls are prose rather than poetry these days, well, nights. Beside her stands a long-stemmed glass half full of wine and the remains of her Hainanese chicken rice. If Richard doesn’t return, then what? Will she even want to keep up the rent by herself? Though she can afford to, just. She looks around. Her small table is a hand-span high with essays, papers, files and newspapers, magazines, books, tissues, at least two apple cores…

There’s a pile of washing by the door, the washing she never got around to doing on the weekend plainly visible from the dining table. All girl habits, all show and tell, including bras and crunchy knickers. She is more than a bit relaxed in these habits and Moss has a smooching affair with all her smalls. Cats.

Just in time John Clarke appears beaming and bald and crazily channeling Tony Abbott still being the CarbonTaxDestroyer or BigNewLyingSomething but so very earnestly, which is better than Christopher Pyne being serious because ex-Jesuits are funnier than uptight goodytwoshoes fullygrown school prefects and no one is funnier than the droll and mischievous John Clarke.

Breakfast is her usual prevarication between toast and honey, and a choice of fruit or oats (fruit bats, she associates), and yoghurt if her teeth aren’t bothering her, or puffed millet the floaty and lightweight healthfood of fairies – and a choice of fruit. Honey and milk, that sharp wet combination of possibly healthy intake, or is fructose intolerance the unpredictable bogie eating her heart muscles? Why is eating so difficult in the morning? After 12 hours of fasting, why does the stomach resist its own desire to eat again?

Bare arms on the table. She presses down onto the vaguest thoughts of her tutorial plans. Improvise! Always works best. She walks to the sink with her empty bowl and washes it out by hand rather than let the muesli harden impossibly (why is that?) on the ceramic. Every day she does this she hears her reason in her head and as unstoppably as thinking fruit bats after fruit ‘n’ oats.

Sometimes she thinks she is trapped by trivia of her own devising. As for her lectures, yes, improvise. Know your stuff and it will come. Trust your game of the intellect. Good luck everyone.

What cannot be trusted is a publisher. Why is she still waiting nearly two years after they gave her the nod? Publishers are full of fire and stinky smoke: we know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away. And yet Andrew bloody Hutton has written an unreadable book-as-insult on post-colonial post-modernist readings of novelists who those same novelists now want to kill him for. Because if they can read more than a para or two of the sections based on their books he seems to be crucifying them, with more spit and vinegar than nails, for crimes they never committed, for sins they never acted out and for structures not fascist, sexist, racist and backward, but merely for what the publishers call ‘readable’ ‘what the public want’ ‘exciting’, breathtaking, artful ‘works of greatness’. And these same publishers have published him.

And the publishers think it’s a cracker. Head of School. His fellow academics spew over its second-hand Derridean deconstruc­tions, its last-word-being-said of Edward Said; its only good bits the shredding and insulting of all writers, including Nobel Prize winners (all academics hate them). Et al. But essentially they bite at his success.

Unless they want a promotion. So they all read him, hating him every Friday night while slumped in their beer at the Club. Yes, OK. We know what the public want and this is not a commercial proposition and now go away.

She really must take her tablets.

She had almost been a goody-two-shoes. Bright at school, conser­vative parents, father who was quiet enough to want quiet in a girl but maybe not loud enough to insist. A mother who was a bit fey but never eccentric enough to take risks. They even went to church sometimes. But Jasmin was never quite stable enough to get the goody-goody thing right. Even when she tried. She questioned teachers when she thought they were wrong, holding her hand up and speaking in her loud voice, instead of arguing her concern in her homework assignments.

She mistook girls’ friendships and vocal excess for wild approval of her personality, not as sign of barely making it into the clique. She followed the clique’s rules but only by being conscientious. The rules never made sense. She was adept enough, luckily, at pretending.

Until it all went wrong.

It happened in her first year of high school: Jasmin sided with a good teacher against her for-many years best friend when her friend implicated the teacher in a taintedly sexual accusation she knew was untrue. She was cut loose by the friend, shocked by her and by her own principle, and humiliated at a result. She had betrayed her friend with the rightness of… what? doing the right thing ethically, for… what?

Then she saw it. Saw manipulation everywhere, she began to see its signs, she knew then how she had been inculcated into unthinking ‘rightness’. She learnt ambiguity. She studied this as her own right over cultural rightness.

She realised to her great embarrassment that she had thought, and spoken, but hadn’t seen. If anything, her seeing now is its own problem – too much of. Unavoidable. Now she sees in order to think. Then to speak. Then to write… Now she has to let go and feel more or she’ll live long and layered but miss out on the langorous.

Now waiting for this book is hurting her work profile where it matters: her Uni publication credits. Her first book of essays wasn’t quite the mustard-cutter the system wanted. They want refereed articles and academic books, the manuscripts of which are shoved very slowly (contradictorily) through the intellectual scanner to emerge as the real thing. Because, of course, she is in the boat, whether she likes it or not.

There have been emails back from the publisher and, in response to her urgent calls for up-dating, there have been none – she has begun to think there is another book in this refusal to communicate. In the age of effortless communication, an email that takes thirty seconds is left unwritten for twelve months. Everyone is saying it. Publishers refuse to stay in contact. When contact took serious effort they used to nag their writers; now that it’s easy, they don’t. Their writers are the nags.

She is a terrible waiter, the worst waiter she knows. Only she among her friends gets angry if a bus is late, if the traffic stops, if any person even a person she adores keeps her shuffling on the pavement for ten minutes. After twenty minutes her anger goes up by the minute. Fucking publishers! She is aware she swears too much. Remembers Kevin Spacey interviewed as Director of the National Theatre being asked if the British actors were very different from the US: Well, they say cunt a lot more than we do. She loses herself in cursing and once lost in this limbo, this rudeness of the other, of those who steal your time, she loses all tolerance. By the time they turn up she hates the world and her curses fall on them. Shitheads. Time should be used as planned and is never for wasting; to her the worst kind of waste there is – is suspension.

Suspension is far worse than suspense. Richard, the boyfriend, here and not here, the book in manuscript only, here and not here. Suspension has no resolution, it is the nothingness that should be something, that wants to be something and it tears away at her.

She wants something more physically real.

Which is why she thinks, not for the first time, to fancy Angus. His hands-on world, the physicality of work and earth, of water and the long textures of plants. It was Herder (Johann Gottfried, the German) who said of all the senses the primary way we know the world is through touch. Way back in the 18C Herder was thinking that. What a smart mind he must have had. He gave short shrift to Aristotle’s favouring of the eye, of sight. Her own discipline.

She must touch the world more. To feel. She wants to feel these made things of his so she can share in the pleasure of their being finished, that unlike manuscripts, they exist, they are here.