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.
For Slavoj Žižek, the falling in love is important. He makes love an event or an encounter. It isn’t just a being in love, but the moment of falling in love that matters, it changes the rest of your life. It is such an important event that not only is it a catalyst for everything that will follow in your life, but it feels like everything in your life has been leading up to that moment.
Rilla’s notes
The day after we met, I really thought I would never see Simon again. Maybe that was the unromantic side of me. I had had such a good evening that first night when he took me out to dinner, but I had convinced myself that it must have been a one-off, something not real. We had talked nonsense for three hours over our shared platter of injera (Simon had wanted to know if it made him a cannibal that he liked bread that felt so much like human skin), shiro, yellow split peas, red lentils and the house speciality, lamb stew. Over the enormous platter we discussed – well, everything. Victorian pocket-watches. Fondue and Simon’s complete abhorrence for liquid cheese. Rye crackers and how they were really hyped-up cardboard. Whether or not Liv Tyler looked like a Disney princess version of Steven Tyler. Whether or not the Steps reunion would reveal that members of that band had frozen their bodies back in the nineties and they had now re-emerged from the freezer. If concept art was actually art or just something produced by people who couldn’t paint. And whether Theresa May looked like Arrietty’s mum in the Studio Ghibli version of The Borrowers
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