Reunion (21 page)

Ava advised against it.
With such a huge teaching load, there'll be no time left for your own work
, she had written.
Your passions will starve
.

At the time he had taken little notice of what she actually said, so thrilled was he at her concern. But now her reference to passions in the plural returned. Once it had been true, but the diverse passions of his youth had coalesced into the one consuming passion for her. And all those years of cramming his mind with her had prevented it from wandering off on junkets of its own. No unfettered thoughts, no new ideas. If he had never met her, if he had never come to love her, how different his life might have been. Or perhaps there would have been someone else. An Ava substitute. Perhaps he was condemned always to love exclusively and hopelessly. Jack Adelson: fundamentalist in love.

He found a clean sheet of paper and jotted the phrase down.
FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE
. His love for Ava – singular, confined, obdurate, immutable and efficiently cannibalistic in the way it sought out only what nourished it. An intriguing thought, but disturbing.

He regularly intimated in his letters to her that he was working on a new project and she regularly requested to see chapters. When he felt he could stall her no longer,
The Reinvention of Islam
had been fortuitously discovered in the massive warehouse of minor scholarship, dusted off and relaunched.

Pundits, interviewers, academics and commentators praised his prescience. ‘The world was such a different place when you wrote the book,' they said.

Even among the more intelligent observers there was an attitude that Islamic extremism had sprung up fully formed just a few years ago. Jack would point out that the signs were visible much earlier but it required a creative imagination to notice them. It's a quality of the future, he would say whenever he was given the chance, that no one can know it with any certainty, but one can and must imagine it.

Few interviewers would permit Jack to go beyond this point, and most had stopped him well before he reached it. But in lectures and symposia he could speak his mind, and he had plenty to say – about Western politicians in particular: that committed as they are to staying in power they have little need for creative imagination. That rather than inspired and visionary leadership, their ambitions are tethered to three-or four-year terms and played out in tangible temptations like tax rebates, affordable childcare and a plasma-screen television for every household. That if one were to listen only to politicians, one might conclude that the complex social, political, spiritual, ethical and intellectual fabric of human societies had been shrunk to a single economic dimension.

Islam, indeed any issue of complexity, simply could not compete.

Jack would speak his mind whenever he had the opportunity. And people were listening, for there had been offers of work when his NOGA fellowship finished. He was in demand, and all due to a book he had written years ago. As for anything new, the few ideas that came to him evaporated within days. Most did not survive beyond a page of notes.

How different it was for Ava. Nothing ever stopped her from working. She lived and worked with one hand grasped firmly to the safety rail of a speeding train. The risks were hair-raising, and when things went awry, as they often did, she was quick to shoulder the blame.

‘Although it's human to make mistakes,' she used to say.

‘Bad breath is human too,' Jack would reply, ‘but that doesn't make me want it.'

Ava insisted that mistakes were a necessary corollary to taking risks. ‘Life's an adventure. You never know what's around the next corner. And besides, who would want to?'

Throughout their friendship she had derided his desire for perfection.
Perfection is just a form of control
, she once wrote to him,
a means of reducing life in all its diversity to a few manageable absolutes
.

Ideals of perfection provided standards for behaviour, he wrote back. Far from exercising control, they undergirded a dynamic and progressive life. Perfection, he had argued, was justice without human jealousies, the oasis without the desert. But now he was having doubts. If he were to approach the issue differently, he could see that an overriding belief in perfection provided an immutable authority, which was – such a reluctant concession – characteristic of all types of fundamentalism. He left his chair and paced the room, eventually returning to his desk and beneath the phrase
FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE
he wrote
BELIEF IN PERFECTION PROVIDES OBDURATE AUTHORITY
. He folded the sheet of paper and shoved it in his ideas' folder.

An ATM receipt fell out of the bulging file. Across the top in red ink he had written a line from George Steiner's
Errata
: ‘Fundamentalism, that blind lunge towards simplification'.
Even chance, it seemed, was forcing him to think this idea through. He withdrew his sheet of paper from the folder, added the Steiner line to it, and left the page spread on his desk.

FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE
.

BELIEF IN PERFECTION PROVIDES OBDURATE AUTHORITY
.

FUNDAMENTALISM, THAT BLIND LUNGE TOWARDS SIMPLIFICATION
.

Ava was an avid reader of biographies. Rather than absolutes, she searched for meaning in the often messy lives of writers and other artists. Creative people tend to behave badly, she said, they break boundaries both in their life and their work. It was how she lived herself, as Jack knew better than most, and yet there was a coherence to her existence, Helen's too, which he seemed to lack. Ava was compelled to write fiction (he had once heard her say she was ‘helpless before fiction'), and in a similar fashion Helen was compelled to do science. As for him, he was compelled to love Ava Bryant. But when a great love is a compulsion, can it still be a great love? Compulsion in the emotional realm seemed to fit better with revenge and hatred and patriotism and religious fervour – not love, unless one were to include obsession. And obsession itself: just a nudge away from fanaticism.

Work. The imagination. Reality. Experience. All such distinct, even mutually exclusive categories for him, but not for Ava. He and Ava had discovered together Yeats's poem ‘The Choice': ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.' They both regarded it as a false dichotomy but for very different reasons: Ava because life and art were inseparable, and Jack because it was a nonsense to compare two essentially different things.

‘The dichotomy was dispelled by Yeats himself,' Ava said. ‘He was involved in politics and the theatre, he had numerous friends and acquaintances, he loved well and he loved foolishly. Less life and there probably would have been less art.'

Perhaps life writ large was the mark of a true artist; if so, where did that leave him? His passion for Ava had become so deeply entrenched it had acquired the same sense of inevitability as God has for a believer, a taken-for-granted existence with its own rules and logic, its own
raîson d'être
. His love for Ava, not Ava herself was, he realised, the most authoritative element in his life and his sole allegiance was to it. Like any form of fundamentalism.

What sort of life is driven by a single desire? Of yearning always for what one lacks. Never to be satisfied. What sort of life is this? Again he picked up his pen and wrote:
PASSION AS DICTATOR
.

He read through the odd list before switching off the desk lamp and crossing to the windows. There he gazed out at the strings of street lights, the towers of lights, the smoothly moving headlights, the illuminated boxes of trams, the flashing buy buy buy neon signs. And the patches of blackness: gardens, buildings, markets – places shut down until morning. As he stared through the glass, a strange night city rose out of the familiar day view, like those magic-eye drawings that separate from an easy-to-see pattern. And through the night and the lights, through all the years of forgetting, he thought he could discern the black patch of beachside parkland where he played cricket and football as a boy. And the St Kilda reserve where he had listened to the Salvos playing on Saturday mornings. And the black snake of the Elwood Canal where he had crouched in a putrid alcove to escape the neighbourhood bullies. And the
cemetery on Alma Road where he had trespassed with friends and they'd deserted him as night was falling, leaving him to climb the gates and make his way home alone.

A whole forgotten life buried beneath his remembered life, and he found himself thinking how there is an exclusiveness to rehearsed memories and a literalness to a remembered past. He had always been wary of people who chained themselves to habit and routine, but memories were susceptible to habit too. Memories like a catechism carved into mind, the same memories revisited as days pass into months and years, the same regularly recalled scenes and events comprising an individual's personal history. And all the while the treasury of forgetting grows fuller – not seen, not noticed and certainly not questioned until someone produces a contradictory memory or one's own mind relaxes, and all of a sudden the habitual view is sabotaged.

Jack crossed to his desk and switched the lamp back on. He made a couple more notes, wavered over his computer, left it untouched. Again he found himself thinking of authority, not just its restrictions and demands but the safety it brings, whether it be the authority of a dictator, a god, of history, of memory, or one unquestionably perfect love. All those yearnings he had cut and polished so they shone like diamonds amid the unruly tumult of daily life. Grand passions make a pretence of shunning all restrictions but the passion itself is a restriction, for nothing must ever challenge it. And while you're flying fast and high on your grand passion, you don't realise you are confined to a single tight orbit and the rest of life is gathering dust. Not surprising his work had suffered.

Perhaps it was time for a new version of Jack Adelson. And immediately he registered a chill. To excise Ava from his life would render him a stranger to himself. Although something
needed to change. He gazed around at the flash and glamour that was NOGA. He was not his parents' son for nothing, he knew that acronyms could camouflage a hornet's nest of intentions and practices, and that nothing ever came for free. NOGA was not the place for a scholar; but then neither was the university any more.

It was after ten. He unplugged his laptop, slipped it into his satchel, stood by his desk not moving. Fundamentalism, authority, love, memory, creativity: the concepts wanted to come together. He stood by his desk for another minute, then he pulled his computer from the bag and picked up his page of jottings. Slowly he walked towards the windows, slowly he settled in his chair: if ever he needed to take a risk it was now. Love, authority, fundamentalism, creativity, memory. This business of all-consuming desires and passions, that in his love for Ava he may have been as restricted as any fundamentalist. That in his singular focus, extending even to his storehouse of memories, he had relinquished his creative gaze.

He opens his computer, he creates a new document, he begins to write.

He writes a meditation on fundamentalism. He writes that where fundamentalist ideas, beliefs, attitudes or passions exist there can be no ambiguity, and where there is no ambiguity there is no impetus for original thought. That in a long and obsessive love, the lover is cut off from reason in much the same way as a religious fundamentalist, and both are locked in a world of fixed desires and singular passions where the imagination is either slaughtered or put in chains. That because of the authority accorded to certain ideas and beliefs, misguided lovers, like fundamentalists, feel entirely justified in their life's course and have no need to question it.

He writes that the appeal of absolutes today is their ability to supply bedrock at a time which is quite literally explosive; that absolutes – whether a belief in God or a perfect love or even the ultimate value of money – delude one into thinking one has some control over the events of one's life. And reason is the first casualty – after all, absolutes are absolutes, there are no shadings or gradings, no flaws or ambiguities – and an engagement with reality is another. Perfect love – fundamentalist love – immerses the lover in a cloud of agnosia in much the same way that religious fundamentalism renders its followers insensitive to everything outside the creed.

He writes through the night. Four and a half hours later he is finished. Nearly three thousand words. A whole essay. He is afraid to read it, has to force himself to stand by the printer as the pages slip into the tray. And when the job is complete he takes the stack still warm from the machine, fans the pages,
his
pages, the first for such a long time, and lets them cool against his chest.

He puts his essay on the side-table and turns off the lamp. He settles into his chair and falls asleep.

 

‘
BONDAGE
. Musings on love, fundamentalism and authority' was published a week later in the online journal WEBster. In keeping with the journal's policy it appeared anonymously. Neither WEBster nor Jack's essay dominated conversation in universities or government offices nor indeed on the floor occupied by NOGA high above the city of Melbourne, but the essay was noticed. Conservatives saw it as an attack on smug liberals who were caught within the mould of old and inflexible ideologies, and liberals saw it as an attack on conservatives who had lost themselves to social extremism. Artists of all
persuasions welcomed it as providing much-needed support for creative work.

Jack emailed Helen about it.
My first publication this millennium
, he wrote. A short time later she telephoned: it was worth the wait, she said.

Connie was so impressed he wished he'd written it himself.

By the time Jack contacted Ava, she had already read the piece and guessed he had written it – his old punchy style, the vocabulary familiar from his letters. Although the thoughts were new. ‘It has the flavour of those articles you used to write back in Oxford,' she said in a phone call to him. And invited him for lunch.