Marginalia – Love, uncorrected

Every manuscript, before the printing press made the labour invisible, passed through the hands of a copyist, someone whose entire job was to reproduce the text exactly, and who nonetheless, being human, could not help but leave something of themselves behind in it. A word transcribed slightly wrong. A margin filled with a private annotation never meant for the next reader, and read by every reader after. Historians call these traces ‘marginalia’, as though they were incidental. They are usually the most honest part of the page.

One fine, balmy evening I received a copy of Elif Shafak’s magnificent and mystical The Forty Rules of Love from a very dear friend, and my life changed. At its structural heart, it is novel about exactly this kind of transmission. A woman, Ella, in present-day Massachusetts, is hired to read and report on a manuscript about a thirteenth-century mystic, and in the act of reading him, becomes something closer to his copyist than his critic, carrying his convictions forward into her own unlived life, leaving her own marginalia in the margins of a story eight hundred years too old to need her.

The book she is reading concerns Shams of Tabriz, a wandering dervish who arrives in the city of Konya and, within a single conversation, dismantles the careful architecture of a celebrated scholar named Rumi, who had until that point mistaken his own erudition for depth.

What struck me, while reading the book, is how much of love in our own century behaves like an unfinished manuscript rather than a cogent sentence. We copy each other’s affection forward without ever quite signing our names to the page. We leave our own marginalia, a message that arrives exactly when withdrawal begins to feel final, a favour done with more care than the moment required, an entire conversation built and maintained by two people who have somehow never once used the word that would make the tedious conversation unnecessary, and we let the next silence copy the last one, faithfully, without correction.

There is a proverb that has followed me through this book more than any single line of the novel itself: ishq aur mushk chhupaye nahin chupte i.e. love and musk cannot be hidden, however carefully the cloth is folded around them. It is an old warning, older than the printing press, older than the manuscript tradition it seems to describe.

And yet we go on folding the cloth. We have simply gotten better at folding, quieter now and far more deniable. The affection is never actually hidden. It only becomes unspoken, which is a different and more exhausting kind of concealment, since everyone involved can usually smell exactly what is being withheld.

Shams has no patience for this particular refinement of cowardice, and it is worth noticing that his impatience is not romantic in the conventional sense; he is not a lover in the story so much as an insistence, a man who has organised his entire life around the belief that a devotion which requires proof of safety before it will declare itself is less devotion more negotiation, dressed carefully enough to be mistaken for the real thing.

He tells Rumi, in effect, that the intellect can admire a feeling indefinitely without ever being changed by it, and that only the heart, which cannot hedge, is capable of being altered by what it loves.

This is a harder standard than most of us are prepared to be held to. We would rather admire, endlessly, from the safety of an unsigned page.

Ghalib understood the particular arithmetic of this cowardice better than most, centuries before either of us: ishq ne Ghalib nikamma kar diya, warna hum bhi aadmi the kaam ke, love has rendered me good for nothing, he says, otherwise I too was once a man of some use. The line is usually read as a lament. I have started to read it as a confession of relief.

To be rendered good for nothing by love is, after all, to have finally stopped being useful in the ways that let a person avoid the one use that actually mattered.

Ella’s transformation, over the course of the novel, is a slow correction of her own copying errors, the small, accumulated ways she had spent a marriage transcribing other people’s expectations of her onto her own life, faithfully, without once checking the translation against what she actually felt.

She stops mistranslating herself, stops being only the housewife her family had signed her name to. That the book eventually gives her a man to love almost feels secondary to the more radical thing it gives her first: permission to stop being an accurate copy of someone else’s idea of her.

I think this is the argument the novel is actually making, underneath the more visible one about Rumi and his dervish. That most of us are copyists before we are anything else, of our parents’ caution, of our friends’ warnings, of every story we have ever half-heard about people who declared themselves too soon and were punished for it.

We transcribe these warnings faithfully for years, adding our own careful annotations in the margin, until the annotations outnumber the original text and we can no longer tell which parts of our own reticence are actually ours.

The book’s final insight, offered almost in passing, is that the universe does not move in the straight line we keep expecting our own certainty to arrive along. It moves in circles, returning things, transformed, to somewhere near where they began.

Ghalib again, since he seems incapable of staying out of any honest reckoning with the heart: dil hi to hai na sang-o-khisht, dard se bhar na aaye kyun, it is only a heart, after all, not stone or brick; why should it not fill, again and again, with the thing hearts were built to hold.

Somewhere tonight, someone is copying an old caution forward into a new silence, certain they are only being careful. The manuscript does not know it is describing them. It has simply been describing this for eight hundred years, patiently, waiting for a reader honest enough to notice the marginalia is their own handwriting.

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