Teach Us to Sit Still Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Part One

  Turp

  Stupid Pains

  The Waterseller

  Worrisome Dissatisfied Individuals

  In His Image

  Urodynamics

  Deterritorialisation

  Remember Life?

  A Tussle in the Mind

  Experiments with Truth

  The Difficult Target

  6,820,000 Hits

  The Pilotòn

  Harley Street

  Il bell’Antonio

  Lives of Quiet Desperation

  A Cat on Board

  Part Two

  Be Silent, Oh All Flesh

  Goblin Fires

  Ineffable

  Verbiage

  A Strainer

  The Scafell Syndrome

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  The Tangled Wisteria

  The Gong

  Surprise Party

  Anicca

  The Booker Speech

  Personally Of Course I Regret Everything

  Coleman

  Charity

  Cathedral

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Just when the medical profession had given up on me and I on it, just when I seemed to be walled up in a life sentence of chronic pain, someone proposed a bizarre way out: sit still, they said, and breathe . . .’

  Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking and improbably entertaining story of Tim Parks’ quest to overcome ill health. Bedevilled by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, he confronts hard truths about the relationship between the mind and the body, the hectic modern world and his life as a writer.

  Following a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system he finds solace in an improbable prescription of breathing exercises that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks expected or wanted to find answers; anything New Age simply wasn't his scene. Meantime, he is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religions in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sport and art in our attitudes to health and well-being.

  Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks.

  Captivating and inspiring, Teach Us to Sit Still is an intensely personal – and brutally honest – story for our times.

  About the Author

  Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona.

  ALSO BY TIM PARKS

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara Massimina

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Shear

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Cleaver

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  Non-fiction

  Italian Neighbours

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  A Season with Verona

  The Fighter

  To those who got me out of gaol:

  David Wise and Rodney Anderson;

  Ruggero Scolari, Edoardo Parisi, John Coleman.

  Teach Us To Sit Still

  A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing

  Tim Parks

  Foreword

  I never expected to write a book about the body. Least of all my body. How indiscreet. But then I never expected to be ill in the mysterious, infuriating way I have. Above all it never occurred to me that an illness might challenge my deepest assumptions, oblige me to rethink the primacy I have always given to language and the life of the mind. Texting, mailing, chatting, blogging, our modern minds devour our flesh. That is the conclusion long illness brought me to. We have become cerebral vampires preying on our own life-blood. Even in the gym, or out running, our lives are all in the head, at the expense of our bodies.

  I had no desire to tell anyone about my malady, let alone write about it. These were precisely the pains and humiliations one learns early on not to mention. You need only look at the words medicine uses – intestine, faeces, urethra, bladder, sphincter, prostate – to appreciate that this vocabulary was never meant to be spoken in company. We just don’t want to go there. My plan, like anyone else’s, was to confide in the doctors and pretend it wasn’t happening.

  On the other hand, this is reality, and in my case there was the happy truth that just when the medical profession had given up on me and I on it, just when I seemed to be walled up in a life sentence of chronic pain, someone proposed a bizarre way out: sit still, they said, and breathe. I sat still. I breathed. It seemed a tedious exercise at first, rather painful, not immediately effective. Eventually it proved so exciting, so transforming, physically and mentally, that I began to think my illness had been a stroke of luck. If I wasn’t the greatest of sceptics, I’d be saying it had been sent from above to invite me to change my ways. In any event, by now the story had become too inviting a conundrum to be left unwritten.

  What it boils down to, I suppose, is an extraordinary mismatch between the creatures we are and the way we live. I grew up in a family of evangelical Anglicans. They were also solid middle-class Brits. What they most instilled in us, as children, was purposefulness, urgency. Everything about the world had long been understood, so the right moves were obvious. We must save our souls, we must save other souls, we must perform well at school, we must go to university and get good jobs. And we must marry and have children who would share our same goals and live as we did. Even singing was purposeful. It was to praise God. Playing, we were soldiers bent on killing each other, in a good cause. When we did sports, of course, we had to win.

  Meantime our bodies were the ‘vessels’ which allowed us to get on with all these pressing tasks. Confusingly, a vessel was a ship or a jug for storing liquids. Either way it was useful only in so far as it contained something else: the Christian soul, the middle-class self. In any event, the body had no purpose or identity as such. When we were dead we would be better off without it, though for reasons not explained God wanted us to hang on with bodily grief for as long as we could. Perhaps it was to purify the soul, to ennoble the self, the way some people find a sort of virtue in hanging on to an old car. The body was a necessary hassle on the way to success and paradise.

  This will sound like a caricature. But it was entirely in line with school biology where they merely told us how complicated and alien that fleshly vessel was, a matter best left to the experts. Even today I meet few people who accept a substantial identity between self and flesh. At most, they have a more attractive vision of what pleasures and enjoyments life affords: sex, food, music, booze. Otherwise, everyone seems equally busy asserting their points of view, furthering their careers, saving against the day when the decaying vessel will start to leak. In the main, doing cancels out being as noise swamps silence.

  To date I have written twenty books, with this twenty-one. I may have shaken off my parents’ faith, then, but
not the unrelenting purposefulness they taught me, that heady mix of piety and ambition. And like my father I have lived under a spell of words. He read the Bible and wrote his sermons. He told you what was true and how you must behave. Rhythmically, persuasively, the way politicians do, and the pundits of opinion columns; the people who know everything and are sure of themselves. My novels have tended the other way, suggested how mysterious it all is, how partial anyone’s point of view, how comically lost we are. But even this is preaching of a kind. The fact is, as soon as you start with words you’re locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before. Nothing you say stands alone or is complete in the present: it has its roots in the past and pushes feelers into the future. And as we grow heated, marking out our corner, staking our claim, we stop noticing the breath on the lips, the tension in our fingers, the pressure of the ground under our toes, the tick of time in the blood. None of my father’s admirers noticed how tense his jaw was, how much his hand shook when he raised a glass or microphone, what an effort it was for him to assert assert assert, to keep the 2000-year-old faith, giving encouragement to the doubters, finding clever arguments to confound the devil’s advocates. When I think back on Dad’s cancer and death – he was sixty and I twenty-five – there is a certain inevitability about it. Forever ignored, the carnal vessel cracked under strain. Sometimes I think it was the invention of language that started this queer battle between mind and flesh.

  Shortly after Dad’s funeral I left England for Italy and have lived here ever since. The illusion of escape was reassuring. Another language plunged me into other debates. I worked and worked. I wrote and translated and taught. But in retrospect I see I never really deviated from the initial project, never looked to right or left, was always true to my parents’ obsession with vocation. ‘Your handwriting,’ I remember my brother observing, in those last years when one wrote letters by hand, ‘has never changed.’ He was right. It’s still the same: ferociously slanted to somewhere off the page, some distant goal.

  Then at an undetermined moment in my forties, the symptoms began, the pains, embarrassments, anxiety, anger. Was I going my father’s way? But I mustn’t get ahead of my story. Suffice it to say that in choosing to write this book I have decided to set down, often in disagreeable detail, all the things I scrupulously avoided mentioning for years. Had what happened been merely a problem of diagnosis, one bunch of doctors getting it wrong – in their eagerness to cut me up – and then another finally suggesting just the drug that would fix me in a jiffy, I would never have bothered to write about it. Likewise, had the whole problem turned out to be in my skull, something to sort out with a psycho-drug and a few sessions on the analyst’s sofa.

  No, it was infinitely more complicated and interesting; to me, I don’t exaggerate, amazing. I was amazed, when someone showed me a way back to health, to realise that I knew nothing of my body at all, nothing of its resources, nothing of its oneness with my mind, nothing of myself. And if the reader is surprised to find, in a book that might sound like a health manual or a self-help spiel, reflections on D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, Velázquez and Magritte, on Gandhi and Mussolini, Italy as opposed to England, Jesus and the Buddha, faith-healing and white-water kayaking, that is because illness is not a separate thing circumscribed in symptoms, diagnosis and cure, but part of a whole that has no separate parts.

  ‘All very well, but how do you want us to categorise it?’ the publisher asks. ‘Health, Psychology, New Age, Biography, Criticism?’ My immediate response is indignation: this is exactly the problem I have been writing about! Reductionism, labels. On second thoughts, though, I have to accept that if we didn’t slot things into categories we’d never find what we were looking for. I’m uncertain. I can’t decide. Until it occurs to me that, with books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your taste to new territory. ‘Put it where the true stories go,’ I tell him. It’s only stories that gather the world up in unexpected ways.

  PART ONE

  TURP

  SHORTLY BEFORE MY fifty-first birthday, in December of 2005, my friend Carlo sketched a tangle of tubes and balloons on a corner of newspaper.

  We were in a café in the southern suburbs of Milan.

  ‘The prostate is like a small apple, right? Here. But it’s getting bigger and more fibrous with age, it’s pressing on this tube going through it, the urethra. It’s choking it, see? So, what do we do? We sort of core the thing, from the inside. With a laser. Going up your penis. Make it wider.’

  I could see that Carlo had made this sketch many times before. Chewing a doughnut, his voice had a believer’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Then we just burn away a bit of this valve, or sphincter, here, to make sure it opens properly. That’s the base of the bladder.’

  My bladder.

  I asked: ‘Why?’

  ‘So it empties better, then you go less often.’

  ‘What about sex?’

  Now he needed a proper sheet of paper. He opened his briefcase. There was a complication. Expertly, his surgeon’s wrist traced out the same diagram a couple of times larger. ‘When you pee, there are two sphincters have to open, right? The one we’ve burned away a bit at the base of the bladder and another lower down. Well, when you climax, the sperm shoots in here, between the upper and lower sphincters. Got it? From the prostate into the urethra obviously. The lower sphincter opens and the upper one shuts tight. But, after the op, since we’ll have opened the upper one permanently, you can get a situation where the sperm whooshes off up into your bladder instead of down through your penis. So you get a dry orgasm. Same feeling, but no stains on the sheets. An advantage really.’ He smiled and took another bite of his doughnut.

  I examined the smudgy tangle of tubes and cisterns. It was a question of dodgy plumbing. My sink was blocked. The loo tank needed looking at.

  ‘What about the pain?’

  ‘Not that painful. You’ll be in bed for a few days, then a couple of months before you can start sex again.’

  ‘I meant the pains I’m getting now.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Carlo is a big man with an open, honest face.

  ‘We can’t actually guarantee they’ll go.’

  I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself. If the operation didn’t solve these problems, why do it?

  ‘Your bladder will empty better. You’ll pee less at night. The pains will probably recede, it’s just I can’t guarantee they will.’

  I said OK.

  In the meantime I should try a variety of pills.

  ‘These problems tend to be hit and miss,’ he said. He would put me in touch with a colleague who was up to date with the most recent drugs; for the moment I could start with alpha blockers. ‘They inhibit the reaction to adrenalin which is connected to the impulse to pee.’ He thought I might wake up only once or twice a night instead of five or six times.

  I tried the alpha blockers. After a couple of weeks I was still getting up six times a night and now I was constipated too. I stopped taking the pills and after another week things were back to normal. Normal bowel movements, normal pains. It seemed like progress.

  Then shortly before Christmas, the ‘up-to-date colleague’ Carlo had sent me to, a small tawny haired woman with a strong southern accent, handed me a sample of something absolutely new. ‘Christmas present,’ she smiled wrily. ‘Different approach. Let’s see what happens.’

  For a while I didn’t notice any change. Then I was happy to find I wasn’t peeing so often. Then I was concerned that I wasn’t peeing enough. Come New Year’s Eve I was in serious trouble. I hadn’t peed for ten hours. I had the impulse. I stood over th
e loo. Nothing but pain. I stopped taking the pills. I called Carlo, but his mobile didn’t respond. I didn’t have his home number. In the end he was only one of a circle of friends at the university where I teach in Milan, while I actually live in Verona, two hours away.

  Should I go to hospital? The casualty wards would be packed on New Year’s Eve. There was also the consideration that I knew people in the local hospital. My next-door neighbour worked there. If I had gone to someone in Milan, it was precisely out of a childish desire for secrecy close to home. Who wants to admit to prostate problems?

  I cried off our small party and went upstairs to bed well before midnight. I lay there rigid and angry. I was angry with the doctor who had given me these pills. I was furious with life for dealing me this card. My body seemed alien and malignant. We couldn’t get comfortable together. Perhaps I am a parasite in my own flesh, I thought; and now the landlord has had enough.

  In the past I’d always imagined I owned the place.

  From downstairs, I could hear my wife and youngest daughter chatting and laughing with the neighbours and their kids who were getting ready to let off fireworks in the garden. Their voices sounded distant. I was locked up in this stupid health problem. The space between us, between myself and my family, suddenly presented itself to me as part of a story, a scene in a film. It was the story of my decline into a pissy, grumpy old man.

  When the New Year’s fireworks began, I didn’t get up and go out to the balcony to watch. All over town people were celebrating. I was in a dark cell, trying to figure how to get out, how to shake off this unhappy story that had started telling itself inside my head. Self-pity is a great teller of boring tales. I was at a turning point, with nowhere to turn.

  Towards three a.m. I managed a trickle of pee. It took a while, but afterwards I felt better. To celebrate I found what was left of the champagne and drank it. A good half bottle. Then I went down to the basement, turned on the computer, brought up Google and typed in ‘TURP’.