Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

The translation conference had three more days to run, but the meeting with the doctor and his wife had captured my mind and I found it hard to concentrate on what my colleagues were saying. If you were born and brought up, I thought, in a family that had always been into ayurvedic medicine (which after all only means Knowledge of Health), this story of vata and prakruti, inherited and acquired characteristics, would all make sense. You would do your birth chart, you would ponder the position of the stars, who you were originally, what you have become, and react accordingly. And you would be able to distinguish this ayurvedic doctor from others, know which school of thought he was coming from, how he compared. As it was, the unfamiliar words and explanations I had heard soon fell away; just two remarks continued to echo in my mind: ‘You will never overcome this problem, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradiction in your character.’ What was it in me that had prompted the doctor to make that observation? Then his wife’s comment a few moments later: ‘You only say psychosomatic if you think that body and mind are ever separate.’

  Since I had a day and a half free when the conference was over, I arranged for a driver to take me to Agra so I could see the Taj Mahal. The man was a Sikh, burly and brazen. About halfway along the road I asked him if he could show me a small village since so far I had only seen Delhi. He found a dirt track and, waiting at a level crossing, we were besieged by beggars. The driver had his window down waving them away. At a certain point, when a small child was particularly insistent, he yanked his shorts down and tried to grab his tiny prick. The child was away like lightning. The driver laughed. ‘Pretty boy,’ he said. Then we drove up to a temple that marked the birth place of Krishna. It was strange to see religious images with brightly coloured clothes and big grins stamped on lacquered lips. One is so used to Christ suffering on his cross, the martyred saints. The driver pointed to some tall barbed-wire fencing, armed men in uniform and a mosque about two hundred yards away. ‘For the Muslims too this is a holy place,’ he said. ‘There has been a lot of fighting.’

  Why, I wondered, in bed that evening, did almost everything I heard and saw seem obscurely relevant to my condition? I kept recalling the young boy’s perfect body as he wriggled from the driver’s heavy hand.

  The sheets were damp. We had arrived in Agra at nightfall to find the town under thick fog. The Sikh’s car had no heating and my hands and feet froze. Mostly unlit, the streets were a ghostly play of headlights, cooking fires and dense bluish shadow. The major hotels were full. There was a festival of some kind. My driver found a small place with a damp room and a loo that didn’t flush. I had to pile more or less everything in the room onto the bed to get warm. Suitcase, pillows, floor mat. How strange this was, in India. Yet I felt oddly cheerful.

  Dr Hazan’s wife was right, I reflected, when she said that only a culture that tried to keep body and mind separate would need to use a word like psychosomatic. To put Humpty together again. And this word was always associated with sickness, in particular the sort of sneaky, stubborn sickness that Western medicine can’t cure. So body and mind are only one when the anxious mind makes the body-machine ill. Or makes it think it is ill. Or makes the mind think that the body is ill. When actually it isn’t. And because it isn’t really ill the doctor can wash his hands of it, or send you to a psychiatrist. ‘If Signor Tim had no symptoms,’ the radiologist had concluded, ‘I’d say he was fine.’

  The fact that your condition is psychosomatic, I told myself – and it seemed amazing to me that my feet could be so cold in India – is amply demonstrated by the way it never really stops you from working or doing the things you want to do. You talk about chronic pain but you always deliver your books on time. You travel to Milan every week to teach. The lessons are two hours long but you never have to go out to the bathroom. You never miss a book presentation. You accept invitations to Germany and even to India, you eat and drink healthily and you fulfil all your obligations. Obviously your condition is psychosomatic. Why else would I spend time trying to find obscure significance in a painting by Velázquez while feeling mainly indifferent to the results of blood and urine tests?

  On the other hand, one frequently reads of people who keep working, keep pretending there is nothing wrong with them, then drop down dead.

  Every time I got up to go to the loo that wouldn’t flush – but perhaps the filthy bucket had been put there to flush it – I had to rearrange the suitcase and pillows and floor mat on my legs in the hope that the circulation would finally come back. Could cold feet, I wondered, also be psychosomatic? And if my condition was psychosomatic did that mean that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, or, on the contrary, that my mind had somehow created a genuine physical condition, even if it wasn’t showing up very clearly on the medical radar.

  That said, of course, it was still possible that the cystoscopy would reveal that the inner wall of my bladder was riddled with cancer. Then everything would be clear. Actually, following Sherlock Holmes’s assumption that once you’ve drawn a blank with the most likely solutions the answer to a puzzle must be the one explanation, however improbable, that remains, I ought to be terrified.

  Every now and then, as I lay waiting for my feet to warm, a loud humming started up, rattling the thin panes of the window. It was the hotel’s electricity generator clicking in when the mains went down. Each time it began the sound shocked me a little, sending a sudden strong pulse throbbing through my body. My father had also been extremely sensitive to noise. He could hear the faintest of sounds very far away, as indeed can I. One evening, as a child, when I told him that the living-room clock was ticking more loudly than usual, he immediately said: ‘That means you have a temperature, my lad.’ He liked to call me my lad. And he was right. I had a high temperature and was packed off to bed. After he died, as I was the only child living close by, I was made executor of his will, and thus discovered that for some years he had been making a regular donation to the Noise Abatement Society, this despite leaving less than 2,000 pounds in assets and having always given his tithe to the church. My mother used to get upset, I remembered, when people would suggest that cancer ‘had a psychosomatic element’. ‘As if it were Dad’s fault he was ill!’ she protested. Having never touched a cigarette, he died of lung cancer at sixty.

  The generator fell silent. What a pleasure sudden silence is, as when a harsh light goes out and your eyes can attune to the friendly dark. I picked up faint noises of plumbing, cries from the street, and I reflected that most people feel ashamed if told their problem is psychosomatic. They feel accused, guilty. It’s acceptable to have a sick body, that’s not your fault, but not a sick mind. The mind is you, the body is only yours. Choosing to go to an analyst because you’re unhappy is another matter. There is a respectability about being unhappy in a complicated way and most people would agree that to recognise you need professional help shows humility and good sense. But someone who makes his body ill because he doesn’t want to acknowledge his mind is in trouble, because he’s repressing his fears and desires and conflicts, is just a loser.

  At exactly the moment I formulated this view, I realised that I was actually extremely eager for my problems to be psychosomatic. I was more than willing to countenance the idea that my pains only existed in my head, or that trouble in my head had brought them into existence in my body. I want to change, I told myself, returning from the bathroom. Why else would I have gone to an ayurvedic doctor? I want everything to change, inside me.

  The following morning I felt let down by the Taj Mahal with its determined whiteness and oppressive symmetry. It was too much the photos I had seen of it, enclosed and regimented and wilful. But the view of the Yamuna from behind the Taj remains to this day one of the most powerful images I have of India. You lean on a parapet and look down. The river is a few hundred yards away, slowly meandering across a broad brown floodplain. Beyond, low hills stretch into emptiness. From left to right, nothing obstructs the eye as it follows the stream’s wintry drift through a sea of s
and. The sun was hazily bright that day and here and there spots of intense colour marked where women were turning the soil for springtime. Very slowly, three camels forded the stream.

  Experiments with Truth

  YOU UNZIP YOUR fly, point your penis to the bowl and out flows a stream of dark blood. This happened to me sometime in my early forties; I did not suppose it to be psychosomatic. I had been out running on a stifling July afternoon. The temperature was in the thirties. Climbing the hills, I could barely breathe. Back home, I took a shower, dried off, then went to pee. The deep dark red electrified me.

  I stood and stared, then called the doctor at once. Discomfort, even pain, I might ignore for years, but blood propelled me to the phone.

  ‘How much water did you drink before running?’ the doctor asked.

  I couldn’t recall.

  ‘And you didn’t take a bottle of water with you?’

  I hate carrying water. I hate the way it sloshes at every step.

  ‘Dehydration can do this,’ the doctor said. ‘If there’s a serious problem, you’ll see blood frequently. If not, just remember to drink enough before running. And don’t go when it’s too hot. Why punish yourself?’

  It’s curious that despite all my efforts, in that miserable winter of ’05–’06, to trace my problems back to their origin, I didn’t recall this particular experience until, following the cystoscopy, I went to the bathroom for the first time and tried to pee. How long life has been, it occurred to me then, seeing the bowl once more splash red! You try to structure it in a story that will hold all your experiences together, but so much is left out and forgotten. The blood that July afternoon of years ago had been a ten-minute fright. I had put it aside, forgotten it, a random incident that had nothing to do with the main plot. Would it ever be possible, I wondered, to say the same of these stupid pains that plagued me now?

  Flying home from Delhi, I had been very aware that within forty-eight hours of landing I would be anaesthetised in hospital with a rigid instrument skewered through my penis. ‘About as thick as a pencil,’ one website had said. At least it’s the last experiment and we’ll have the final truth, I thought.

  In the corridor seat I’d asked for, near the bathroom, I read Gandhi’s autobiography, appropriately entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Since I was visiting India it had seemed right to read Gandhi. I was struck by the book’s obsessive references to diet. Gandhi seemed to remember what he’d eaten, or more often hadn’t eaten, every day of his life. ‘Soon after this,’ runs a typical sentence, ‘I decided to live on a pure fruit diet, using only the cheapest fruit possible.’ He imposed these regimes on those around him, his long-suffering wife in particular. No meat, no eggs, no alcohol, no salt, no cereals, no food at all after sundown.

  The autobiography is also unusually up front about embarrassing ailments. ‘As a result of the attack of dysentery [brought on by eating groundnut butter] my anal tract had become extremely tender, and owing to fissures I felt an excruciating pain at the time of evacuation, so that the very idea of eating filled me with dread.’

  This unhappy situation creates a dilemma: should Gandhi accept his doctor’s advice and drink goat’s milk to build up his strength, or should he hold true to his vow never to drink milk again, a promise made in reaction to the cruel way cows and buffaloes are treated. In the end, he drinks the goat’s milk and recovers, then bitterly regrets it. What betrayed him, he reflects, was the ‘subtle temptation of service’; he was too eager to serve his fellow men to allow himself to die.

  I puzzled over this strange story as the plane made its steady journey west: almost every aspect of Gandhi’s relationship with his body became a means of imposing his will on others, yet he thought of himself as striving only for purity and universal love.

  ‘The carnal mind,’ he writes, ‘always lusts for delicacies and luxuries . . . Instead of controlling the senses, it becomes their slave.’

  So he rules out sex with his wife from age thirty-seven; she must also renounce her jewellery.

  ‘I explained that it was always a good thing to join with others in any matter of self-denial.’

  Accordingly, he doesn’t allow a desperately sick child to be given meat broth. He doesn’t allow his dying wife to be injected with antibiotics. Injections are impure. She dies.

  Again and again, Gandhi uses the spectacle of his own self-starvation to force his political enemies onto the back foot. The experiments with truth in the book’s title often seem to involve searching for the most mortifying of diets, the one that will cause most concern in those around him. His enemies can’t hit back because everyone agrees that self-denial is a positive quality that leads to purity. Meantime, Gandhi acknowledges his desire for service as a temptation. His only impurity is generosity.

  ‘Carnal mind’ was an odd construction, I thought, going back through the book to reread the sentences I’d underlined. Like ‘psychosomatic’ it blamed the mind for something going on in the body, in this case ordinary appetite rather than chronic pain; the mind rebels against its own yearnings and punishes, or purifies, itself through the body, to which it is ever superior.

  Was this healthy?

  Those ayurvedic doctors could say what they liked, I reflected, but my own dietary denials were laughable when compared with Gandhi’s whom everybody admires. Nor were my experiments aimed at purification, a concept that meant nothing to me. I had simply hoped to identify some link between diet and pain. Certainly I never imposed my renunciations on others; and they would never have succumbed if I had. My wife, for example, eats far less than I do anyway and almost never the same things.

  But was I in some subtle way using my ailments and dietary fussing to manipulate people, or at least to come across to them in a positive light? There are those, after all, who see eating disorders like anorexia as a way of controlling others by presenting a suffering, self-denying image.

  No. I could not accuse myself of this. If anything I did my best to hide my troubles. On the plane I used three different bathrooms so as not to be seen going too often.

  Approaching Rome in the early morning, I remembered a connection between Gandhi and Italy. In the early twentieth century, a certain Vinayak Savarkar had translated a biography of Giuseppe Mazzini, the Risorgimento revolutionary, into Marathi, formed a group called Young India (after Mazzini’s Young Italy) and launched a campaign of violent insurrection against the Raj not unlike Mazzini’s rebellion against the Austrian Empire. Gandhi responded to Savarkar by devoting a chapter of his manifesto Hind Swaraj to comparing India and Italy; he dwelt at length on Mazzini’s love of humanity and presented him as a non-violent visionary who had redeemed his country by ‘his strength of mind’ and ‘extreme devotion’. It was the warrior Garibaldi, Gandhi claimed, who, distorting Mazzini’s pacifist message, had got involved in the Satanic business of shedding blood.

  This was an outright lie and one that would have infuriated Mazzini who untiringly preached the virtues of violent action in a good cause and himself yearned for martyrdom in armed struggle. Gandhi must have known this; pacifism, then, was more important to him than truth. Yet Gandhi was right that Mazzini never shed blood. Blood frightened him. In his teens he had switched from studying medicine to law because he couldn’t bear the dissection lessons. Later, every time he set out to join some revolutionary uprising – insurrections that he himself had instigated – he fell ill: lumbago, rheumatism, stomach pains. Psychosomatic stuff. He never made it to the field of battle, whereas the arthritic Garibaldi rode into the fray even when he had to be lifted on his horse and strapped to the saddle.

  Gandhi, Mazzini, Garibaldi. I make no claims to being a positive force for change in the world, as these three great men no doubt were: on the other hand, I would never distort historical fact for ideological ends. Nor, try as I might, could I see a connection between my bouts of illness and those duties I found onerous or frightening. I never used my condition to skip classes, or extend delivery deadline
s, or even avoid domestic chores. I was in no less pain on days I was looking forward to and would enjoy, nor any greater pain on days I was dreading. If my troubles were psychosomatic, they were driven neither by phobia nor by megalomania.

  On the train from the airport, I at last started worrying that it might not be psychosomatic at all. Which left only cancer.

  The Difficult Target

  I WAS TO meet my surgeon in the urology ward on the fifth floor, then proceed to the operating theatre for the cystoscopy. He was busy when I arrived and to pass the time I studied a number of posters hung at intervals along the corridor advertising conferences. In each case, there was a title, a subtitle and an image to illustrate the topic. A crude cartoon of a dripping tap represented the problem of female incontinence. More imaginatively, a conference on erectile dysfunction was advertised with Magritte’s painting The Double Secret: against the backdrop of a nondescript sea part of a man’s face has been lifted off like a mask to reveal, inside the head, what seem to be bundles of bamboo with strangely split spherical joints. Evidently, male problems were more interesting than female, or sexual problems than urinary.

  Magritte’s face in this painting, it should be said, or rather, the face Magritte painted, is decidedly androgynous. How were the conference-goers to interpret that? In any event, there seemed no doubt that this ailment at least could be considered in intimate relationship with the psyche.

  But the most disturbing of the posters referred to a conference entitled LA PROSTATA: IL BERSAGLIO DIFFICILE: the difficult target. To illustrate the idea, the poster presented a frontal outline of the male body with arms and legs outspread. At the crotch was a red bull’s-eye with concentric yellow lines (of pain?) radiating outwards as far as the knees and the chest.

  I was struck: the prostate, or prostatitis, was an enemy to aim at, an interesting enemy because hard to hunt down, like some devious terrorist who avoids open confrontation and holes up where he can’t be got at. A military challenge.