by Tim Parks
But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness. She lay motionless, with wide eyes staring motionless into the darkness, while he was sunk away in sleep, his arms around her.
What I was trying to show the students was the way the states of obsessive thinking on the one hand (Gudrun), and ‘thoughtfreeness’, we might say, on the other (Ursula), seep into the syntax. The provocative thorniness of that ‘destroyed into consciousness’, the serene elision of ‘lapse of stillness’, the smooth rearrangement of linguistic furniture in ‘in complete ease’, rather than ‘completely at ease’. Along with this analysis, I confess, there would be a fair bit of banter with the students at the expense of the pompous pseudo-spiritual psychodrama of the passage. It goes on:
There were strange fountains of his body, more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.
But florid prose or not, it now seemed that I had had an experience that matched the one Lawrence was describing. Minus the sex, of course. I had not been up to sex for some time. In that regard I was the smitten rock without the fountains. All the same, and even though I would never have put it like this, ‘floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches’ made sense. That was what it had felt like. We were talking about the same thing.
Ineffable.
The only time I’d ever used the word was singing that hymn: ‘Oh worship the king, all glorious above’. One of the verses starts: ‘Oh measureless might, ineffable love’.
What did it really mean though? Much the same as measureless, presumably. I went to the dictionary.
Ineffable: too intense to be uttered.
So, something you can only speak by saying you can’t speak it. And when you did try to speak it, at least with this experience, you found yourself talking water – it was the obvious metaphor – abundant, flowing, crashing water, ultimate antidote to thought, essential requisite for Leopardi’s sweet mental shipwreck.
The water at low ebb in my dreams.
But that wasn’t the end of Lawrence’s scene. A few lines later, when the food arrives (hopefully the couple have rearranged their clothing), Ursula serves her lover tea, and we have:
She was usually nervous and uncertain at performing these public duties, such as giving tea. But today she forgot, she was at her ease, entirely forgetting to have misgivings. The tea-pot poured beautifully from a proud slender spout. Her eyes were warm with smiles as she gave him his tea. She had learned at last to be still and perfect.
Learned to be still and perfect! Are such things possible? I wasn’t so ambitious. But I did hope that one day I might ‘forget to have misgivings’.
And so I did. Only the following week in fact. Waking at 5 a.m., pain miserable as ever, I brewed a cuppa and decided that, rather than surfing the net, I might as well use this dead but wakeful time for the famous paradoxical relaxation. I lay on the sofa. Afterwards, six thirtyish, I returned to bed. At which, my wife rolled over and, quite without thinking, we made love.
Perfect.
Verbiage
I WASN’T CURED, much less healed. I wasn’t whole, or an essential new being or lapsing into complete ease. I hadn’t learned to sit still or to stand up straight, nor was I having visionary sex every day or surfing the crest of a perfect wave. The pain dragged on. The nights were interrupted five or six times.
But the change in my life was enormous. Little pools of comfort had begun to ripple out from the relaxation exercises. I recall vividly the first time I walked downstairs and realised that the usual burning sensation had not returned. More than that, my belly was miraculously calm, positively comfortable. My bladder was comfortable. It came as quite a shock and I stopped and checked it. Like a child’s. I remembered that little Indian boy my Sikh driver had grabbed. His perfect body. And I realised: This is the first time you have felt like this for many years.
I was sure now that it had been many years.
And I had done this myself. ‘Empower’ is a verb I dislike, easy currency of those who tyrannise us with their piety. But I felt inclined to use it now. I had been empowered. However imperfectly, I could do something I wasn’t able to before. Feelings of deep gratitude towards Drs Wise and Anderson welled up in me. It was true that they talked of anything up to two years to recover. Two years’ perseverance, sacrificing precious time every day. Even then, they admitted, one hundred per cent recovery was unlikely. ‘Flare-ups are always possible,’ Dr Wise warned. I didn’t care. A door had opened; lying still, I had moved on. I had made love again. After each session for a few minutes I felt absolutely normal. Or rather, I felt infinitely better than what had for a long time seemed normal, to me. It lasted fifteen minutes, then, a week later, half an hour. As long as the trend was positive I honestly didn’t care if it took ten years. Or even if I never got there.
A Headache in the Pelvis was determinedly pragmatic about what was happening inside me. Relaxing the pelvic floor, I had allowed blood to flow; muscles could begin to heal. As they did so, a more ‘hospitable environment’ was created for the nerves passing through them, which thus ceased to transmit pain. For a short while.
To what extent this description corresponded to reality, I have no idea. There is no way of measuring such things. Wise spoke of experiments introducing electrodes through the anus into the muscles to measure tension as electrical intensity; and again through the urethra to measure the tone of the sphincters. Who wouldn’t be tense with a bundle of wires up back and front passages? Who would ever sign up to such an experiment? If the doctor’s version was true, one can only say that nature was being very generous. Mistreated – as Wise and Anderson saw it – for decades, my body had reacted with exemplary promptitude to a fairly limited effort on my part. As if a dog cramped for years in a tight kennel were suddenly to become a cheerful walking companion.
For my part, I had the impression that the changes taking place were more profound. On the one hand I had been forced to make the concession of allowing these pains into my life alongside the things I cared about; in return, my ‘illness’ had been drastically cut down to size, emptied of fear and menace. What self-respecting illness would allow you to halt its hitherto inexorable advance with a few deep breaths? I felt sure now that the worst was behind me and this conviction altered my state of mind and the texture of each passing day.
More than that, I wasn’t even interested in the pains any more. Or not for themselves. I had taken them on board. I was learning to go towards them rather than pull away, to feel them fully as I lay with eyes closed. This way they lost rather than gained in fascination. They no longer seemed a deep enigma, some contorted Gothic construct holding clues to my conflicted character. Their day was up. I no longer trawled the net for new insights, new tales of woe, new cures. Instead of seeing the future as a life sentence to be served in a narrower and narrower cell, I was looking forward to adventure and exploration.
In the space of a few weeks, then, the mystery of this ugly, wearying condition had given way to the positive and inviting mystery of the body, the same body I had hitherto studiously ignored. Ignored studying. Ignored in favour of interminable, overheated mental activity. This new (to me) mystery was something that opened out rather than closing in. Something you would be happy to explore without feeling an urgent need to solve. An ocean, not a leak.
There were at least two sides to this. The small successes I had scored with Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation had opened my eyes to the eyes-closed silence where mind meets flesh. I appreciated at once that there was much, much more to be done here and many discoveries to be made. Except that you couldn’t simply set out, guidebook in hand, to find them. Like the wave that sometimes swept over
me, any discoveries would present themselves when they wanted, when I was ripe for them. So it was a question – and, extraordinary as it may seem, this had never occurred to me before – of cultivating a mental discipline that might allow new things to happen, a discipline in which, for the moment, I was a complete novice.
And for the first time in my life it was a mental task that had nothing to do with words. For decades now, I realised, all purposeful mental activity, for me, had been linguistic: writing, thinking, reasoning, teaching, talking (I had given up numbers the day they let me take maths O level a year early). When I did a sport, I turned all the mental side of it into words. I tried to work out in words how to do everything. How to head a goal in football. How to spin my kayak on its tail. What length of steps to take when running downhill. As opposed to uphill. Same with love-making even. I worked it out in words. And I honestly imagined that everybody did this, that everybody explained every action to themselves in words. After all, I had grown up listening to sermons more or less daily (there we are again), studying the scriptures over the breakfast table. Exegetics! My father loved to talk about exegetics. He loved to read the Bible at breakfast and elucidate. It was an inexhaustible puzzle. Etymology, philology. When I saw a painting, or a film, I immediately tried to sort out its pleasures and failings in words. My mind rattled off a review, a critical essay. Most of the pleasure in films and paintings, was precisely this verbal activity afterwards. Even during. I was writing the review during the movie, while looking at the painting. Everything had to be lived through language, or it wasn’t lived at all; to the point that I hadn’t really seen a painting or a film (or a game of football, for that matter) until I had thought about it in words, or preferably talked about it, or better still written about it, in carefully organised, purposeful, self-regarding words. Then I possessed it. In this, I suppose, I was not unlike those unhappy people who haven’t really been on holiday unless they can show themselves the photos. The photos are the holiday, even when they’re on the beach, or in the bedroom. And if I never took a camera on holiday, it was only because I was doing the same with words. What mattered was not the experience itself, but the experience described. My notebook, my laptop. And when I wanted to understand something new, I bought the book, of course, or books. I taught myself, with a book. Like Manuel in Fawlty Towers – ‘I can speak English, I learn it from a book.’ When I travelled, there was a guidebook. I had faith in books. I had a whole shelf-full of books on kayaking technique. I bought them compulsively. One day one of them would finally explain to me how to make that elusive manoeuvre round the slalom gate.
One consequence of all this verbiage was that I never really appreciated that there could be hard mental work that did not involve words, work for which, on the contrary, words might prove an obstacle. And this business of relaxation – but the term seemed quite inadequate now – was clearly work, of a kind. I had to labour at it. I made heavy weather. Under that low interior sky. It required effort, skill, determination. Harder than playing the piano, I kept repeating to myself.
Equally clearly, the big obstacle for me with this discipline was the constant chatter in my head. How could it ever be stilled so that I could focus on physical sensation, as Dr Wise insisted I must? Yet, however daunting, I was excited about this challenge. I sensed it was timely. These pains had come, I even found myself thinking, because I needed this. And without really knowing, or caring, where it would take me, I began to see the silence of these hours I had so grudgingly conceded to my condition – these hours of paradoxical relaxation – opening up before me across the months and years ahead like a vast new continent, a territory more arduous and gratifying than anything that foreign travel, or even reading, could offer; a journey that would take me far beyond the solution, or otherwise, of my pelvic pains and peeing problems.
Away from those relaxation sessions, though, what a physical wreck I discovered myself to be! What a bundle of twitchy nerves, poor posture and bad habits. The tension I had initially struggled to locate, eyes closed in the dark, complacently convinced that I was not tense, turned out to be everywhere in every moment. Not an inch of me, not a sinew or muscle, that didn’t clang with tension, constantly. No sooner had I stumbled on the tiniest corner of it, clenching and unclenching a muscle at random, than it reared up and overwhelmed me. I was nothing but tension.
How could I ever have let myself arrive at this state? I brushed my teeth ferociously, as if I wanted to file them down. I yanked on my socks as if determined to thrust my toes right through them. I tied my shoes as if intent on snapping the laces. When I pushed a command button, I did so as if it was my personal strength that must send the lift to the sixth floor, or raise the door of the garage. While I shaved I tensed my jaw, while I read I tensed my throat, while I ate (too fast) I tensed my forehead, while I talked I tensed my shoulders, while I listened I tensed my neck, while I drove I tensed everything. My grip on the steering wheel was set to crush it. My spine was hunched rigid. My stomach turned to rock. And yes, my pelvic floor was hoist up tight, like a trapdoor against a besieging army below. It was as though, as far as my body was concerned, I was forever accelerating and braking in first and second, when I might perfectly well have been relaxed in fourth, or even cruising in fifth. Which reminds me how, in the 1970s, when my mother switched from the old Morris 1100 to a bigger Datsun, it was a year and more before she realised that the car had a fifth gear, and even then she wouldn’t use it. I had been doing the same for thirty years.
But worse than all this, I had a habit, I discovered now, of setting one part of my body against another. Reading, legs crossed at the ankles, I would be pulling one ankle against the other. At my desk, I thrust my head back against linked hands that yanked it forward. Or I pushed my forehead forward against fingers that forced it back. Going to sleep on one side, the hand on the upper arm would form a fist against the lower arm and shove. The two sides of my body were forever fighting each other. Quite possibly I was sleeping all night in a state of constant tension.
And this is only the briefest summary of my chronically maladjusted state. Everything I did, I did with more effort than was required. It was a relief to find an activity that did require the effort I was putting into it: paddling my kayak upstream, for example, or forcing my body to run up the long hill from our house to the Pilotòn. These were really the only exertions that brought energy use and accomplishment into some kind of balance. Even then, when one of the kayak instructors was about, I was always told to take fewer paddle strokes. ‘Plant them in the water more carefully. Don’t hurry it. Don’t fight the water.’ ‘Parks, you’re too frenetic!’ This was what the games teacher always used to tell me when we played football. ‘Take it easy, Parks, or somebody’ll get hurt.’
If there was one consolation in this painful process of self-recognition to which my relaxation exercises had unexpectedly brought me, forcing me to be still and feel the tension that was burning in there, it was that many of those around me were not much better off. Not many people, I began to notice, were genuinely at ease. At least I didn’t wolf down food that I didn’t need, as Carlo was still doing, despite his diabetes. At least I didn’t bite my fingernails like my daughters, or tug at the skin round them like my wife. I didn’t smoke.
At least I was waking up to the situation.
So, leaving aside residual worries about the nagging pains that had taken over my life, the question uppermost in my mind now became: would it be possible to change profoundly, in myself? Would it be possible, at fifty-one years old, to unlearn this tense and somehow, I felt, language-driven behaviour?
If so, how?
And I knew this question was the same as asking: could my father, Harold James Parks, whose nerves and anxieties frequently caused him to vomit of a morning, have learned to peel an orange calmly, without sinking his fingers into the pulp and tearing it to shreds? Would that have been possible? I also sensed that if I ever did achieve a transformation of this magnitude, if I
ever did learn to stand up straight and hold a glass of water with the same serene stillness as the waterseller of Seville, then the pains that had set off this whole process would be a distant memory.
This link between posture and pain was no longer just a whimsical notion. A Headache in the Pelvis included, as was natural, a long section about the therapeutic massage they offered in their California clinic, together with guided courses in paradoxical relaxation. They had identified, Dr Wise claimed, a number of muscles which, in sufferers of my variety, tended to hide so-called trigger points. That is, as the muscle atrophied with little or improper use, a part of it would become taut; then within that taut band certain areas would grow particularly knotted and sensitive. Press on these ‘contraction knots’ and the patient’s customary pains would immediately be triggered or intensified, often in organs or areas remote from the muscle in question, this thanks to the way nerves passed between layers of muscle. Identify the trigger points and massage them gently over a period of weeks, returning the muscles to something like health, and the pains would subside.
Thus spake Dr Wise.
The muscles involved were primarily those of the pelvic floor, above all the marvellously named levator ani, and the book included disquieting images, as if from inside the body looking downward, of a finger poking up through the anus to explore and massage these muscles. Each diagram explained where the muscle in question tended to ‘refer pain’.
