Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

I couldn’t figure this. He’s overawed, and apparently delighted to be so – he’s got what he was after – but simultaneously blessing God for the power of Reason and Will. Because they will help him get out of his predicament? Or because they will enable him to write about it afterwards? He ‘explains’:

  I know not how to proceed, how to return, but I am calm and fearless and confident – if this Reality were a dream, if I were asleep, what agonies had I suffered! What screams! When the Reason and the Will are away, what remain to us but Darkness and Dimness and a bewildering Shame and Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure, that draws the soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind.

  It’s confusing; without reason and will, we alternate, as in dreams, between horror and fantastic pleasure; but Coleridge describes the latter state so enthusiastically it seems to cancel out the former, and make the calm, fearless mind he’s so pleased with uninteresting. In reason-free pleasure the soul swims and changes shape constantly. Ergo, has no identity? Like my Cleaver, the poet doesn’t seem quite sure whether he wants to end up badly or not.

  A rather dull paragraph then explains how Coleridge in fact got out of gaol by shinnying down a gulley he hadn’t previously noticed.

  For some days I let this story turn over in my mind, occasionally going back to the net to read snippets of the man’s biography or a poem or two. In particular, I tried to find out about Coleridge’s many illnesses. It’s amazing – and this was also true when writing about Thomas Hardy – how many biographies will simply say, Coleridge was ill and so began to take laudanum, to which he became addicted. Without telling you what the illness was. As if one could know a man without knowing his illness. One website said he had a swollen knee. Another that he had rheumatic fever. Shooting in the dark, I Googled ‘Coleridge urine’ and came up with this:

  What a beautiful Thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, trans picuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it.

  Transpicuous! Meaning ‘clear’, I presume. But the word itself is more conspicuous than transparent. Anyway, here was someone used to peeing at night, used to holding a candle over his chamber pot. I remembered the torch in the tent shining down on my plastic bottle.

  Then I found an article admiring Coleridge for his lack of squeamishness in his diary. He spoke openly of ‘bowel agony’, of ‘testicles twice the usual size’.

  For twenty dollars I purchased a research paper from Johns Hopkins University press that promised to discuss Coleridge’s long, writerly obsession with his health. His poor health. It was a chastening piece. Given the poet’s interminable descriptions of his bowel complaints, the writer decides, Coleridge was probably ‘one of the most ingrained hypochondriacs in history’, a man whose mental state ‘manifested itself in semantically rich self-diagnoses typically fraught with internal contradictions that raised more questions than they answered’. The author goes on:

  Of course, the relation in medical history of the troubled medical condition and label ‘hypochondria’ to the gut represents a vast swath of cultural history that we cannot even begin to allude to properly here, save to say that Coleridge was the type of sedentary, solitary, scholastic, symbol-making figure who surely lies close to its center.

  This very much reminded me of the cover of Dr Wise’s A Headache in the Pelvis. The sedentary, scholastic Zechariah. This is the kind of guy who bellyaches. I felt uncomfortable.

  The Johns Hopkins professor was ruthless. Because the poet’s pains did not have any consequences beyond frequent bowel movements he concludes that Coleridge’s obsessive writing about the matter was without substance, autistic, and of no help to anyone intent on understanding bowel disorders.

  Medical categories, stable and unstable, existed in his imagination primarily as linguistic constructs; because all language was by degrees metaphoric, unstable categories lent themselves rather more feverishly than stable categories to aberrant images.

  In short, elusive as a mountain waterfall, the pain inspired Coleridge to conjure up strange images. Since the writer’s self-esteem largely depended on his ability to be creative with language, it was worth being in pain, or imagining he was, as it had been worth risking his life on Scafell, because it stimulated his writing.

  Coleridge seems to have taken an avid, indeed almost morbid, pleasure in teasing out the semantic ambiguities of medical categories.

  This is aggressive criticism. And of course we can’t know. We can’t know if he was really in pain, or how much. I tried to summarise. Afraid, five years on from the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, that he had lost his creativity, his mind unhappily divided between a wife and mistress, Coleridge seeks in nature experiences so intense as to overwhelm those preoccupations, and indeed the whole unbearable thought process that daily afflicts him. Then he is so excited by extreme experience that he tries to exploit it to recover his creativity, to show he can still produce remarkable images, still force language to the limit, shattering the white bear hair of tumbling waters. There is a conflict at the core: language is to be shaken off as part of the distressing thought process (‘thoughts that tortured me’ I found in a poem of 1803); but language is also to be exalted as the (only) means of conveying the exciting experience of escape from thought (and language).

  In ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, written in 1802, I found these words, addressed to Mont Blanc:

  . . . I gazed upon thee,

  Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,

  Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer

  I worshipped the Invisible alone.

  And elsewhere in a note, this:

  To think of a thing is different from to perceive it, as ‘to walk’ is from ‘to feel the ground under you’.

  Perceiving Mont Blanc, without thinking it (in words), Coleridge enters a state of trance, as he was almost in trance on Scafell. And it was in a kind of trance, as I recalled, that the Ancient Mariner redeemed himself by blessing the watersnakes. Unaware, is the word. I looked the verse up. ‘He blessed them unaware.’ It was when – after a ‘lapse of stillness’ perhaps – you entered into an immediate perception of the world, unmediated by language, that there was a chance of love and joy gushing from your heart. ‘No tongue their beauty might declare,’ the mariner says of the watersnakes. Ineffable.

  When he didn’t have Mont Blanc to look at, Coleridge tried to force himself into this immediate relationship with the world by tumbling down rocks in the Lake District. When he didn’t have Scafell he took Laudanum, and brought back ‘Kubla Khan’ from his trance. The movement was always the same: away from pain/thought/words via extreme experience/the sublime/drugs; then back into words/thought/pain via sublime poetry. Hence escape actually fed the compulsion it was seeking to escape from.

  I pass, like night, from land to land;

  I have strange power of speech.

  This is perverse, I decided. Coleridge was perverse. I am perverse trying to see his experiences in relation to mine. The only glimmer of analogy, perhaps, was that the sort of mental tension I lived in – notoriously a world of words – had encouraged me to develop a pastime, kayaking, which had the advantage of sweeping away thought and returning me to an immediate, urgent relation with my body and the world. In doing so, however, I raised my adrenalin levels to the roof and created an even higher level of tension, albeit of a different variety. I then exacerbated this by fretting about how to bring those experiences back into the world of words. Hence I oscillated between an obsessive super-verbal tension in my office and an intense physical tension on the water. Either way my gut paid the price.

  As did Coleridge’s.

  Conclusion. It is a big mistake to imagine you can get back to a better relationship with your body simply by bullying it into extreme action. In my own case, it was time to find a way out of my predicament that didn’t involve chasing out one form of tension by plunging into another.


  Resolution. If ever I wrote about this ‘illness’, it would only be when I had recovered and it was no longer a ‘complaint’. And then in the simplest of words. No white bears with shattering hair. No fancy literature at the expense of well-being.

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  EARLY IN SEPTEMBER I cancelled my season ticket at the stadium and made an appointment with a practitioner of shiatsu. What exactly was wrong with words, I’d been asking myself? The same thing that was right with them, presumably. Without words it’s hard to refer to something that isn’t here in front of us, now, it’s hard to get conceptual or even tell a story. It’s hard to plan. Hard to worry.

  What a loss that would be.

  With words, on the other hand, you range everywhere, over everything, you can go back to the past, forward to the future. Past worries, present worries, future worries: things you ought to say tomorrow, things you ought to have said yesterday. With words you can plan and change plans. You have dates to remember and numbers. You can build castles in the air. And demolish them. With words you can talk about things that don’t exist, about times that never were, might-have-beens, eternity, grammatical constructs. If you want, or even if you don’t want, you can live entirely in books and newspapers, chat rooms and radio talk, dimensions entirely detached from the here and now of your own existence. You can phone in and express opinions on AIDS in Africa, on the Oscars in LA. You can send the same email to three friends simultaneously, or read text messages while making love. It’s an intensely mental process. Wasn’t that, it occurred to me, what the second part of ‘Kubla Khan’ was about?

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song,

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

  That with music loud and long,

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  And all who heard should see them there,

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  Words build domes that never were. In the air. Pure mental material. Beware indeed! For when can you ever say, with words, where the real starts and ends?

  because all language is by degrees metaphoric

  Language builds domes, then other domes over them, as the first dissolve. Because words are never still. The opening of a sentence projects you forwards; the end demands you have the beginning in mind. One paragraph leads to another and this page to the next. The eye is ahead of the lips. Reading, we turn the page while the last lines of the one before are still falling into place. Typing, my thoughts run ahead of my fingers. Driven on. Never now. Never grounded in this moment.

  Reading, writing, talking, thinking, you move in a separate system. The map may be a real one, but it’s not the territory. To think an object is not to perceive it. To text a girlfriend is not to be with her. You lose your grip on things as they are. But this second life is compulsive. You can’t stop. A whirling word machine lifts off from the heavy surfaces of soil, cement and skin. Mind and body part company. You’re more at home on the page now than the pavement, on the net than the street. Your mind is you. Your body is a vehicle. An enabler. An ear to hear, a mouth to speak, eyes to read, fingers to write. Sometimes a fashion accessory. Or else an embarrassment. When some physical disturbance forces its way into your consciousness, into words, you feel disorientated, betrayed.

  This breathing House not built with hands,

  This body that does me grievous wrong,

  Thus Coleridge.

  Uneasy, you take drastic action (from time to time). You try to draw your body back into a relationship with yourself (every now and then). You compel it to run further than it wants (twice a week), to swim a hundred laps (on Saturday afternoons); that way it will transmit feel-good endomorphines. You force it to paddle dangerous torrents (twice a year), to leap from a plane with a parachute, or from a high bridge with an elasticated rope (on annual holidays), that way it will pump adrenalin and emotions: fear, excitement, exhilaration. You imagine that by doing this you are rediscovering your body, giving it an airing, putting it through its paces, keeping it presentable, as my parents always wanted our bodies to be presentable. You don’t want to become obese. Or anorexic. Then you sit it down in front of the screen and write about your experiences. The whole thing was mental from start to finish. Even when it seemed most physical, it was mental. The mental life has triumphed over the physical, says Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The modern gym with its machines and mirrors, the cosmetic surgeon with his enticing brochures, these are telling signs. Likewise pornography and the obsession with underwear. Men don’t love women, Lawrence complained, they love their underwear. The mind fantasises the body, builds curves in air. Over caves of ice. ‘While kindness is the glib order of the day, underneath . . . we find a coldness of heart . . . Every man is a menace to every other.’ To be out of touch with your body is to be out of love with your neighbour.

  And if you haven’t the energy for the weights or the stomach for the knife, you can go to the stadium and watch the serious athletes perform. For ten years I had held a season ticket for Hellas Verona FC. Right in the curva sud. The stadium wired me into frantic focus on the here and now of the game, the back and forth of the ball, the immediacy of the moment in front of goal: Shoot now! Do it now! No replays, no second tries. No chance to rephrase, or translate. The drama of the moment. Time ticking away. Life running out.

  In the stadium the words you use are locked into the present, they are exhortations, chants, mantras. Hellas, Hellas, Hellas! Attack, attack, attack! Go, go, go! It’s a battle (with Hellas a relegation battle). The crowd shares in its team’s struggle. But only at a psychological level, of course. I am not the player in front of goal. I don’t have to do anything now. Anything physical. I’m agog, but with another’s performance. I savour the terrible immediacy of life, his life (my disappointment), from a distance. Raised from the field of action to the vantage point of the terraces, I shout back down at the performers. I know they don’t hear my imprecations. I’m shouting for myself. To excite myself.

  At the beginning of a big game, my body shivers. I’m tense. I have to go to the bathroom. My body suffers the mind’s excitement. Reading the programme, my hand trembles. Today we stay up or go down. Hellas are on the brink. Hellas are always on the brink. I can’t watch while a penalty is taken.

  Leaving the stadium, I’m emotionally drained, exhausted. Euphoric or depressed. On the car radio urgent voices have begun the post-match analysis. Waking in the night, I’m still furious we were denied a penalty. My belly is on fire. I can’t pee, I have to pee.

  Enough. This autumn I didn’t renew my season ticket but went instead to lie down on a large futon, perhaps three metres by three, all but filling a small airless room overlooking the river in central Verona. Warm hands lifted my right foot.

  ‘Let go,’ a voice said softly. ‘Let me take the weight.’

  I tried to relinquish control. The hands took my foot, firmly but gently. Then, after some exploration, resting the heel on one palm, he enquired, ‘Here?’ and pressed a finger into the sole. A connection lit up. The pain shot from foot to bladder and simultaneously from bladder to foot. There was a live wire along the back of my leg.

  ‘Ow! Yes!’

  ‘The water meridian,’ Ruggero said.

  Beforehand I had been sceptical.

  ‘If you can’t go to California for the anal massage,’ my wife laughed, ‘why not try some shiatsu?’

  Over two months the paradoxical relaxation had gradually subdued the pain. Wider and wider pools of comfort spread out around my sessions. But they were still shallow. There were setbacks. The nights had not improved. Then in my new-found optimism I became impatient. I wanted things to change quickly. Introduced to my body and its curious pulsations and connections, I wanted to know more, now.

  All the same, I was sceptical.

  ‘Ruggero’s just a dressmaker,’ I said. ‘What can he do for me?’

&nb
sp; We knew a man our own age, a local Veronese, who had become a shiatsu practitioner. Ten years ago, during a midlife crisis. He now taught shiatsu in Milan and Padua. Prior to that he had made dresses for the rich women of Verona. He was the father of one of my son’s early school friends. The two families had once eaten a pizza together. Ruggero’s wife was a court stenographer. They were hardly sophisticated folks.

  ‘It can’t do any harm,’ Rita said.

  I had a mental block about massage. Perhaps I associated it with laziness and self-indulgence, or with things oriental and threatening. Perhaps I was scared of being touched. I remember once, in my thirties, at the gym where I did furious abdominals and played volleyball with frantic intensity, the management decided to offer Christmas-time treats to the clients. Taking a small red parcel off the tree in the foyer, you might find inside a token giving three months’ free membership, or ten visits to the swimming pool. Mine awarded me three massages. I was so upset I begged them to substitute the gift for something else. Anything. They gave me the visits to the swimming pool and I splashed back and forth to see if I could still swim as many laps as when I was eighteen.

  ‘Shiatsu is not massage,’ Ruggero corrected me. ‘It’s a form of therapy through touch and pressure.’

  He wanted to know why I’d come. As briefly as possible, I described my situation. He made notes. He was careful to check that I had done all the relevant medical exams. He told me to strip to pants and T-shirt and lie down. Then, like someone plugging in a wire to check a circuit, he chose a point on the sole of my foot and pressed. The pain in my bladder was immediate and intense but disappeared the moment he eased off.

  ‘What about dreams?’ he asked.

  ‘What about them?’

  It would be the first of many embarrassing conversations. Ruggero talked about meridians and yin and yang as if they were as real as red and white blood cells, nerves and skin tissue, not just words, inventions, stories. I decided to humour him, but was unsettled. The opening gambit with my foot had been impressive.