by Tim Parks
But this morning I didn’t make it to the food. Leaving the meditation room, you stepped into the small garden, whence it was a few yards to the door into the house and the dining room. On the threshold, I felt a sob rising from chest to throat.
The novelty of the experience was that I was not feeling unhappy in any way. Rather the contrary. Also unusual was my immediate appreciation that what was happening was beyond the usual social controls. My body had decided to sob, the way when it’s ill, it decides to vomit.
I stepped aside to let the others pass and, to hide my face, turned to look out over the low garden parapet across the broad valley with its shreds of cloud and shafts of sunlight, its villages and churches, and then, beyond the valley, the great chain of mountain peaks: woods, scree, snow.
The weeping burst on me like a storm. I shook.
This crisis lasted half an hour. On two occasions I tried to go in to eat – I was hungry – but each time the emotion surged up with renewed force. My throat ached. So I sat on a stone table under a pergola and continued to gaze through my tears across the valley which seemed intensely part of the experience, as if, again, there were nothing separating self and outside – I was truly in this huge panorama, mind and body, weeping.
Then, as though a voice were calling a class register, name after name was announced to my mind, people I knew or had known; and together with the names came faces, bodies, vivid expressions and gestures. One after another, faster and faster, these folk were crowding into consciousness. It was as if, at some carefully engineered surprise party, a door had been thrown open and I was confronted with everyone who ever mattered to me: my wife principally and throughout – we had been together thirty years – then my son, my daughters, my mother and my father, my brother and sister, my friends, lovers, everybody precious, but colleagues too, old acquaintances, neighbours even, they were all here beside me on the terrace under the pergola looking out over the valley, not summoned by myself, not expecting to see me, but glad nevertheless to be here at this impromptu gathering – and solemn too, solemnly aware of our shared mortality, aware that some had already passed on, while others of us were well on our way through life’s journey. Then I saw that the long valley we were gazing over was the journey. I was one with the group, the living and the dead, and we were one with the landscape. And slowly, between fits of bewildered tears, it dawned on me, at long last, that the roads to health and to death were one: to recover my health, fully, I must accept death as I had accepted the pain sitting cross-legged in the meditation room. I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t. But I knew that if I did, this was what they meant by purification.
I have never wept so deeply. Like most people, I have sometimes been very unhappy, and sometimes very happy. But there had never been this outpouring, nor this feeling simply of being present, a mere witness, while something necessary unfolded. Had I wanted to resist, I could not have done so.
Finally, when it really was over and I could go to the bathroom to wash my face, I was struck, glancing in the mirror, by this obvious thought: that the two selves that had shouted their separateness on waking that morning almost a year ago were my daily life on the one hand and the ambitions that had always taken precedence over that life on the other. I had always made a very sharp distinction between the business of being here in the flesh, and the project of achieving something, becoming someone, writing books, winning prizes, accruing respect. The second had always taken precedence over the first. How else can one ever get anywhere in life? That was why I had been so challenged when Dr Wise warned me that I must put my painful and embarrassing condition at the centre of my ‘project’. What he had meant, I saw now, was that the real project was always mortality.
A black cat had climbed on board.
The next meditation session was not till eight a.m., and, retiring to my bed in the meantime, I called up a thousand bookish references to get a fix on what had just happened to me, to turn it, as always, into words. ‘Life presents itself first and foremost as a task. We take no pleasure in it except when we are striving after something.’ I remembered reading that, but couldn’t remember where. It had sounded a warning, I had made a mental note. But over the years I had read a hundred warnings and made a thousand mental notes and none had carried the conviction of the ugly bellyache that had stopped me sitting at my computer.
‘We go to novels for life,’ I had read those words, or words to that effect, quite recently, in James Wood’s book How Fiction Works. But they might easily have been spoken by D.H. Lawrence or F.R. Leavis. And I understood now with absolute certainty that this claim was a false and self-regarding piety. Life is not in novels. The novels that most compellingly keep us away from life are those that most accurately, intensely and wonderfully imagine it and replace it for us, the novels of Dostoevsky and, yes, of Lawrence, of the truly great writers. But the novels themselves are not life and we don’t go to them for life. If it’s life we want, we put the book down. There were some dumb lines from O-level Browning:
And you, great sculptor – so, you gave
A score of years to Art, her slave,
And that’s your Venus, whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn!
‘Yonder’, ‘fords’ and ‘burn’ were awful, I thought. Why had such poor poetry stuck in my head?
Or there was Poe’s story about the painter who so obsessively has his young wife sit for her portrait, that only when the absolutely life-like painting is finished does he notice the girl is dead. Art at life’s expense.
Then I remembered – the weeping experience had set my brain racing – Robert Walser and the Benjamenta Institute of his novel Jakob von Gunten. Yes. Jakob, the narrator, is sent to a school where he must ‘learn to think of nothing’, something he at first finds absurd, but that eventually wins him over. ‘One must go courageously into the inevitable,’ was a line I remembered.
But why seek to tie down the intensity of what had happened to me with all these literary references? First the emotion, then the excited reflection on emotion, attempting to divert it from its initial function, to enrol it in my career project, to turn it into smartness and writing. First the illness to warn you away from monomania and back to life and then the reflection on that process, moving you away from life and back to monomania, back to writing and books. Coleridge again. Or even Wordsworth. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ The formula sounded so innocuous, but the next logical step was to seek the emotion in order to recall it in tranquillity, to care more about the recollection than the emotion, because it was the sophisticated recollection that brought recognition and celebrity and self-esteem. ‘Who can ever feel at ease when he cares about the world’s praise and admiration?’ Jakob von Gunten again. I had remembered that line too. More warnings. Jakob comes to appreciate the school’s curriculum of thinking about nothing because he is disturbed by the power and ugliness of the instinct to achieve. I remembered an anecdote about Walser. One day his admirer, Carl Seelig, went to visit him in the mental home where he lived. You know, Robert, Seelig told him, you are perhaps the greatest writer in the German language at this time. Walser was upset. If you ever say such a thing again, he told Seelig, I will never speak to you.
I lay on my bed, leafing through the pages of my literary memory. As I did so I knew that it was foolish. The thing to do was to get back to the silence. Go to the meditation room now, I told myself, even before the next session. Go and sit in silence. At once a quotation rose to possess even this decision.
The important thing is not to learn, but to undergo an emotion, and to be in a certain state.
That was Aristotle. I laughed and discovered something that has served me well since: the more we threaten thought and language with silence, or simply seek to demote them in our lives from the ludicrous pedestal on which our culture and background have placed them, then the more fertile, in their need to justify and assert themselves, they become. Reflection is never more exciting than w
hen reflecting on the damage reflection does, language never more seductive than when acknowledging its unreality.
This is the territory of Beckett, I thought. ‘Of it goes on!’ The Unnameable. The mind’s mindless chatter. Beckett too had spoken of being brought to an awareness of his sick psychological state by an array of inexplicable pains.
I stopped myself and went downstairs for the first session of Vipassana.
Anicca
WORDLESS WAKEFULNESS, LIVELY stillness, meditation resists description. When, at the beginning, words and images fizz in resistance to our attempt to put them aside, the writer can have fun. But when thought at last relents, when eyes close behind closed eyes and the mind sinks silent into the flesh, then it’s hard to describe that strange state of alertness, oneness, quiet. Moreover, the meditator loses all desire to do so.
To what end?
Vipassana, however, does offer a few fireworks on the way to composure which all practitioners recognise. Something can be told, though the experience lies beyond any verification. Above all, you can’t see it. There is nothing you can copy, the way we might all copy the movements of a tennis player, or the way Eugen Herrigel copied his Zen master of archery.
‘Now,’ our teacher says, ‘take your concentration away from the breath crossing the lip, and raise it to the top centre of the head, a small area, about the size of a coin, corresponding, in an infant, to the fontanel. Focus your attention there. Take note of any sensations that arise, without seeking to induce sensations where there are none, without resisting or altering sensations when they occur.’
So, at each of the retreats I have been to, whether of five days or ten, of twenty people or of sixty, on the fourth morning, it begins. Never, at first attempt, do I find any sensation in this neglected area of my anatomy: the bald spot. I can’t even locate it. What does happen is that a headache flares as the mind detaches from the breath and moves out to explore the body. The tension swells into the skull for a few seconds, then fades.
Superficially, the Vipassana process is not unlike the autogenous training that I failed at so abjectly in my early thirties, or indeed Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation. One is to contemplate sensation as it flows and ebbs throughout the body. The difference lies in the intensity and thoroughness of the exploration and the attitude with which it is undertaken. One renounces any objective beyond the contemplation itself. You are not here in order to relax, or to overcome pain, or to resolve a health problem – the experience is not subordinated to a higher goal – you are here to be here, side by side with the infinitely nuanced flux of sensation in the body.
First the fontanel, then the forehead, then the temples (left and right), the back of the head, the ears (left and right), the eyes (left and right), the nose, the nostrils (left and right), the cheeks (left and right), the lips (upper and lower), the gums (all), the teeth (every one), the tongue (above and below), the pallet, the jowls (left and right), the throat, the jaw, the neck.
And we have only just begun. The body is a universe. It has many parts. It is made up of many materials. The skin, the muscle, the nerves, the tendons, the blood, the bone . . .
But what does it mean that the mind, or the attention, moves around the body? The body is absolutely still (you are not flexing muscles to feel, as you did in the early days of paradoxical relaxation), yet, within the three-dimensional stillness of limbs, head, trunk, you have the impression of the mind shifting, exploring, travelling up and down, left and right, as if, with the body parts that are usually in movement now firmly anchored, the usually anchored mind can move at will. And this is not the movement of the schoolboy’s eye over diagrams of anatomy. It is not the movement of looking. Rather it is like a man wandering through the rooms of a house, in the dark, knocking on this door and that, perhaps after a long absence, checking if anyone is home, if anyone wants to talk, or gripe, or rejoice, or simply turn on a light for him.
For a while, perhaps, there will be no response. The doors are closed, perhaps locked. You must be patient. Nobody has passed this way for some time and it would be impolite of you to start rattling the handles. This is not a police raid.
The forehead doesn’t respond.
The ears don’t respond.
The nape of the neck never responds.
In another part of the house, on a lower floor perhaps, a noisy melodrama demands your attention. A fierce cramp is shouting in the calves. An ache hammers at the back. These people want an argument. They are protesting. But those are not the doors you are knocking on now. Their turn will come. For the moment you tap politely at the nose. You listen politely to the skin at the bridge of the nose.
No response.
But you have time! Hours of time. You are not in a hurry. There are many doors to try.
Attention attends, unrequited.
Then, all at once, the temples!
I remember distinctly, my first session of Vipassana, it was in my temples that it began. First one, then the other: singing, buzzing, dancing. Had I wished to induce a sensation in this part of the body, I would never have imagined such mayhem, as though insect eggs had hatched, or breath on ashes found a nest of live embers. Yet it wasn’t creepy. And it wasn’t hot. It was the lively sparkle of freshly poured soda water.
In my temples.
At this point you realise that focusing the mind – eyes closed – on a part of the body is quite different from focusing on something outside yourself, a ball, say, or a bottle, or a boat. In that case the object remains an object, however long we look at it. But like light through a lens, or through a glass of still water perhaps, the mind sets the body alight, or the body the mind. It is hard to say which; the skin glows in the mind and the mind fizzes in the skin. Together, neither flesh nor fleshless, or both flesh and fleshless, they burn.
This is the beginning of Vipassana.
The inclination now is to enjoy this novel sensation. It’s such a relief, after twenty minutes perhaps, to get a response from the body at last, to understand at long last what the teacher was leading you to. So relax now and enjoy. As you relaxed with Dr Wise. This song in the temples, this temple song, is such a pleasurable sensation.
But the teacher is moving on. We must not attach to pleasures as we must not attach to pain.
Nose now.
Lips now.
Tongue now.
The encouraging thing is that once one part of the body has answered your polite enquiry, others too seem more willing to respond: here a band of heat, there a patch of coldness, here a dull throb, now a tingling current. The whole house is waking up and as you pass from door to door each occupant acknowledges your presence by turning something on: now a blue light, now a red, here a coffee grinder, there a TV. The tower block starts to hum.
These varied sensations, our teacher now tells us, are manifestations of anicca, which is to say, the constant instability of all things. He invites us to contemplate anicca. To know anicca, the eternal flux, in our hands, our chests. To recognise that nothing is fixed. Ego, identity, they have no permanence.
Immediately, my thinking mind rebels. My determined self resists. Who needs this mumbo-jumbo – I’m angry – these mystifying foreign words? Anicca! Who needs this theory? The body may indeed be subject to constant change, but it is also true that it remains largely the same for many years. I recognise my friends year in year out. In childhood photographs, my face is already essentially me, Tim Parks.
As I think these thoughts, the temple dance fades, the lights dim, the pain mongers on the lower floors increase their clamour.
Damn and damn.
I choose to forget the debate and concentrate on sensation. I remember Ruggero: treat it as an entirely physical thing.
The thud of the beating heart, the rise and fall of the diaphragm, a burning hoop around the waist, a warm tremor in the belly – very slowly, part by ageing part, the body was put together. The book I had translated on early Indian philosophy, Roberto Calasso’s Ka, told the story o
f the so-called altar of fire. Blessed with longevity, but nevertheless mortal, the lesser gods sought out the first god, Prajapati, whose broken body was dispersed throughout the world, was the world, to ask if there was any way they might be ‘saved’. ‘You must reconstruct my lost wholeness,’ Prajapati told them. ‘How?’ ‘Take three hundred and sixty boundary stones and ten thousand eight hundred bricks . . .’ The numbers corresponded to the days and hours of the Vedic year. Every brick was an ‘intense concentration’.
The altar was built from the outside inward, focusing the mind. Its shape was that of the eagle, bird of eternal wakefulness. If ever you managed to complete the construction, a fire would kindle and the eagle would take flight to the paradise of immortality.
Well, there comes a moment in Vipassana, if you are lucky, if you stay focused, patient, if you learn not to want such a moment, when the entire body links up and ignites. Once, I remember, it began in my wrists. Pulsing waves accelerated into whirling orbits of bright electrons, pure energy, without substance. Contemplating this marvel, it did seem the ego was bleeding away into the hectic flow. If they wanted to call it anicca, let them.
But more often, for me at least, it begins when contemplating pain. It is hard to sit with pain in stillness, allowing it to be there, uncomplaining. A knife blade thrust between the vertebrae, for example. But if you do, then, perhaps, just perhaps, for one can never command these things, a sudden intensification will invade the spine, a rush of fierce heat flushes through the chest and dissolves away through arms and legs. The pain is gone. The hunched back straightens, the lungs fill, and the body is one, as if all the doors in a house had been taken away allowing free movement throughout. You are feeling everything, simultaneously, or rather, you are everything, from toes to fingertips to the hairs on your head. You dance through the rooms, you who never learned to dance.
