Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  ‘I would rather say nothing, if that’s allowed,’ I would say, in Italian. Or even better, I could approach Coleman in the corridor before tomorrow and, murmuring softly, ask if he could avoid calling me out to the front. Certainly people could hardly say I was looking for attention if I stayed sitting when the others went up to talk.

  Or could they?

  It was simply maddening how insistently this meaningless chatter ground away in my head those first three days of the retreat. Perhaps I should confess, I thought, when I was called out to the front, that I had wasted hours and hours of this precious meditation time with self-regarding thoughts about what I should say when called out to the front, thoughts entirely directed to the effect of my performance on the audience rather than an honest comment on the way my meditation was going. Badly, needless to say. Should I be confessional? Or would that have even more effect?

  Of course I then imagined writing about this meaningless chatter and how brilliantly I could deconstruct myself, or someone like me (very like me), in a novel perhaps. I could very cleverly show how useless I was. Should I write a novel or should I make it non-fiction? Which would seem more necessary? And if I wrote non-fiction, should I perhaps use a third person, as Coetzee had in Boyhood and Youth, or accept the slithery candour of the first person like everyone else? Those are strange books that Coetzee wrote. They make you feel uneasy.

  It went on and on. I hated it. I couldn’t find a way out. After the first retreat I had read Coetzee’s essay on Robert Walser and been astonished by a curious fact and by Coetzee’s response to it, a fact that now came back to my mind as being extremely pertinent to this speech madness. In his mid-thirties Walser suddenly found that he could no longer hold a pen. His hand became painfully cramped every time he picked one up. He couldn’t write. But of course he had to write, otherwise who was he, where were his old ambitions? So he fell to writing with a pencil. And his handwriting changed drastically. Instead of the generously rounded calligraphy of the well-educated young man from the provinces, he now wrote in a script so minuscule that to the naked eye it looked like some indecipherable code. Even experts, Coetzee remarked, cannot be sure they have got it right.

  Why could Walser work with a pencil but not a pen? I wondered now, partly as an antidote to playing this idiotic speech over and over in my head and partly because I suspected that, however self-aggrandising it might seem, Walser’s problem and my own were not unrelated. And why, in particular, did he talk about his ‘pencil method’? Here comes Coetzee’s bizarre interpretation. Like an artist using charcoal, the Nobel winner claimed, Walser needed ‘to get a steady rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into the frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became the same thing’. That is, he needed the rhythmic movement of the pencil to overcome some obstacle which Coetzee wasn’t eager to identify.

  But why is a pencil more rhythmic than a pen? Is the charcoal analogy pertinent? Painters do not try to execute miniatures in charcoal, do they? Surely if Walser’s script had now shrunk to the indecipherably microscopic, the hand movements would have been more cramped and not free and rhythmic at all. Isn’t it more likely that Walser’s problem lay with the egotism and exhibitionism inherent in writing and publication? That was what was cramping his hand. ‘Writers do not know what they lost when they sacrificed anonymity,’ Walser had written somewhere. Words to that effect. His novels were all glaringly autobiographical, with an alter ego at the centre of each story. Was it possible that the switch to pencil, which, unlike ink, can be erased, gave him a feeling that what he was doing was provisional, could be reversed? And that writing in such a tiny script he was in a way hiding his work from others? He was doing it and not doing it. For a while Walser would copy out his pencil manuscripts in a fair hand for the publishers, using a pen. Detached from the moment of creation, or self-revelation, self-affirmation, the pen was mysteriously useable again. But later he left his work in pencil without trying to publish it, and later still he stopped writing altogether.

  I kept thinking about Walser in relation to this conundrum of self-presentation, of simultaneously wanting to take the stage and truly not wanting to take it, above all not wanting to want to take it, or not wanting to be seen to want to take it. And wasn’t there something of the same conundrum in Coetzee’s disquieting decision to write his autobiography in the third person? As if he wasn’t writing about himself, but someone else. And no one is harder on that someone else than Coetzee in Boyhood and Youth, that person responsible for his committing the unforgivable indiscretion of writing these books. He was hard on himself because he was writing books about himself. And everyone knew it. Even though he pretended it wasn’t himself. That was what he hated. Writing about himself, he wrote against himself. Himself being a writer writing himself. ‘Not I,’ Beckett proclaimed. Or had a mouth proclaim. A mouth without a face. Without an I, without an eye. ‘Shall I never be able to lie upon any subject other than myself?’ wonders Malone, or Beckett, in Malone Dies. A rhetorical question. No. Pain, pain, not my pain. Please. And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, ‘So you’ve come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.’

  And it was!

  And I was in deep trouble. I couldn’t go on. For long periods, as the hours ticked by, I felt I was swaying from side to side and must sooner or later crash to the floor. I began to look forward to it. Or fall on my nose. I was so hunched. It would be such a relief when I crashed on my nose and everyone would see how much I was suffering and then I could stop and take a rest, take a walk, go to bed, go home perhaps. There was now a stabbing pain right between the shoulders. It was ferocious. Stab, stab, stab. Bizarre lights and burning heat radiated out from it. How could I be in so much pain when I knew there was nothing at all wrong with me? What was I learning from all this, I wondered? Nothing. Nothing except that every single thought that rose to my mind was in some way self-regarding. No, in every way self-regarding. Every thought. My analysis of Walser’s problem was no doubt accurate, I complimented myself, and fitted in with many other elements in Walser’s biography. My sense that Coetzee actually needed to miss the point was in line with his own obvious conflict when it came to presenting himself. But what is there to present, in writing, if not oneself? Even if I wrote about the man on the moon it would be self-presentation. Especially if I wrote about the man on the moon. What I must say when I am finally called to the front, I decided, is that these three days of meditation have revealed to me that every thought I think is, in one way or another, an ugly, fatuous form of self-congratulation. Even what appears to be the most searing self-criticism is in fact self-congratulation. A man capable of seeing his worst side, you congratulate yourself. Coetzee is pleased to have been so hard on himself. Nice observation, Tim. Was there no way out of this? How could I stop it, really stop it, forever? Without blowing my brains out.

  ‘Gently return your attention to the breath crossing the point on the upper lip. The in breath crossing the point, the out breath crossing the point. Nama and Rupa, mind and material. Everything in the world, mind and material. Without identity.’

  Tom Pax was called to the front with three other names.

  So much for identity. The translator was misreading from his list of names. Pax I’m used to, but I hate it when I’m called Tom.

  Knowing that Coleman always proceeded from left to right, I put down my cushion on the far right.

  The first man admitted to panic attacks.

  Coleman was silent. ‘Just concentrate on the breath,’ he told him eventually. ‘And make an objective note of the fear.’

  The second man confessed he kept falling asleep then waking himself up as his body slipped and slumped.

  Like the disciples at Gethsemane, I thought, and thinking this was simultaneous with congratulating myself for the pertinent allusion, then wearily ticking myself off for another manifestation of self-regard. />
  ‘One does tend to get sleepy the first three days,’ Coleman told him. ‘It will stop as we go on. Don’t be angry with yourself. Make an objective mental note – sleepiness – then return your concentration to the breath on your lips.’

  In a late change of plan I decided I would simply say I was having a lot of pain and was finding it hard to concentrate. Nothing else. The most bland summary of what everyone else had said. I hoped that wouldn’t sound provocative. I hoped it wouldn’t sound anything at all.

  I would say it in Italian. Speak in Italian, as if you were one of them.

  What was the ‘as if’ about?

  Then the third man confessed that his main difficulty these last two days had been that he had kept thinking about what he would say, now, when he was called to the front. And Coleman laughed. Coleman laughed deep in his fat belly, a really hearty, rumbly, fat laugh, and said he had been wondering when somebody was going to own up to that. He was evidently much amused.

  We had been set up.

  ‘And now I’m saying something completely different from what I planned to say,’ my companion lamented.

  Coleman smiled. ‘So you lost the present for a future moment that didn’t even happen.’

  That was my Booker story exactly.

  ‘We never say what we plan to say, do we?’ Coleman added kindly. ‘So why not just leave the words till the moment itself? Nothing is at stake here. You’re not being interviewed for a job.’

  My turn next. Stay to plan, I decided. The new plan, that is. There is nothing worse than the penalty taker who decides at the last second to go for the other corner.

  The fat man turned to me. There was a charisma about him. There was a merriment in his heavy features. Sunk in the flesh, the eyes were bright and young.

  ‘Well, Tom Pax?’

  I opened my mouth and nothing came out. It’s an experience I’ve had a thousand times in dreams, but never till now in life. I was voiceless. I was supposed to speak and I couldn’t say a word. Three or four times I tried. Nothing but air and pain in my throat.

  Shaking his head, Coleman looked down on me from his armchair throne with a mixture of condescension and sympathy.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ I finally croaked. The words were barely audible.

  He leaned slightly towards me. ‘Why don’t you go back to your place?’ he said.

  Personally Of Course I Regret Everything

  OVER THE NEXT four days I decided I must stop writing. I had just gathered some concentration, tuned my mind to the breathing, allowed the ticking clock to enter my unresisting pulse, to run across my cheeks and lips and up and down my arms, dissolve in my chest and belly, just got myself settled, in short, into the sitting position, into the meditation room, into the company of my fellow meditators, when the time came to switch from Anapana to Vipassana, from breathing to exploration. Then it was like stepping from a darkened bedroom into a burning house. Or coming out of anaesthetic after surgery. First a prolonged explosion deep in the skull, then, one after another, in the dark landscape behind closed eyes, not so much fires as burning rocks, great boulders of obstruction and pain.

  After the first hour of this I hurried outside into the afternoon sunshine, overwhelmed by déjà vu. Had I been writing these experiences as a novel, I thought, then the crisis on the mountain terrace that rainy dawn in Maroggia would have been the obvious place for the story to end, with a life-changing breakthrough. But it had not been life-changing. Here I was five months later, back at square one, back with my old self, back with a sense of something that would never budge, with a body that seemed to resist me, didn’t want my company.

  Back with my bent back.

  I watched the others bringing tea and kiwis out into the garden. On day one, day two, day three, people had walked vigorously up and down, or lain on the grass to do sit-ups and stretching exercises. It was a flat, symmetrical renaissance-style garden, a lawn split by a cross of paths. Now on day four everybody was moving in slow motion. People would take a few steps then stop, standing absolutely motionless for five minutes, even ten, transfixed. They sipped their tea slowly, peeled their kiwis as if it didn’t matter whether they ever actually ate the fruit or not. Nobody was exercising. I too had lost any desire to exercise. And I had the impression that I wasn’t the only one to have been caught out by the Vipassana. There was a shell-shocked look to the young man passing back and forth in front of me, placing one foot in front of another, heel to toe, as if walking a tightrope over an abyss.

  Then it seemed to me that the only way to force an irreversible change in my life would be to dump the project that had been driving me, goading me, making me ill, I decided, for as long as I could remember: the WORD PROJECT. If illness is a sign of election in an author, I thought – where had I read that? – then renouncing writing might be a necessary step to being well. Not that I was actually ill any more. But I certainly wasn’t healed either. Otherwise, what was I doing in this crazy place?

  Pulling my ankles into place for the next cross-legged hour, I remembered it had been V.S. Naipaul who had said that to me. We were eating lunch together at a conference many years ago. ‘A writer must undergo a serious illness,’ Naipaul had confided solemnly. This was some years before his Nobel. ‘To awaken his conscience.’ Which of course was only Naipaul’s way of saying that he had undergone a serious illness and he was one of the elect. The man was nothing if not vain. How could I have fallen for such nonsense? Because he had indeed written some great novels, of course. Then I recalled that moment in The Information when one literary author wonders why a rival literary author bothers to keep on writing. And you know at once that the question is really Amis’s question. He calculates the man’s earnings. Less per hour than a taxi driver makes. Why does he do it? To avoid facing up to naked, unmitigated, unmediated reality, the author (and no doubt Amis) decides. Perhaps it was time, then, for me to face up to that: the simply being here, instead of taking refuge in writing about being here. I must go speechless. The moment of aphony at the check-up had shown me the way.

  Guru Coleman, I felt, was trying to tell us something similar in his evening talks. The most immediate reality, the only reality to which we had access at every moment of our lives, the fat man said, was the breath, this breath, this instant, crossing our upper lip as it went in and out of our lungs. The breath, not our breath. Everything else was empty imagining.

  These evening talks – from six p.m. to seven – were remarkable for their combination of blandness and pessimism. Sprawled in his chair, vapid smile on slack cheeks, ham hands on chubby knees, Coleman lurched into the sort of wet, preacherly parables my father would not have stooped to with a Sunday School class. ‘So you want to have a red Ferrari?’ Coleman almost crooned to the Italian crowd. He paused at every rest point. ‘All your life you have dreamed of a red Ferrari’ – pause – ‘you have to have that red Ferrari’ – pause, smile – ‘and when you get it?’ – pause, deep sigh – ‘When you get it?’

  He didn’t bother to say, what then?

  Please, I thought, while the translator trundled through his deadpan approximation for the benefit of the very few Italians who hadn’t already grasped the idea, please, do me the favour of finding an object of desire that it would be genuinely hard to relinquish.

  I must have a certain woman.

  I must win the Nobel Prize.

  It irritated me immensely that he drivelled on about this red Ferrari. People on meditation retreats are hardly of a kind to sell their souls for a sports car.

  I supposed.

  Sometimes Coleman felt too tired to talk and had his translator read us something directly in Italian, while he looked on with the same bland smile on his face.

  ‘There are ten levels of awareness in Vipassana meditation,’ the translator read swinging his one leg from the table top.

  Sammasana, theoretical recognition of Anicca, Dukkha and Anatta (change, dissatisfaction, emptiness), through observation and
analysis;

  Udayabbaya, awareness of the appearance and dissolution of Nama and Rupa, mind and material, through observation and analysis;

  Bangha, awareness of the rapid change of Nama and Rupa, like a swift current or a flow of energy; intense awareness of things dissolving;

  Bhaya, awareness that this existence is terrible;

  Adinava, awareness that this existence is full of misery;

  Nibbida, awareness that this existence is disgusting;

  Muncitukamyata, awareness of the urgent need and desire to flee this existence;

  Patisankha, awareness that the time has come to work for complete liberation, through Anicca;

  Sankarupekkha, awareness that the time has come to detach ourselves from all contingent phenomena (sankhara) and to break with our ego-centred lives;

  Anuloma, awareness that speeds up our attempt to achieve liberation.

  When he reached Adinava I began to smile and by Munci-whatever-it-was I was laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was so Beckett, so like Arsene’s great speech in Watt that I always use with my second-year students, and that always sets me chuckling:

  Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure from beginning to end.

  And it goes on:

  The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday mourns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps . . .