Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  Monica is in serious trouble. She is just starting the second of three pieces and the exam is more than half over. Francesco has almost finished. Late to arrive he will be first to go. The students sweat behind their screens, treading the borders between English and Italian. Mrs Lambert was Madame Louis in the original French. Who cares? She never existed. But the pain Beckett describes is entirely convincing.

  I haven’t made much progress with my meditation since that retreat last summer. Perhaps you need more than an hour a day to break new ground with Vipassana. All the same there comes a point, where, entering fully into the moment, entirely focused and concentrated, you do indeed cross a border and leave all pain, physical and mental, behind; you move into a kind of bliss. Then, and this is the odd thing, you can go back and forth across that border, at will, with the tiniest mental shift. Bliss . . . pain . . . bliss . . . pain . . . bliss . . . pain. The reflection that one has achieved bliss is the return to pain. The elimination of the reflection is the return to bliss. You cannot be there and congratulate yourself on having arrived.

  The students soldier on, anxious, but entranced too. I’ve often noticed that translation has an anaesthetising effect that writing does not. Even during an exam. The text has already been written. You are not the author. Your identity is not at stake. All you have to do is follow, however difficult that may be. Text, text, not my text.

  The third passage I’ve given them is vintage Woolf, something I’ve used a hundred times. They have to look at the original and the translation and use the differences between the two to say something about the passage. We’ve been doing a lot of exercises in class so it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s one of those little street sketches from Mrs Dalloway, a single paragraph, a single sentence, a character who appears this once and no more. More fleeting even than Mrs Lambert.

  Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitated, for within was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter in, he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly—why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.

  What I want them to notice is how the nondescript man’s dilemma – shall I go into the cathedral or shan’t I? – occurs as an extended temporal parenthesis inside what is really a simple statement whose main clause appears only in the very last words: Then, while . . . bla bla bla . . . out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus. The syntax, with the long interpolation after ‘while’, creates the sort of suspension – mind off at a tangent before some event intervenes – which Woolf loved. The effect is completely absent in the Italian which gives, ‘Meantime a man carrying a leather bag did this that and the other . . . then a plane flew towards Ludgate Circus.’ Towards?

  It’s tough comparing translations with their originals because the student has to overcome the expectation that the professional translator is always going to be right. He has to think against something already thought, undo something done. It’s not unlike the effort one has to make to resist received ideas. In this case the translator didn’t understand ‘without a situation’, didn’t realise that we’re probably talking about some unemployed sectarian pamphlet-pusher now tempted to return to mother church. Above all, she didn’t really understand that provocative reflection: ‘tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation’, translating instead, ‘signs of victory not over armies, but over that pestilential spirit of truth which guides me in my search of what leaves me without resources’, a sentence that doesn’t really mean anything but which actually reads rather elegantly in the Italian. Translations are full of such stylishly incomprehensible moments but readers rarely notice them. So long as there are words to keep it turning, the mind rattles on, content to be centre stage.

  Mariangela has underlined ‘truth seeking’ on her photocopy. She is biting her lip. I have high hopes for Mariangela who I think will make an excellent translator. Then it occurs to me that there’s a parallel between these reflections from Mrs Dalloway and the Hitchens article. A contrast rather. The journalist writes off religion as a self-indulgence. Equally atheist, Woolf nevertheless sees the Church as an opportunity for surrendering self and divisive ideas in community. What the seedy man is contemplating is a surrender of his supposed truths – ‘put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied’.

  The man hesitates. He needs guru Coleman to tell him, ‘Let go!’ Or the cathedral’s patron saint to remind him that even if he handed out a million pamphlets and hath not charity, yet he is nothing. Surprisingly, the translator has written ‘pure spirit, disenchanted’.

  I hope the students notice.

  When I returned from my ten days’ meditation, the first thing I did was to go to my office, turn on my computer and set about knocking a few words together.

  Are you, by any chance, Tim Parks, the writer?

  Well, I was and I wasn’t. I have never felt so strange. Wordless for ten days, I didn’t know who I was. Closing my eyes, I found I was floating with the current of some strong river, or I was the river. I was no one. This seemed stranger on my office chair than on a meditation mat. I was no one, but I was in Tim Parks’s chair. A guy I knew.

  I sat. I couldn’t decide if I was immeasurably happy or desperately sad. The computer hummed. Every time I tried to swim against the stream, to do something that is, I felt inadequate, not exactly paralysed but quite unable to move, unable to want to move. Never fight the water, kayak instructors always tell you. It went on a fair while, ten minutes, twenty, a half-hour. The nerves had been stripped from my body, and the sinews, and the tendons. I imagined them tied in a bundle floating downstream beside me. Opening my eyes at one point I saw that eighty-three emails had arrived during my absence. I closed them again. I was waiting. Finally, of their own accord, my fingers began to move. Over and over they typed:

  I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired

  Every time I typed the ‘I’, I did so in lower case, ‘i’, but Word at once converted it into a proud and proper ‘I’.

  In the days that followed, as the props that shore up personality were pushed back into place – wife, children, lessons, canoe – I discovered, coming day by day to my desk, that my feelings about words had shifted a little. I was a little less negative. Setting down a few pages – the opening pages of this book, as it turned out – everything seemed reassuringly slow and careful and very clear in my mind, freed from the usual turmoil and compulsion.

  I wonder.

  I wonder if it’s not just a question of pruning down the tangled wisteria of one’s ego year by year, retreat after retreat, not I, not I, not I.

  Or of entering the text like a Mormon entering St Paul’s, ready to surrender his precious pamphlets.

  Letting go the lifelong plots and plans.

  Or of sharing words with the reader like a glass of clear water on a hot summer afternoon. My hands on the keyboard, yours on the page.

  Taking time to breathe, too. Remembering we are both of us here in the flesh. Now.

  In
any event, forgetting immortal icons, moribund musings, swaggering self-assertion.

  Forgetting the sounding brass of Grub Street, the tinkling cymbals of the Booker, the Nobel.

  Envieth not. Vaunteth not.

  Endureth all things.

  In the classroom the printer beeps to life. The strimmer has stopped. How much time has passed? It was Francesco broke the trance. He has finished. He is printing. Pale in the glow of their computers and sticky with heat, the others redouble their efforts. The keyboards seem very loud.

  ‘Shall I tell them they have five more minutes?’ Andrea asks. He is at my side. Since when? Andrea is such a serious, peremptory young man. With such a literary beard! He wants to take control.

  ‘It’s OK, Andrea. They have their watches.’

  Standing at the front, feet slightly apart, arms folded, I keep guard. In a few minutes my two years with this class will be over. Two difficult but also wonderful years. The sun is pressing hard against the window and in the room the air is stale and damp. I’m not suffering. My body is used to it, the way you get used to hot water, or to sitting cross-legged. The seconds tick by, Andrea frets. Why don’t I blow the whistle? Time is up. It’s the intensity of their presence that holds me: the urgent eyes, pursed lips, flushed cheeks, the quick capable hands, raven hair coiled round a pencil, grimaces, grins, flurries of labour, and the violent stillness of a chin thrust down on bent fingers.

  ‘Nearly quarter past,’ Andrea mutters.

  I’ve grown attached. I don’t want it to end.

  Someone else sets the printer whining. Francesco has gone over to the machine to sign his papers.

  Deep breath.

  Monica has her face in her hands.

  ‘OK, everybody, that’s the end. Time’s up now.’

  My voice is very loud. Eyes lift, alarmed, relieved.

  ‘Just a couple of minutes, Prof!’

  ‘Finish the sentence you’re on and that’s it. The end. No more writing! OK? Pain of death!’

  Afterword

  But that is too dramatic an injunction to close on. After all, half of this book has been written since that summer exam, and I’m neither dead nor in pain.

  Let me sign off then with a few words about this morning, Monday, 26 October 2009. After a moderately interrupted night, I rose before six and went down in the dark to the bedroom that used to be my son’s. Since the days are growing chill, I pulled on a sweater and tracksuit trousers, then set the alarm on my mobile for seven. One can’t always have a Tibetan gong.

  There’s not much space here. I keep a blanket folded on the floor, a cushion to sit on, a couple of beanbags to slip under the knees. One day the left leg tucks in first, the next day the right; for symmetry. Careful not to hurry, I wrap a shawl round my shoulders, switch off the lamp and sit.

  The room is pitch dark now. The shutters are closed. The Iron Maiden poster beside the door is invisible. In the silence, I say no formulas; I do not take refuge in the dhamma or wish for all beings to experience sympathetic joy. I am not prayerful. But taking a deep breath, I am aware of the sleeping house around me: of Lucy in the next room, Rita under the quilt upstairs, the dog curled in his basket, of all of us up here on the hill, looking south across the Italian plain.

  Morning thoughts rise like bubbles. I concentrate on the breath in my nostrils, on my lips. Only steady awareness of the body will still that mental fizz. I’m not concerned when I don’t succeed. The aim is quiet, but I will not crave it. Now I catch myself composing an email: Dear Prof. Proietti, although . . . Now I’m replaying Torres’ goal last night against Man U. Where was Rio? Stop. I take the mind back to the breath. Back and back, again and again, until eventually the two fuse in a whispery stream on the upper lip. A warm tide swells in the chest. My wrists are pulsing.

  There is nothing mystical about this. If I think back to when I started, I see there was a desire for extraordinary experience, for waves of cosmic healing. One lived torn between a determination to be reasonable, pragmatic, scientific, true to one’s culture, and a desire to transcend reason, to escape from pragmatism and science. The two attitudes called to each other, like old sparring partners. One was always on edge. So, at the Vipassana retreats, the first-time meditators are hungry for drama, for an encounter with their demons, submission to a guru. We all want to add another episode to the narrative of our selves, the yarn we are constantly spinning of our dealings with the world. This is why so many go to India, I suppose, to do no more than sit on a cushion, eyes closed. They hope the exotic location, the guru’s robes and foreign voice will add intensity to the tale.

  But as words and thought are eased out of the mind, so the self weakens. There is no narrative to feed it. When the words are gone, whether you are in Verona or Varanasi hardly matters. Whether it is morning or evening, whether you are young or old, man or woman, poor or rich isn’t, in the silence, in the darkness, in the stillness, so important. Like ghosts, angels, gods, ‘self’, it turns out, is an idea we invented, a story we tell ourselves. It needs language to survive. The words create meaning, the meaning purpose, the purpose narrative. But here, for a little while, there is no story, no rhetoric, no deceit. Here is silence and acceptance; the pleasure of a space that need not be imbued with meaning. Intensely aware, of the flesh, the breath, the blood, consciousness allows the ‘I’ to slip away.

  So if I can recount the first minutes, I can’t tell the rest. There are deepenings. There is a liquefaction of some kind, the thighs flowing into the calves, the head into the breast. And there are resistances: stones, obstructions, pains. The mind goes back and back to them. An ankle. A shoulder. Maybe they will shift, and maybe not. I am absolutely awake. I hear Rita pad downstairs with the dog behind her. I hear a scooter straining up the hill. And I am not there. I am in the stream.

  Then the alarm sounds and I must move. I’m up, dressed and getting Lucy into the car in just a few minutes. By ten past seven we are speeding down the hill, trying to beat the traffic light at San Felice. Lucy is anxious about some homework, a possible low grade. I repeat the parents’ mantra: you do your best, then what happens happens.

  We stop at a pasticceria for cappuccino and croissant. On the table newspaper headlines tell me that a bomb in Baghdad has killed 147, the Governor of Lazio has resigned after being filmed naked together with male prostitute and cocaine, AC Milan scored in the ninetieth minute to beat Chievo 2–1. I pay in a hurry and drive Lucy another mile to her bus stop. She disappears in the crowd.

  Parking outside my office, I’m aware of those small everyday actions that stand between me and my work. The blue key for the gate. The yellow key for the front door. The stairs, the big key for the flat. Switch electricity on, switch computer on, raise the shutters. I have always resented these tedious actions, these dumb routines that are merely in my way. I try to take them slowly, with equanimity. This is life too, I tell myself. Now and now. But I can’t, I’m so eager to get going, to write down this tale, to have it finished, to move on.

  Author’s Note

  Over the period when I wasn’t well, and again when I was writing this book, I found myself spending more and more time looking at images. It began with a need for clarity, the desire to see my physical problem represented, but more and more the contemplation of images of any kind – illustrations, photos, paintings – seemed to offer relief from the language-driven anxieties inside my head. Eventually I decided to include some of these pictures in the book; not all of them are beautiful, not all of them are of the highest quality; they had simply become part of the tale.

  Acknowledgements

  Extracts from Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, George Craig and Dan Gunn (eds), The Letters of Samuel Beckett © The Estate of Samuel Beckett 2009, published by Cambridge University Press

  Extracts from Samuel Beckett’s Watt, Endgame and Malone Dies by permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Lines from ‘The Dry Savages’ found in T.S. Elio
t, Four Quartets by permission of the Estate of T.S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Extract from Virginia Woolf by permission from The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf

  Permission to use part of an article by Christopher Hitchens by permission of Christopher Hitchens

  The author is grateful for permission to reproduce the following images:

  p13: TURP. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health

  p23: The Waterseller of Seville. Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library

  p37: Painting of church facade and clergyman. John Parks, www.johnaparks.com

  p40: Diagram of body. Shuttershock

  p42: Canoeist. Isaac Levinson, www.isaackayak.com

  p47: Artwork for urine test graph. Lucia Parks

  p51: Detail from The Waterseller of Seville. Diego Velázquez, Galleria degli Uffizi/Bridgeman

  p80: Yamuna. Lian Chang

  p83: Gandhi. Kanu Gandhi/GandhiServe

  p90: Cystoscope. MedTec Applications, Inc., www.medtecapp.com

  p100: Aneros anal massager. Aneros, www.highisland.com

  p119: Bench in park. John Parks, www.johnaparks.com

  p122: Il bell’Antonio book cover. Mondadori, and Reporters Associati-Roma

  p127: Tap in sky. www.funny-potato.com

  p145: A Headache in the Pelvis book cover. David Wise, Ph.D. and Rodney U. Anderson, M.D., National Center for Pelvic Research, p.O. Box 54, Occidental, CA 95465, USA