A sceptic's search for health and healing

A series of blog posts by Tim Parks, featuring extracts from his new book Teach Us to Sit Still.

Day 3

Teach Us to Sit Still has pictures. 63 to be precise. Of the most varied kind. There’s a photograph of a desert lizard. There’s a lovely  illustration of some old pots and pans. There are medical instruments and diagrams of the body, Velasquez’s great painting The Water Seller of Seville, Magritte’s weird and wonderful The Double Secret and Millet’s enigmatic Death of Ophelia. Not to mention an image of fires burning in the night, a giant wave at the point of breaking, a kayaker spinning his boat.

Why? I’ve never put pictures in books before.

It goes to the core of the book. While I was ill, with a whole array of mysterious symptoms, but above all a nagging pain in the abdomen that just went on and on for months, I began to notice how much pleasure I was taking looking at silent, still images. It began with the medical illustrations. I was looking for clarity, for some inkling of what was going on inside me. But more and more I became aware that the contemplation of images, still images, enigmatic images, had the effect of calming the cascade of words that interminably fills my head. When words and thinking eased off, my body relaxed and I felt better. It was a foretaste of the greater therapeutic effect I would get from meditation.

The Waterseller of Seville Diego Velazquez

The Waterseller of Seville was the image that brought most pleasure. It’s a scene in the chiaroscuro of a portico in summery Seville. Standing beside two great earthenware jugs, an old man in a tattered cloak, passes a brimming glass with a black fig in the bottom to a smartly-dressed young boy. I have never really understood why this painting has so much impact on me. The two faces, one lined with work and wisdom, the other serene with youth and wealth, stare intently, but neither at each other, nor at the glass that is changing hands between them. They seem to believe that something important is happening, they seem to be communicating something, but what? There is no indication that they are talking. The water in the glass is impossibly transparent and still. How could they hold it like that, between the two of them, without a tremble?

Over many months thinking about this picture, visiting it in Apsley House when I was in London, or more often staring at it in hi res on my computer screen, I began to think of that transparent water as somehow mental, the fig within as sensual, physical; mind and senses meeting in transparent glass, and the man and boy knowing each other through that contact while, shadowy behind them, another figure looks on with envy.

Maybe that’s pure fantasy. The important thing was that that picture, led me to understand what should always have been obvious, that life means intently, simply in its being, without us needing to attribute words to that meaning. It’s when the observer lets go of the drive to ‘understand’ the painting that body and mind relax and harmonize.

Teach Us to Sit Still is published by Harvill Secker on 1st July.

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