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 6

This is a book about transformation and transformation should make good narrative. There had been an illness in my life, a period of chronic pain. Very slowly, after trying all the traditional solutions I was forced to go to places I would never otherwise have explored. As I did so my life began to change, I changed. It seemed an exciting thing to write about.

There were complications. The medical details were embarrassing and unattractive. Everybody’s convinced our age has dispensed with taboos. It’s not true, there are all kinds of bodily functions no one wants to talk about. I myself had gone out of my way never to speak of the problems I was having, to the extent that even close friends had no idea I was living with chronic pain. So why talk about them in a book? And how?

There was a deeper problem. As I began to grapple with a lifestyle that had separated mind and body to the point that I had no idea at all what state my body was really in (or, paradoxically, my mind either), it became clear that at the heart of the problem lay words, language, my obsession with words, my determination to assert myself and become famous (how embarrassing) through language.

Everything I did, everything that happened to me, hadn’t really happened or been done until I had transformed it into words. I was in so much hurry to fix it in language, turn it – and it might be a football game, or a conversation, or a trip to India – into words that I barely lived the experience itself. Not unlike those unhappy people whose holidays are lived entirely through their cameras. Later they look at photographs of scenes they weren’t really present at.

So wouldn’t writing the book just be a return to the past?

On the other hand, who was I if I didn’t write? And how could I make some sense of what had happened or share it with anyone else if I didn’t gather these facts and thoughts in a book?

The only solution seemed to be to write in a quite different spirit. Genuinely to put the material before the writing, before cleverness, before literary exhibitionism. Genuinely to set aside all ambition that was personal. To be ambitious only for the book’s possibility of getting close to what had happened, preserving all the strangeness and unresolvedness and incompleteness of what I had gone through. Not trying to possess it or wrap it up at all.

Above all remembering my body as I wrote. Remembering not to tense up, to breathe quietly, to relax the fingers on the keyboard. And the readers too, remembering their bodies, their breathing, as they open the book on the tube, in a waiting room, on the beach. Just try, I thought, to share what happened with them the way you might share food and water with a stranger on a train.

God knows what difference all this has or hasn’t made. I leave it to you to judge.

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

To visit Tim Parks newly designed website click here.