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 8

An extract

And for the first time in my life it was a mental task that
had nothing to do with words. For decades now, I realised, all
purposeful mental activity, for me, had been linguistic: writing,
thinking, reasoning, teaching, talking (I had given up
numbers the day they let me take maths O level a year early).
When I did a sport, I turned all the mental side of it into
words. I tried to work out in words how to do everything.
How to head a goal in football. How to spin my kayak on its
tail. What length of steps to take when running downhill. As
opposed to uphill. Same with love-making even. I worked it
out in words. And I honestly imagined that everybody did
this, that everybody explained every action to themselves in
words. After all, I had grown up listening to sermons more
or less daily (there we are again), studying the scriptures
over the breakfast table. Exegetics! My father loved to talk
about exegetics. He loved to read the Bible at breakfast and
elucidate. It was an inexhaustible puzzle. Etymology, philology.
When I saw a painting, or a film, I immediately tried to
sort out its pleasures and failings in words. My mind rattled
off a review, a critical essay. Most of the pleasure in films
and paintings, was precisely this verbal activity afterwards.
Even during. I was writing the review during the movie, while
looking at the painting. Everything had to be lived through
language, or it wasn’t lived at all; to the point that I hadn’t
really seen a painting or a film (or a game of football, for that
matter) until I had thought about it in words, or preferably
talked about it, or better still written about it, in carefully
organised, purposeful, self-regarding words. Then I possessed
it. In this, I suppose, I was not unlike those unhappy people
who haven’t really been on holiday unless they can show
themselves the photos. The photos are the holiday, even when
they’re on the beach, or in the bedroom. And if I never took
a camera on holiday, it was only because I was doing the
same with words. What mattered was not the experience
itself, but the experience described. My notebook, my laptop.
And when I wanted to understand something new, I bought
the book, of course, or books. I taught myself, with a book.
Like Manuel in Fawlty Towers – ‘I can speak English, I learn
it from a book.’ When I travelled, there was a guidebook. I
had faith in books. I had a whole shelf-full of books on kayaking
technique. I bought them compulsively.
One day one of
them would finally explain to me how to make that elusive
manoeuvre round the slalom gate.
One consequence of all this verbiage was that I never
really appreciated that there could be hard mental work that
did not involve words, work for which, on the contrary, words
might prove an obstacle. And this business of relaxation – but
the term seemed quite inadequate now – was clearly work,
of a kind. I had to labour at it. I made heavy weather. Under
that low interior sky. It required effort, skill, determination.
Harder than playing the piano, I kept repeating to myself.
Equally clearly, the big obstacle for me with this discipline
was the constant chatter in my head. How could it ever
be stilled so that I could focus on physical sensation, as Dr
Wise insisted I must? Yet, however daunting, I was excited
about this challenge. I sensed it was timely. These pains had
come, I even found myself thinking, because I needed this.
And without really knowing, or caring, where it would take
me, I began to see the silence of these hours I had so grudgingly
conceded to my condition – these hours of paradoxical
relaxation
– opening up before me across the months and
years ahead like a vast new continent, a territory more
arduous and gratifying than anything that foreign travel, or
even reading, could offer; a journey that would take me far
beyond the solution, or otherwise, of my pelvic pains and
peeing problems.
Away from those relaxation sessions, though, what a
physical wreck I discovered myself to be! What a bundle of
twitchy nerves, poor posture and bad habits. The tension
I had initially struggled to locate, eyes closed in the dark,
complacently convinced that I was not tense, turned out to
be everywhere in every moment. Not an inch of me, not a sinew
or muscle, that didn’t clang with tension, constantly. No
sooner had I stumbled on the tiniest corner of it, clenching
and unclenching a muscle at random, than it reared up and
overwhelmed me. I was nothing but tension.
How could I ever have let myself arrive at this state? I
brushed my teeth ferociously, as if I wanted to file them
down. I yanked on my socks as if determined to thrust my
toes right through them. I tied my shoes as if intent on snapping
the laces. When I pushed a command button, I did so
as if it was my personal strength that must send the lift to the
sixth floor, or raise the door of the garage. While I shaved I
tensed my jaw, while I read I tensed my throat, while I ate (too
fast) I tensed my forehead, while I talked I tensed my shoulders,
while I listened I tensed my neck, while I drove I tensed
everything. My grip on the steering wheel was set to crush it.
My spine was hunched rigid. My stomach turned to rock.
And yes, my pelvic floor was hoist up tight, like a trapdoor
against a besieging army below. It was as though, as far as my
body was concerned, I was forever accelerating and braking
in first and second, when I might perfectly well have been
relaxed in fourth, or even cruising in fifth. Which reminds
me how, in the 1970s, when my mother switched from the old
Morris 1100 to a bigger Datsun, it was a year and more before
she realised that the car had a fifth gear, and even then she
wouldn’t use it. I had been doing the same for thirty years.
But worse than all this, I had a habit, I discovered now, of
setting one part of my body against another. Reading, legs crossed
at the ankles, I would be pulling one ankle against the other.
At my desk, I thrust my head back against linked hands that
yanked it forward. Or I pushed my forehead forward against
fingers that forced it back. Going to sleep on one side, the
hand on the upper arm would form a fist against the lower
arm and shove. The two sides of my body were forever fighting
each other. Quite possibly I was sleeping all night in a
state of constant tension.
And this is only the briefest summary of my chronically
maladjusted state. Everything I did, I did with more effort
than was required. It was a relief to find an activity that did
require the effort I was putting into it: paddling my kayak
upstream, for example, or forcing my body to run up the
long hill from our house to the Pilotòn. These were really
the only exertions that brought energy use and accomplishment
into some kind of balance. Even then, when one of
the kayak instructors was about, I was always told to take
fewer paddle strokes. ‘Plant them in the water more carefully.
Don’t hurry it. Don’t fight the water.’ ‘Parks, you’re
too frenetic!’ This was what the games teacher always used
to tell me when we played football. ‘Take it easy, Parks, or
somebody’ll get hurt.’
If there was one consolation in this painful process of selfrecognition
to which my relaxation exercises had unexpectedly
brought me, forcing me to be still and feel the tension that
was burning in there, it was that many of those around me
were not much better off. Not many people, I began to notice,
were genuinely at ease. At least I didn’t wolf down food that
I didn’t need, as Carlo was still doing, despite his diabetes. At
least I didn’t bite my fingernails like my daughters, or tug at
the skin round them like my wife. I didn’t smoke.
At least I was waking up to the situation.
So, leaving aside residual worries about the nagging
pains that had taken over my life, the question uppermost
in my mind now became: would it be possible to change
profoundly, in myself ? Would it be possible, at fifty-one years
old, to unlearn this tense and somehow, I felt, language-driven
behaviour?
If so, how?

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

To visit Tim Parks newly designed website click here.