Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  Once the trigger points had been identified and palpitated by expert massagers in the Stanford clinic, patients would be provided with a special stick or ‘wand’ (the Aneros perhaps) so that they could massage these points themselves. At home.

  I wondered if I would ever rise, or sink, to such a do-it-yourself treatment. On my back, knees raised, a fairy wand up my bum. Or on all fours . . .

  Best not to think about it.

  Some of the offending muscles, however, were more easily and modestly accessible from the outside, in the thighs, around the groin, in and just above the buttocks. One of those that most referred pain to the bladder, my preferred hot spot, was the quadratus lumborum, the muscle that, at each side, attaches the pelvis to the spine. Checking the quadratus lumborum on Wikipedia, I found a detailed description of its susceptibility to deterioration as a result of constant contraction during prolonged periods of sitting, particularly sitting at desks, most particularly sitting at computers. The Wiki contributor then added the following reflection:

  This chain of events can be and often is accelerated by kyphosis [a hunched spine] which is invariably accompanied by ‘rounded shoulders’, both of which place greater stress on the QLs [quadratus lumborum muscles] by shifting body weight forward, forcing the erector spinae, QLs, multifidi, and especially the levator scapulae to work harder in both seated and standing positions to maintain an erect torso and neck.

  In short, by not standing or sitting straight but rather peering forward from bent shoulders, I was stressing, among others, a muscle which, in its deteriorated state was known to refer pain to the bladder. Was this, I wondered, why the hunched Leopardi, his youth wasted, as he beautifully lamented, hunched over his ‘sudate carte’ (sweated pages), had had his peeing problems and bellyache so young? With advanced scoliosis at eighteen he’d already screwed up his quadratus lumborum. And how uncanny that an idea that had suddenly come to me as I walked along the street one day – if only you walked tall, Tim, you would be better – an idea I quickly dismissed as foolish fancy, might actually have been a genuine insight.

  As if my body knew things that I didn’t! Or I knew things my mind didn’t.

  But how can you learn to stand up straight in your fifties?

  Day after day, I lay on my back, eyes closed, breathing, concentrating on tension where I found it. At worst it was dull, disheartening, unconvincing. My attention slipped from its object like a man climbing an ice wall in ballet shoes. To latch on to things, I needed words. But words can only describe sensation, not experience it. Here, words actually loosened my grip, the ice wall fractured under their pressure, little avalanches running off with my attention. Without words I needed some purpose, some activity: concentrate on this muscle in order to contract it, to move it. But to relax I was supposed to focus without making any effort to move or change anything, remaining absolutely still.

  I couldn’t do it. I grew frustrated. I cursed Dr Wise for withholding those mysterious audio-tapes which might perhaps have helped. Some days I gave up.

  But when by some miracle I did find a foothold in the ice, when my mind held and clung, even if only for a few moments, without trying to push or pull, just hung there, attentive and wordless, then the session would be positive, transporting; then, if I was lucky, the warm wave would eventually sweep over me, gentler now than the first times, friendlier, as if the landscape had already adapted to its passage. And I would suddenly find that my hands had sunk into my abdomen. The flooding water had allowed them to wriggle down into the seabed of my belly, like eels in sand. My hands were deep in my entrails, glowing. Sometimes they swapped sides. The left hand was on the right. To what end, I have no idea. I would be agog. Tension intensified and dissolved, heated and melted. In my thighs, calves, shoulders. On two or three occasions my body appeared to detach itself from the bed, to float. I was floating, head back, in warm salt water. On those days the pain receded dramatically, like rocks submerged by spring tide. Then I might get two or three hours quite free of pain. I might begin to hope it would never come back.

  But the tide ebbed and the soreness raised its gritty edges.

  Never celebrate when you have a good day, Wise warned.

  Never despair when you have a bad day.

  All the same, it was coming time to look for something else beside these relaxation sessions. I wanted more than to fight off the pain. I needed to look beyond.

  I had no idea how or where.

  Then, one morning, I woke very abruptly, sat up in bed, and pronounced the words, You are two different people. It was disconcerting. There was no dream to blame. No narrative. Just this sudden waking in the small hours, these words given as though in revelation. Two different people, Tim.

  I went to the bathroom.

  OK, so who?

  A Strainer

  IT WAS JULY and time to go boating. Months before I had booked three days with a kayak guide in Austria. More than once I had thought of cancelling. I would be in too much pain. But it had been part of my strategy of denial never to cancel anything.

  With life improving, I decided to go. These few days were a rare moment of escape from work and family. It was the first time I had booked a guide all for myself: a learning experience and a luxury. I dug out my white-water kayaking equipment, packed the car and drove north.

  Two separate people. How strange to wake with words on my lips, with a message for myself.

  My selves.

  Or from one self to the other.

  Not Physician, know thyself, then, but, Parks, know thy-selves!

  Probably dangerous to take stuff like this seriously.

  I decided to leave early and make a small detour into the South Tyrol to run a river with my friend Roland. A warm-up. He’s a dark, wiry little guy whose native tongue is the local German dialect; it must be funny for Italians to hear us speaking their language, he with his Tyrolese accent, me with my English. Yet we are both, to all intents and purposes, Italians, Roland thanks to the border-drawing folly of Versailles, me of my own free will. We met at the autostrada exit for Brixen, drove up the Eisack, left my car at the get-out and strapped the kayaks on his van to go up to the launch.

  ‘What’s the water like?’ I asked.

  He shrugged, rolling a cigarette as he drove along tight, winding roads, past Weinstubes and crucifixes.

  ‘Fast, slow, safe, dangerous?’

  A faint smile curled his unshaven lip. Far from Aryan, Roland has a pockmarked, gypsy look to him. Straggly hair under a sweatband, necklaces, tattoos. All I know of his past is that he once got himself a job with Italian public TV in Milan, so he must have trained at something. Six months later he was back in his remote village home in the Ahrntal. Perhaps he was afraid of a wound opening up between two selves: the Italian city man and the Tyrolese country boy. Now he teaches kayak and takes tourists rafting. He seems wonderfully at ease with himself.

  ‘So, is it difficult or not?’

  He laughed, blowing out smoke. Roland always makes fun of my pre-river nerves.

  Eventually, he asked me what I’d been up to this year.

  I’d just published a novel set right here in the South Tyrol, I told him.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘About a big-time media man, London TV celebrity, who kind of escapes here to empty his mind. Deliberately chooses a place where he can’t speak a word of the language, and high up in the mountains where there’s no one to speak to anyway. Above Luttach,’ I added.

  Luttach was Roland’s village. He smiled again. All around us steep pine slopes rose to dizzying peaks of blue and grey.

  Then, just as we turned down a track to the river bank, I articulated something that had never come to me quite so clearly while writing Cleaver. ‘It’s a sort of death wish really. He’d like to look so hard at the rocks and trees that he becomes one of them.’

  This time Roland nodded. ‘TV will do that to you,’ he said.

  About an hour later I nearly got the end Cleaver
desired. It was a shock. The Eisack is a bouncy torrent tumbling through the boulders of a deep gorge, crossed here and there, high above, by the autostrada to the Brenner. It’s strange with icy water on your hands, spray on your face, splashings and gurglings in your ears, to think of those vehicles a hundred feet above, droning across the landscape as if it wasn’t really there. I suppose I go paddling to reconnect with the world, I thought. A moment later I went under.

  I had made the mistake, even more unforgivable on the river than during Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation, of drifting off into my thoughts: not connecting with the world, then, but reflecting on connecting. Close to the right bank, Roland paddled over the top of a little weir and thumped down onto rocks below. Not concentrating, I assumed this was an error and moved left into the main stream. Roland was yelling now but I couldn’t hear what. Then I saw that while about a quarter of the river’s flow did go over the weir in the centre, the main current was dragging me irresistibly towards a grey iron barrier on the left. Below it, I understood at once, would be a grille for catching debris. A strainer. To be avoided at all costs. But it was too late. In an instant I was against the barrier, side on, and tipping with the pressure of the water.

  Life happens quickly. This would not be a warm wave that swept the mind clean and left it in complete ease. It was a trap. The moment I went below, I would be thrust against the grille in the conduit beneath and that would be that. Not two selves, but none.

  Squeezed between current and barrier, the kayak began to flip. Ignoring Roland’s shouts, lost in the watery roar, I yanked off the spray-deck and launched myself out of the boat in a frenzied freestyle towards the weir beyond the barrier. For a moment I stayed uncannily still in the grip of two equal tensions, the downward pull to the grille and the sideways rush to the weir. Then I was released, weir-bound. I suspect my buoyancy aid saved me.

  The accident made Roland talkative. Again and again he apologised. He should have warned me. He hadn’t thought. He marvelled at the lightness of my injuries. ‘Move your wrists, OK? There’s a cut on your hand. Your neck? Roll your head.’ I had fallen three metres over the weir onto rocks taking only a bang on the knee and a fierce smack on my helmet. Freed from my weight the kayak had floated after me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeated. He hugged me. ‘Rest now. You’re shivering. Cover up.’

  Half an hour later I needed to pee. Once, twice, three times. In the car, my pains welled. But I felt euphoric. Got away with it! And optimistic too. The peeing and pain must be in response to the million-volt tension, the adrenalin. This reaction proved it. And however much I might need to change my life, I felt intensely that I did love it; I loved my body, loved Roland, loved the boats, the mountains, the smells of moss and resin, and above all the water, I loved the crazy, crashing, dangerous water. No death wish for Timmy, I thought. And when we stopped for a sandwich and I needed a fourth pee, I simply told Roland what my problem was. It was the first time I had talked about my health odyssey to anyone but wife and doctors. It was a release. And I knew it had been made possible by the breathing exercises, by my new state of mind and now this sudden swelling of emotion. I wasn’t embarrassed at all. ‘Yeah, I have this peeing problem.’ The accident had become part of getting better.

  People with pelvic pain syndrome, Dr Wise said, tend to swing dramatically from catastrophic thinking to the opposite: an excess of excited optimism.

  What to do but enjoy the ups?

  I kept the story brief. When I’d finished, Roland told me he had a groin hernia that needed operating. For the third time. It was very painful. He grinned. His wife taught yoga, he said. He knew all about breathing. Lighting a cigarette, he shook his head. ‘So glad nothing happened to you.’

  When we’d said goodbye, I found a side road and an empty meadow and lay down with the roll of my sleeping bag under my knees. One feels more vulnerable doing this kind of thing outdoors. I closed my eyes, then opened them. No one was sneaking up. A cloud had crossed the sun. There was a slight breeze on my skin. The thick grass creaked faintly. The pain was steady and strong.

  I couldn’t empty my mind. Every time I tried to breathe deeply and concentrate on some tension, I was suddenly back there, trapped against the iron barrier, the kayak tipping, the current tugging. I saw my body sucked down into the strainer, my dead face pressed against the grille. I shivered and pushed the image away. It came back. It came back like the pain, I thought. Caught against the grille, it couldn’t flow. Blocked vata. After five or ten minutes I realised there was no point in fighting. Go towards it then, as towards the pain. Go underwater.

  For a while I studied my dead self against the grille in the dark of the conduit as the river plunged under the barrier. It wasn’t so frightening. There would be a couple of minutes’ choking panic, then the definitive calm. Paintings of drowned people, I thought, tended to show them serene. Millais’s Ophelia is transformed into something more beautiful than she was alive. The weeds and pond water suit her. And now I remembered a recent nightmare in which I found my son drowned in the bath. Tell me it isn’t true, I kept repeating. He was fully clothed, drowned in the tub. Please, it mustn’t be true! It can’t be! But at the same time I was thinking how beautiful he was, how calm and solemn, eyes wide and untroubled. Ophelia is beautiful because she has stopped tearing herself apart over Hamlet. We despair on seeing her, but she is free to become one with the natural world. Relaxed even. Phlebas the Phoenician forgot the profit and the loss. A current under sea picked his bones in whispers.

  Still, I reflected more sensibly, how much better, if you could shed the torment without losing your breath for ever, if you could stop agonising over the prince of Denmark, or the consumer price index, without being dead. What my hero Cleaver had wanted, I clarified then, was not exactly to die, but to ‘die to this world’, to the clamour in his head.

  A religious expression.

  Of course the more intensely one thinks about all this stuff, the less likely you are to chill out. I couldn’t make the pains subside. They were lodged there. Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation was not an emergency bandage. I needed another pee.

  Back in the car, the only radio station I could pick up was a political phone-in. People were indignant about Guantanamo. There was also a question of whether the high court would allow a man on an iron lung the right to die. The presenter had various experts on the line, apparently selected for their vehemently contrasting points of view. A listener from Bari felt we should accept suffering as part of God’s plan. He was belligerent. Everybody seemed agitated. But I too get agitated about the news. There are days when I am more concerned about the American elections than anything else, days when I’m constantly on line checking opinion polls. A listener phoned to say that rapists should be castrated. Rape seemed to be the main sport of Slav immigrants, he said.

  Time to turn off.

  My car, an old Vectra, must be one of the last models produced with a tape deck rather than a CD player. I always bring a few books on tape when I travel. Moby-Dick is an old favourite. I must have listened to it a dozen times. But before turning on I attempted a brief summary, thus:

  You have problems peeing and related pains. You dream about rivers and beaches where water has run out, leaving only melancholic mud. For sport you go where water is abundant, violent, dangerous. You find it compelling. And you are attracted to literature that describes water as carrying away the mind, thoughts drowning in eternity. You imagine similar experiences lying on your bed relaxing. But when really carried off by the water, your mind reacts like lightning to keep you alive. And thinking.

  The curious thing about Cleaver, I decided then, was how the novel had foreseen various developments in my life a year and more before I had been aware of them. Supposing myself creative, I had merely been scribbling down a memoir in metaphor of the months to come. Once again, some part of me had possessed and even expressed a knowledge that remained inaccessible to the voice that speaks in the head and calls itself I. Perhaps
the two selves that had been announced waking up that morning were the one writing about Cleaver’s problems and the one denying my own. The first, literary self doesn’t do much to help the second, the sufferer. The literary self likes finding forms and words to talk about things metaphorically, to make them more dramatic and intriguing than they are. He thinks of this as art and congratulates himself when someone pays him for what he does. Meantime the sufferer tries to ignore his pains. The two selves don’t connect.

  Call me Ishmael.

  I spent the rest of the drive with Melville. It wasn’t silence, but at least it was a rest from my thoughts. I was crossing the Brenner while Ishmael got into bed with Queequeg and the Europabrücke as he met Captain Peleg on the deck of the Pequod. With all its excitement, the narrative relaxed me. I began to feel better. And again it was strange to think of the dislocations of literature, the mind and the flesh: Melville writing in New York, the whalemen setting out from Nantucket, me speeding across Austria, but far away in my head. Then an hour and more later, climbing the Inn valley towards Switzerland while the Pequod was becalmed on the Line, things came together. I stopped the tape and rewound to listen again. It was a passage about keeping watch on the masthead.

  There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks.

  Unnecessary excitements! In 1850 Melville had already understood how the media can make a man tense and dumb. He goes on:

  Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.