by Tim Parks
But why did these lines of Beckett make me laugh, I wondered, the way I was laughing now at Bhaya, Adinava, Nibbida – this existence terrible, this existence full of misery, this existence disgusting? Because they were so over the top, I suppose, because the trite rhythms and rhymes showed how misleading language can be, making everything sound hunky-dory while in fact what we were talking about was deep despair, as if I’d recounted my own months of pain as a nursery rhyme.
But it was more than that. I had been laughing at Beckett, I realised, ever since I was an adolescent, because these ideas were forbidden. My Anglican parents would never have countenanced such a vision of life. The blandness of the Anglican sermon always ended in optimism: the risen Christ, redemption, renewed commitment, the promise of glory. All my life I had associated blandness with Christian conformity, socialist optimism, complacency; and hence, vice versa, pessimism with non-conformity, intellectual acuity, liberation from coercive fairy tale into unpleasant truth.
My parents hated Beckett, hated it when I started reading Beckett. ‘You’ve been led astray by your brother!’ they yelled. They hated Beckett’s nihilism, his defeatism. ‘And if I could begin it all over again,’ Arsene goes on,
knowing what I know now, the result would be the same. And if I could begin again a third time, knowing what I would know then, the result would be the same. And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one. A cat’s flux.
A hundred lives as one. A cat’s flux! I loved that. And now I discovered that it was the essence of Buddhism, and that I was supposed to be arriving at an awareness of this awfulness while meditating. So many people see reincarnation as reassuring, even wishful thinking – you don’t die, you get another shot at it – but Beckett, like Buddha, knew better. Every existence plumps you right back on the rollercoaster of desire and disappointment, scratching yourself out of one itch into another. Best out of it! And too bad that suicide only thrusts you deeper into the samsara shit.
Nihilism was evil, my parents insisted. Just the way my mother said ‘nihilism’ gave it a dangerous foreign sound, like an Italian stiletto. Or like Nietzsche. Foreign names, evil foreign words. Nothing sensible and Anglo-Saxon about nihilism. Nihilism was of the devil, it was the beginning of all criminal behaviour. Who would ever behave if life was meaningless? Even worse, nihilism was the beginning of not trying, not making a wholesome Anglican effort to improve the world. God had created us in his image, life was good; if the Fall had left the world less than perfect, that was our fault and it was up to us to make it better. Not to bellyache. Nor to bail out like a wimp. Buddhist fatalism was evil and led people to corruption and despondency which was why millions were dying of hunger and disease in Asia. ‘We know because we’ve been there,’ my parents would say, referring to missionary trips to Malaysia, India, Pakistan.
All this when I was sixteen, seventeen.
Now, listening to the complacent, pessimistic Coleman, it occurred to me that Buddhism framed things differently. To perceive the emptiness at the heart of existence, you must first achieve purity. Far from being a plunge into criminal behaviour, such a vision was – how odd! – the reward for good behaviour, and a key in the first door that would get you out of gaol. It was impurities and ignorance that prevented you from seeing things as they really were (awful) and hence prompted you to grow attached to life and suffer. The person who perceives deeply that life is empty, must be morally admirable otherwise he could never have arrived at the concentration required to grasp this. Certainly, I thought, I had always had an impression of Beckett as somehow saintly, or at least hermit-like in his pessimism, hardly a man plagued by the desire for this world’s goods.
On the other hand, and this was where it all grew complicated, there was no way I personally thought of life as a veil of misery. No way could I accept Coleman’s vision. Or Beckett’s, for that matter. Precisely the problem for me is that life is so beautiful. I am very attached to it. My misery when I was ill was only in part the pain. More important was losing beauty, being unable to enjoy. But I have never imagined joy was impossible.
Thus my confused reflections in the old monastery garden after that evening’s talk, with the air now silvering to twilight and that grating music striking up in the valley below. It was beautiful being here, I decided, in this balmy air beneath the cypresses high on the Tuscan hills. The fairground noise had ceased to bother me. It was beautiful watching my fellow meditators cloaked in their thoughts at dusk, noble in their silence. There was a young woman, I remember, six or seven months’ pregnant, standing at the low parapet gazing down into the valley. Her fingers, just meeting on her belly, were relaxed and slender, and from time to time she turned her head this way and that, twisting her long neck, as if to relieve some stiffness there. Life is too beautiful, I decided. Not disgusting at all. There was a shadow of a smile on her lips. And the act of meditation was making it more beautiful, causing me to experience it more calmly. Simply eating had become an intense, slow pleasure, feeling a rough crust of bread on the roof of your mouth, a crisp carrot between your teeth, a forkful of rice melting in saliva on the tongue, slithering down the throat, then the cool cleanness of the water that washed it all away, the quiet sense of repletion. Sitting silently at table with the others was also an intense pleasure, watching their silent faces as they ate, watching their concentration. Breathing the evening air was beautiful.
I should definitely stop writing, I decided. How could I possess this deep calm day by day if I went on writing, hoping, fighting? I remembered Emil Cioran saying of Beckett that, if, over dinner, someone started discussing the relative merits of contemporary writers, Beckett would be furious and turn his chair to the wall in mute disgust. He refused to be part of such conversations. Wasn’t all Beckett’s later writing, it occurred to me, like Walser’s tiny pencil script, an attempt to stop writing while still going on writing? First the switch to French – language, language, not my language – then the pieces getting shorter and shorter, with each sentence appearing to cancel out the one before, the whole thing more and more resistant to the reader, more and more concentrated on simple physical movements, walking, shifting the eyes, breathing. ‘All writing is a sin against speechlessness,’ Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.
Again I recalled the evening I was at the Booker dinner. My acceptance speech churning in my head, I nevertheless prepared myself to clap when Arundhati Roy won. I think all of us on the shortlist knew that Arundhati Roy would win: the book was charming, it was already a bestseller, it was from India, it was about poor children who suffer abuse but make good, the author was beautiful without being too young, sophisticated without being a member of the English upper classes. How could she not win? I prepared myself to clap, and I did clap, damn it! And Arundhati Roy went to the podium and stood there smiling, beautifully – she was wearing a beautiful dress – and said she was lost for words, quite lost, because she had never imagined she could win, she hadn’t prepared anything to say. And I knew this was false because I had been to lunch with her the day before and she seemed more than prepared to win. If nothing else, the bookmakers were giving her as odds-on favourite. So this speech, like the one I never delivered, had been carefully prepared, I realised, and prepared, like mine, to seem modest and unprepared, hence doubly false.
Then Salman Rushdie walked over to me and frowned and said if it was him he would be furious; he would be throwing chairs round and complaining that he should have won. I smiled and said I was furious, but not in this particular moment, just generally. Generally in a fury. If I threw chairs around all the time there would be nowhere for anyone to sit.
How can one lead such a life without running into an ulcer or two?
Stop.
I suppose it has taken me an hour and more to write down these last few reflections, bu
t it only takes a second or two for them to flash through the mind as you try to focus on the breathing on your lips. How many times did these ideas race through my head in the following days, in the long silent dawns, in the guided sessions as Guru Coleman invited us to explore our bodies, in the twilight hour with the cackling nuns and the clashing music and the strong cries of children playing outside the monastery walls? Stop writing, I told myself. Enough. Enough.
Uncalled for, unwanted, the thoughts flew across my mental space, back and forth, hither and thither, like birds in the evening sky, chasing and losing and finding each other, racing, wheeling, dispersing, gathering, gliding a while then flapping in hard flight, always moving, through each other and across each other, at different altitudes, different speeds, as the light fails and the breeze comes up and the rain spatters on rustling leaves. Then one by one, at last, they begin to settle, they drop from view. With a last flutter, a thought settles on its perch and is quiet. On a rooftop perhaps, or in your wrist, in your throat. Another joins the first, and another. Thoughts fluffing their feathers before falling still. Perhaps one last squawk – Rushdie was right! I should have hurled a chair! – then silence. Until, huddled together on their wire, between your ears, they lose definition, merge into each other, become a single pool of feathery shadow, deep shadow in the darkness, one layer beneath another, beneath others, as eyes close behind closed eyelids, watched by still deeper eyes, and the mind at last discovers itself transparent; the mind is finally still and clear as clear water, and from top to toe the body brims with transparent wordless mind the way a glass held between steady hands in the porticoed chiaroscuro of a sizzling afternoon in Seville might brim with transparent water around the dark secret of the black fig.
It was on the sixth or seventh evening that I came to myself in the meditation room and found I was alone: the others had gone. I was late for bed.
Coleman
ITCH BY ITCH, ache by ache, pulse by pulse, the body was explored. There was the first time I felt the roots of my teeth, a deep vibration in the gums, the first time the tongue throbbed and twitched and was truly present in my mouth, the first time a ball of fire rose slowly from stomach to chest. Pains flared, burned, petered out. Then returned.
Meantime one’s personality was being stripped apart. It was a complicated demolition job where work had to proceed in a certain order: first this certainty came down, then that, then the one on the floor beneath. Not a sudden collapse but a steady dismantling. Or perhaps it was simply that without the people each side of you who make you who you are – wife, family, colleagues, friends – without work, TV, radio, without newspapers and books, phone and email, without a keyboard or paper to write on, the construct that was me was falling apart, rather as though a ship held together by the water it sailed in had been lifted into dry dock. Bits fell off. There was a day of tears, a day of confusion, a day of panic, a day of optimism.
‘May all beings be free from all attachment,’ Coleman intoned and he explained the pains we were experiencing thus: the body was an asbestos-clad stove full of burning coals. The coals were the smouldering accumulation of our past thoughts and actions. If we felt no heat in the ordinary way it was because the constant stimulation of our senses, the interminable churning of our mental activity, were powerful insulators: always moving, thinking, doing, we didn’t notice. But by taking the five precepts and practising Anapana we had stripped off the asbestos and cracked open the stove. Then we felt our karma’s painful heat. Now, day by day, with Vipassana, we would go into every corner of the stove, we would turn the coals so that they glowed and scorched. It was hard, he said. But slowly, surely, they would burn themselves out and all would be calm. Our minds would be pure and empty.
I thought: So they wait until the seventh day to tell you that the whole thing is based on pain, experiencing pain, accepting pain, something that, had you been informed beforehand, would most likely have deterred you from coming.
‘Attachment to self,’ Coleman said, ‘is so strong that we will never be rid of it unless the suffering we feel within is stronger.’ I remembered Beckett’s Endgame. ‘You must learn to suffer better than that, Clov, if you want them to weary of punishing you – one day.’
I had developed a curious state of mind during these evening talks. I believed nothing. I found the ideas ridiculous and contradictory: if life was utterly empty, how could you ascribe a value to purity, how could there be rules governing reincarnation based on your behaviour? etc, etc. At the same time I listened attentively, I enjoyed listening, and I saw that there were indeed ways in which Coleman’s words could be applied to my experiences. I felt I knew what he meant when he spoke of everything flowing, mind and material dissolving into energy. Nor was it unthinkable that the strange pains I had been feeling had in some way to do with all those years sitting tensely, racking my brains over sheets of empty paper, building up hopes, rejoicing over some small achievement, over-reacting to setbacks and disappointments. And it was true that if you placed yourself, or your attention, as it were beside these pains, if you just sat together with them and let them be, not reacting or wishing them away, they did in the end subside. Likewise the thoughts: if you let them bubble up without judging them, or engaging them in any way, they gradually fizzled out. What’s more, you felt that a certain serenity had been acquired in this process, an understanding that much of the pain we feel comes from our reaction to pain, much of our agitation from our excitement with agitation.
Above all, and more generally, I did sense the first hints of that famous equanimity Coleman was constantly speaking of. I had learned to put up with the lazy translation. I forgave our one-legged interpreter. In the end the guy seemed extremely pleasant, and now I was getting some perspective, not at all as incompetent as I had supposed. Some remarks he made in answer to people’s questions were extremely helpful. I even forgave myself when, from time to time, I still grew irritated with him. Of the two, forgiving myself was harder. It came to me now that I’d always risen to the bait of yelling at myself, I’d always been determined to savour just how humiliating failure can be, and to make an exhibition of it. So this was progress, of a kind; paradoxically, letting go, you actually gained control, albeit of a different kind from the control you’d spent your life seeking. Distance, rather than grip. All you have to do now is stop writing, I decided, and you’ll have clinched it. You’ll have changed for ever.
But if I stopped writing, what would I do for a living? It was a false question. I had my teaching. I would be a teacher, a sort of servant. Robert Walser had been obsessed by the idea of service, of burying the ego in service. He dreamed of being a butler and actually worked as one for a while. I knew that this was a bridge too far for me. But teaching is an honest job. I enjoy teaching. With the writing behind me, the tussle in the mind would be over, likewise the gap between experience and fabricating a written account of experience, plus the foolish yearning for praise and success. All over. My health could only improve.
On the eighth morning I had an appointment to see Coleman. The afternoon check-ups had been suspended from day four. I wondered if this was because they were concerned that some of the more negative, aggressive participants might start a rebellion (one woman had used the word gulag when complaining about the rule against leaving the grounds); or because, with sixty people, they felt it was too much of a waste of time, too distracting to have everyone listen to everyone else. If you needed advice, they said, you could sign up for a fifteen-minute appointment with Coleman during the unguided meditation sessions on the seventh, eighth and ninth days.
My first thought was not to sign up. I had nothing to ask Coleman, or to tell him. If I wanted to know more about Buddhism, I could read about it, though I couldn’t really see the point of pursuing notions so whimsical that I would never be able to accept them; those born in a rich, beautiful, peaceful country like Italy, Coleman had told us, could congratulate themselves on having scored highly in their previous lives. Ergo, th
ose born in the Sudan had behaved badly. Nor did I imagine the guru would be interested in my views or reflections. Why should he be? Why should I want him to be? No, the only reason for my going to see Coleman would be curiosity, meaning, in my case, the possibility of collecting an interesting conversation to put in a book at some later date. Or in an article. I could write to the New York Review and ask them if they would be interested in an article on Vipassana meditation. Or to the Guardian.
But if you don’t want to go on writing, what is the point of collecting things to write? Don’t do it.
On the other hand, I was curious about Coleman. He was a type I’d never encountered before, a strange mix of blandness, serenity and shrewdness. He had spoken of an earlier life, in the 1950s and ’60s, working for the CIA in Thailand before his search for a more tranquil state of mind led him to Burma, Buddhism and Vipassana. The anecdotes in his evening talks were infantile, deliberately so I had begun to sense, and delivered with a childish take-it-or-leave-it enthusiasm. He was deliberately insulting the intelligence, attempting to put that pesky faculty in its place. On the plus side, he had none of the sanctimoniousness that fatally attaches itself to every Christian clergyman. Nor did he wear any item of clothing that smacked of robe or ritual, or New Age vogue, for that matter. It was always: old slippers, shapeless pants, a colourless T-shirt. ‘I had to have these pants made for me,’ he announced apropos of nothing. ‘Because I’m so fat.’
My immediate impression, then, was that the man was harmless. He wouldn’t harm a fly, which was just as well, being a Buddhist. But once we shifted from the monotony of Anapana, to the more taxing adventure of Vipassana, I began to sense how powerful Coleman’s charisma could be. He would wait until we were all settled in the meditation room before making his entrance. We would take off our shoes at the door, go to our places, reorganise our cushions, drag our ankles into place, arrange our hands in laps or on knees, close our eyes and settle. Only when we had been there for some minutes would we pick up the sound of slippers shuffling along the corridor. Outside, the guru would pause, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether to come in. Then the door clicked, creaked open, swung to and clicked shut again. Again he paused, standing at the threshold, and I remember having the impression that he liked to hold onto things for support, the door handle, the table where the translator sat. Or perhaps just to touch them. He liked to touch things. We listened to his footsteps, teasingly slow, as he made his way to his shabby armchair. He sighed heavily, slumped into the upholstery and was silent.