Teach Us How to Sit Still by Tim Parks

I have just finished reading a book of my favourite unclassifiable type: strands of memoir, musings on reading and writing, seemingly meandering but actually fiercely but unobtrusively organised.  I love these books so much and find them so hard to find because they turn up in so many different book categories.  How does one search for a plotless meandering book on a topic that one is not yet interested in?  So I have to wait for them to find me.  And, thanks to the Kindle, this one did.  Tim Parks’ Teach Us How to Sit Still was advertised on a poster on the underground  and something in the blurb from Will Self made me want to read it and as soon as the tube train rattled into the air of the upper reaches of the Northern line I had it in my hands.

On the face of it this is an unlikely book for a woman to like as the first section is given over to a detailed account of the author’s struggles with ‘men’s problems' ie his prostate and the problems of peeing and not peeing.  To my surprise, it made interesting reading; possibly because I had the selfishly comfortable sensation of thinking that at least it wasn’t going to happen to me, but also because Parks is a good writer and editor: he knows just how much detail to put in, when to veer off topic for an interesting digression and when to go up close into places that made even me go ‘ouch’. 

But what elevates the interest is the author’s deeper instincts about what the illness is, or means, and his investigations into certain images and ideas that recur to him and seem linked in mysterious ways to his pain, particularly Velazquez's painting The Waterseller of Seville in which the glass of clear water with a black fig in the bottom seems to represent a solution to his problem, if only he could decipher it. He mulls over the relationship of illness to writing in a satisfyingly deft way.

Medical diagnosis seems not to explain his symptoms, the internet predictably drowns him in a babble of conflicting stories but through a chance reference to a self help book he discovers the benefit of relaxation, then shiatsu then meditation.  That then is the ostensible subject matter announced in the subtitle 'A sceptic's search for health and healing', but in these sort of books the destination is much less important than the journey, the musings, the asides and chance connections made.  He discusses the relationship of mind to body which in turn becomes the relationship of words to consciousness and the problem of how or whether it is possible to to experience life unmediated by them.

 “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 …. Until I had thought about it, or better still written about it… Then I possessed it.” Like tourists who experience a holiday through their photos  “What mattered was not the experience itself, but the experience described.”  

Being a writer, translator and teacher he tests his experience against literary models and as he comes uncomfortably close to thinking that he will have to give up writing in order to heal himself he circles round the writing of Robert Walser, J M Coetzee and Samuel Beckett and the conundrum of not wanting to write about oneself (or at all) but being compelled to do so whilst seeking ways not to.  And his references are so apt and interesting that once again I feel myself nudged towards that day when I will get over my terror and actually read Beckett.

The book reminded me of Sebald (in a good way and without being derivative) and was the perfect companion on a long journey on an old fashioned train across a very dull part of Poland. It did however show me the limitations of making notes via the Kindle: so hard to navigate around them later, not a patch on the Moleskine.

 

Comments

[Dorothy W.]

Any chance you might list other books of this sort that you have found? I love this kind of book too (Laura Miller's The Magician's Book is my most recent find), and wonder if there are books you've come across I've missed. I'm putting this one on my list. It's not one I'd pick up on my own without a recommendation, which is precisely why these books are hard to find -- often you don't know you want to read them until for some random reason you do.

[Mrs Bookworld]

I think you and I have similar tastes in this area Dorothy! List coming up and hope you will add any of your discoveries to it.

[Dorothy W.]

Yay! Thank you!