Tim Parks on his quest for bodily peace
Nicholas Lezard, guardian.co.uk, Saturday
The author Tim Parks. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
Resident in Italy for over three decades, Tim Parks has had ample opportunity to suffer his name's rendition by Italians. "Tim Pax" is what usually comes out, as if in deadpan rebuke to the peace he seeks in this book: from the pains in his abdomen, perineum, back, thighs and penis, and, later, from the roar in his head, the continual vigilance that makes him a writer.
Like Parks, I am firmly of the western, evidence-based frame of mind when it comes to the claims of healers. Parks, the son of a clergyman who eventually became an adherent of the more evangelical, charismatic mumbo-jumbo (speaking in tongues, the laying on of hands, and so on), is not the kind of person who goes straight to alternative medicine. The conventional avenues are explored first. But these disappoint him, and baffle the practitioners themselves: they can see nothing wrong with him, even after the most rigorous internal examinations. And yet, as his nocturnal visits to the loo and the constant pain remind him: there is something wrong with him. (There was a nice review of this book by Dan Gunn in the TLS, which begins with Gunn beginning to worry that an introductory speech he was giving in 2006 about Parks was, through its banality, causing him great, writhing torment; he realises now that at the time, Parks couldn't sit down for more than a minute without suffering.)
So I was a little worried about Parks when I first heard about this book. It was, I gathered, a hymn of praise or thanks to Vipassana meditation – not that I am familiar with the different forms of meditation – and I was worried whether this was a case of a noble mind being overthrown.
You need not worry. Parks, who as he puts it here, fell in love with Beckett around the age of 15 (a very good age to do so) and who has absorbed his style for his own excellent novels, is not going to let his mind turn to mush that easily, even when his last guru, one John Coleman, would seem to speak as if that were desirable. Contemplating Coleridge's relationship to his own illnesses (which may have been imaginary), Parks writes: "Resolution. If I ever write about this 'illness', it would only be when I had recovered and it was no longer a 'complaint'. And then in the simplest of words . . . No fancy literature at the expense of well-being."
Luckily, Beckett does not fall into this category. How can one not smile when one of the chapters, in which he comes across such concepts as Nibbida, "awareness that this existence is disgusting" – is called "Personally Of Course I Regret Everything", a line that comes from one of the greatest passages in all of Beckett? (Watt, in case you're interested.) Beckett's comic disgust with life – "a cat's flux" – is, he discovers, "the essence of Buddhism".
This is one of the most interesting and revealing testaments you will ever get from a writer. From one of Parks's calibre, it is remarkable, and I sometimes found myself wondering if he had given too much of himself away. But if he has, then we should just be grateful for his generosity. Peace be unto him.
- This is from his novel Destiny: "There is always a paradox at the heart of character . . . some contradiction that ties the knot, holds two conflicting halves together . . . A sort of stable schizophrenia you could call it, an enigma at the core." Many years later, in Delhi for a conference on translation, where he outrages his audience by talking of the impossibility of translating from one culture to another, he goes to see an ayurvedic doctor. (He wants to see a "respectable" ayurvedic doctor. "They are all respectable, as far as I know," he is told.) After describing his symptoms (which also include having to pee several times a night) and listening to a brief piece of nonsense about an enema of sesame oil and "various herbs", he is startled by the doctor saying: "This is a problem you will never get over, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradiction in your character." "I can't recall," Parks writes, "being more surprised by a single remark in all my life."
So I was a little worried about Parks when I first heard about this book. It was, I gathered, a hymn of praise or thanks to Vipassana meditation – not that I am familiar with the different forms of meditation – and I was worried whether this was a case of a noble mind being overthrown.
You need not worry. Parks, who as he puts it here, fell in love with Beckett around the age of 15 (a very good age to do so) and who has absorbed his style for his own excellent novels, is not going to let his mind turn to mush that easily, even when his last guru, one John Coleman, would seem to speak as if that were desirable. Contemplating Coleridge's relationship to his own illnesses (which may have been imaginary), Parks writes: "Resolution. If I ever write about this 'illness', it would only be when I had recovered and it was no longer a 'complaint'. And then in the simplest of words . . . No fancy literature at the expense of well-being."
Luckily, Beckett does not fall into this category. How can one not smile when one of the chapters, in which he comes across such concepts as Nibbida, "awareness that this existence is disgusting" – is called "Personally Of Course I Regret Everything", a line that comes from one of the greatest passages in all of Beckett? (Watt, in case you're interested.) Beckett's comic disgust with life – "a cat's flux" – is, he discovers, "the essence of Buddhism".
This is one of the most interesting and revealing testaments you will ever get from a writer. From one of Parks's calibre, it is remarkable, and I sometimes found myself wondering if he had given too much of himself away. But if he has, then we should just be grateful for his generosity. Peace be unto him.
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