Because of the Anglo-Italian connection and the fact that Tim Parks is about the same age as me, people tend to assume that I can identify with and admire his work as an author, translator and essayist.
However, I have never been particularly drawn to his fiction, and didn’t like his anecdotal accounts – An Italian Education and Italian Neighbours – based on his life as an ex-pat in Verona . These are supposed to be full of “anthropological wryness” but I found them to be smug and clichéd.
My low opinion is also swayed by accounts of a number of friends and colleagues who have met him. All describe him as an ego on legs who loves the sound of his own voice; good company only if your idea of fun is spending an evening listening to someone telling you ‘why I write such brilliant books’.
Big-hearted guy that I am, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as I embarked on Teach Me To Sit Still which a friend bought me as a birthday gift.
I was relieved to find that it was not a novel and not ostensibly about an Englishman’s experiences in Italy. Its subtitle is ‘ A sceptic’s search for health and healing’. It is a book about illness, self-doubt and meditation – part autobiography, part self-help guide and ultimately what Parks says is his “transformation book”.
It documents how the onset of chronic pelvic pain had a major impact on how he sees his life and work.
The experience of suffering from deteriorating health and the frustrations of his search for a solution via conventional medical routes take up the first part of the book.
As a fifty something reader, I am all too aware of the fact that I have entered an age group in which there is a higher risk of having prostate cancer. The account of the tests he undergoes are therefore both graphic and scary; definitely not recommended reading for the faint-hearted.
All the probing and poking he describes in such gruesome detail ended up revealing nothing. This didn’t stop some doctors advocating surgery all the same.
Although his discomfort was still intense, Parks wisely sought other solutions.
This led him to countless Google searches which in turn directed him into what is broadly categorised as ‘alternative medicine’. This was a field he was very wary of this since he distrusted “any treatment that wasn’t underwritten by Western science”.
Desperation forced him to put aside these prejudices and led to the discovery that meditation and Shiatsu massage, while not cure-alls, made his condition much more bearable.
Above all, they persuaded him to see that what was happening in his body was to a large degree down to what was happening in his head, something he calls at one point his “interminable, overheated mental activity”.
The fact that he was in a constant state of goal-orientated tension meant that he found it high on impossible to relax and ‘let go’ of this driven behaviour.
From his Shiatsu instructor he was advised to try Vipassana, a breathing and bodywork technique described as; a “process of self-purification and self-observation…..a universal remedy for universal problems”.
In the accompanying ‘What Is Meditation’ essay of his website he explains how the practice of Vipassana proved to be a humbling experience through which he learnt to see his mind as “an endless churn of self regard” (confirming the opinions expressed by my friends!).
All this caused a mini-crisis of questioning his vocation as a wordsmith since he recognised that written languages can describe sensation but not experience. Paradoxically, he describes seeking clues into how other writers have confronted such a dilemma. Coleridge, Beckett and D.H. Lawrence are just three of the literary sages he consulted and the title of the book is a line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’.
The most revealing chapter of the book, because it is the most self critical, is entitled Verbiage. In this he asks himself the question “Would it be possible, at fifty-one years old, to unlearn this tense and somehow, I felt, language-driven behaviour?”
As for how much this has truly led to a transformation in his personality is open to serious doubt. The final two chapters suggest that he hasn’t changed so radically .
The last chapter is full of superfluous detail of supervising a final translation exam for PhD students in Milan in which there are no hints of doubt about the power of the written word.
Before this he recounts how a ‘pretty woman’ asks him at the end of one of his retreats “Are you, by any chance Tim Parks the writer”. He doesn’t say how he reacted but it is fairly easy to imagine his head (and another body part) swelling as a result of this encounter.
With his pride and libido safely intact, this would therefore seem to be a case of ‘meet the new Tim – same as the old Tim’
