Nobody warns you about this: not the cover, not the blurb, not the title, not the review puffs. With its disingenuous title and cross-legged yoga person on the cover, there’s really nothing to let you know in advance that Tim Parks’ hard-to-classify medical memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still is — mainly — about his penis.

No — that’s not fair: it is also about his sphincter (or rather, sphincters — plural), bowels, bladder, urinary tract and pelvic floor. And it’s not ‘mainly’ about all this — only the first 142 pages are. Which is less than half the book. Just.

But even the most generous of readers would have to admit that reading these 142 pages — a blow-by-blow account of the author’s chronic prostate problems — is hard work. It’s especially a pain in the arse because the author himself is a bit of a prick.

When I met Parks in India several years back, he came across as self-important, condescending and uptight.

I know one should never judge a book by the person who wrote it, but for the same reason I tend to avoid meeting writers whose works I admire, I have assiduously avoided reading Parks’ novels because — I don’t know — I’d had quite enough of his company in the few minutes I’d spent with the man himself.

Here’s a clue as to his own state of mind during that fateful trip: “Flying home from Delhi, I had been very aware that within 48 hours of landing I would be anaesthetized in hospital with a rigid instrument skewered through my penis. ‘About as thick as a pencil,’ one website said.” I suppose when you put it like that, he was entitled to be a bit grumpy.

Of course, ‘prostate’ is not a word that you generally want in a book title — unless it’s an actual medical textbook. But I did wish someone had warned me, honestly, that I would be spending half the book in the author’s pants. And not in a good way. And yet… and yet. Here I was choosing to read on, and read on I did, my body contorted into an empathetic wince as I got to know, in excruciating embarrassing detail how many times a night he gets up to pee, and how he does it, and what he thinks while he’s doing it...

Years of chronic pain, interrupted nights and periodic impotence, the disturbing prospect of becoming penile kebab plus a close encounter with death out kayaking one day combined to form the perfect storm needed to push this ultra-rationalist, self-obsessed, WASPish English alpha male down the path to alternative healing. He scorns anything that smacks of “the mystical, the oriental” dismissing it as “mumbo-jumbo.” So when the road to recovery leads to a Vipassana meditation retreat, it really is a Damascus moment.

The first time he closes his eyes and surveys his ‘inner landscape’ it is a revelation. It is also, basically, Mordor: “it was as if I were surrounded by a large expanse, though I couldn’t see it. I was alone in a strange, brooding landscape; under a low sky, I thought, damp hills perhaps, but invisible…” Then the pain starts: “The backs of my hands smouldered. A muscle in my cheek sparked. The darkness that had seemed deserted was full of life. Goblins. Havoc.”

Only Martin Amis (in his memoir Experience ) comes close to waxing so lyrical on pain and illness: his teeth are to Amis what the penis is to Parks. Get a writer on to the subject of their own bodily ailments and you’ll be there for a long time, as they scale the heights and plumb the depths of its mystery and meaning. Amis is another grumpy, acerbic individual — and both writers are more than well-aware of the ridiculousness of their own compulsions. Parks scours the bookshelves for other prostate sufferers: Montaigne, Rousseau, and maybe Coleridge and Beckett? He is fascinated by how much of Gandhi’s writing is taken up with the chronicling of his bodily functions. “Every illness is a narrative,” he declares, and — pace Susan Sontag — sets about telling it, or rather retelling it, in order to discover how it ends.

There are few books that so brilliantly describe what it is actually like to meditate, to feel your body ‘from the inside’ as it were, to send the attention to those apparently dark and unknown corners of our physical selves — to the backs of the knees, to the spleen, racing along veins and nerves, to feel the tongue resting in the mouth, to become aware of the teeth, each sitting in its individual pocket of gum.

I never wanted to read a book by Tim Parks, and yet I found myself gripped and fascinated by this book. Teach Us to Sit Still turns out to be far more than a medical misery-mystery memoir. It is about the realisation that what stands in the way of our true wellness is our ability to express it in words, to describe it in language. It seems impossible — and yet imperative — to master the paradox, to ‘empty the mind’ and think of nothing. “We have become cerebral vampires,” as Parks puts it, “preying on our own life-blood.” His painfully revealing book is an invitation to put it aside, to stop reading, unhunch our shoulders, let slip the gaze, rest the eyes, and allow ourselves the unhurried, unmediated luxury of inhabiting our own skin — for a while, at least, for a while.

Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher; www.anitaroy.net

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW