I have just read over Christmas Tim Parks’ book, Teach Us to Sit Still, and what a great read it is. He has written some 21 books now and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, although this particular work is not fiction. No, in fact it is an account of how in his early Fifties he experienced at some undetermined point constant and relentless pain; he was ill, his body was telling him something but he didn’t know what, and so he seeks healing. This healing leads him initially to the medical profession, where he finds no relief, and ultimately to Vipassana meditation where he does.
His journey is profound, given his atheistical scepticism, and also the unflinching way in which he confronts and describes his problems. We – as readers – go into the minutiae of his prostate and other parts, as well as into his mind and mental state. Parks has a gift for fluent and evocative description, as well as writing extremely lyrically. Put another way: I really like his prose style and there are loads of lines which are aphoristically quotable – “The mind is you, the body is only yours”.
The point is that Parks is almost the typical – advanced level – Western man! His problem seems our problem. And what is that? In two parts it is: first, he spends all his time verbalising everything; and second, he does it on a computer screen. The net result of all that is he finds himself stressed in every part of his body, and as someone observes to him: he is the most unrelaxed person they had encountered. One way of expressing his problem is that he is entirely in his head – and this leads to illness.
Of course verbalising everything means – as they say in Neuro-Linguistic-Programming – the map is not the territory: one substitutes experience, or actuality, for words about experience or actuality. So in some sense one’s existence becomes synthetic and unreal, and ego-driven. Meditation becomes the instrument by which Parks comes to see this.
By the final pages Parks has not become a Buddhist monk and I think we can expect more books from him, but the interesting thing from my point of view is: whilst I agree that the silence is where the healing – and so much else – occurs, I also happen to think words are healing too, especially when they form narratives of pregnant meanings. Interestingly, in the book, Parks attempts the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) without success – mentioning only how the words in the procedure fail, but not commenting at all on the acupressure sequence also simultaneously required.
My point is that I suspect that Parks is too intellectual to allow words to do their ‘magic’. Silence is primary; but words too heal, if – and this is a big if – we believe in them. This belief in words is the opposite of the intellectuals’ huge vocabulary and knowing etymological resources. This belief in words is like the shaman’s usage – directed at the heart of things where names conjure properties; this is never intellectual but always a matter of the heart – the missing component in Parks’ book. Yes, he traverses brilliantly from his mind to his body, and as a result healing occurs. But his heart is never there.
And so the power of simple words to heal is not available to him.
As I approach 2013 I shall be looking for more opportunities enter silence and to find words that heal, and to arrange those I have into narratives and patterns that sustain me and others. Two favoured forms here are poems and prayers!
The Mapping Motivation Series 