A journal of poetry and prose

Seeking relief from chronic and debilitating pains that conventional medicine could not cure, critic Tim Parks finds himself, much to his own surprise, attending a meditation retreat that involves sitting in crossed-legged silence for twelve and more hours a day.

Although the retreat takes place in Italy, where Parks lives, the course leader, John Coleman, is an English-speaking former CIA operative who discovered Buddhism in the Far East.  He practices a form of meditation called Vipassana, “seeing things as they really are,”  and communicates with the sixty or so participants through a translator. Parks immediately doubts his decision to embark on this undertaking.

The routine at these retreats is that you eat breakfast at six thirty, after the wonderfully quiet early session, lunch at eleven, then just a piece of fruit late afternoon and nothing till the following morning. “A little hunger in the evening will do no harm,” the overweight Coleman smiled.

Every other afternoon, for an hour, there was a so-called “check-up.” In alphabetical order people were invited, four by four, to bring their cushions to the front, sit before the teacher and report on their progress. On the second day, almost everyone spoke of their pain with the sitting position, their difficulty eliminating their thoughts; many complained of a film playing out before their closed eyes, some old drama rehearsed a thousand times with no solution, as when a ghost appears again and again in the same place in the same clothes – an ex-husband, a dead sister – makes the same gestures and is gone, then back. Never there, never not there.

“I’m in a loop,” one man said. He found it distressing.  “I have a big decision to take when I get home, I just can’t get it out of my mind, I see the conversation over and over.”

People couldn’t identify the place on their lips where breath met skin. When they did identify it, they couldn’t focus their attention there, they lost it. “It must be my moustache,” one man thought. Continue reading »

Exhausted by years of fruitless attempts to treat a battery of abdominal pains and urinary disorders with conventional medicine, Tim Parks tries a relaxation cure described in a book discovered on the net. He has the impression he is clutching at straws.

Silence.

More or less.

How strange, I thought, after the fourth or fifth theatrically deep breath, this closing oneself in one’s body, not to sleep or snooze, but to pay attention.

Attention to what? Eyes closed, I felt disorientated.

There was an itch at the corner of my mouth and I scratched it.

You’re not supposed to move, I remembered. Your hands must be still. But where?

Dr. Wise’s book advised spreading ones hands out, palms up, but this felt weird. Anyway, I was on my side of the bed, so one arm hung over the edge. I put them side by side on my abdomen. Continue reading »

I know that had I been able to do what I liked, and that is just what I have not been able to do, I would have written nothing but novels. Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and given account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts forever. All other forms of literature yield opinions and facts. But an account of what one sees and hears and feels and tastes and the emotional judgments of those sensory events, and the establishment of the relationship of those findings to the rest of one’s life; that one can only do in a novel or a poem.

The exact rendering of experience was what I wanted to do from an early age, because the moment I looked around I was made familiar with the uses of literature. There was a lot of stuff lying around my house. As a family, we had the advantage of reading very quickly and remembering what we read, and the talk of our parents joined on what we read to our lives. My father had the great advantage of having as tutor a famous Frenchman, Élie Reclus, a geographer and early vulgarisator of science, and ultimately a prominent figure at the Free University in Brussels. He had been engaged to teach my father and his brothers by their widowed mother, who met Reclus when he was an exile in Dublin. She was Anglo-Irish, and an impassioned member of the Protestant Established Church, which the English foisted on Catholic Ireland, and she assumed that any French person who was a refugee from France must be a Protestant in flight from the wicked Catholics. She was wrong. Reclus was an Anarchist and had gone into hiding because he and some friends had seized the Town Hall in the course of a rising against Napoleon III.

He accepted the post quite innocently, without any attempt to deceive, because she had told him she was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and he had imagined that this was a small revolutionary body. When he discovered the truth he behaved with great correctness. He said nothing. He liked my grandmother, he liked her Continue reading »