Teach us to sit still : a skeptic's search for health and healing

Title:

Author:

Parks, Tim.

ISBN:

9781609611583

Personal Author:

Parks, Tim.

Edition:

First US edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Rodale, 2011.

Physical Description:

xiii, 322 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

General Note:

Originally published: London : Harvill Secker, 2010.

Abstract:

"Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks"--Provided by publisher.

Personal Subject:

Parks, Tim-Health.

Subject Term:

Authors, English -- Health and hygiene.

Chronic pain -- Alternative treatment.

Mind and body therapies.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2033553

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Fig Garden Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	616.0472 PAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Frazier Park Branch (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Non-Fiction	616.0472 PAR	Searching... Unknown
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Summary

Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out.

Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless
journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a
breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks
anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get.

As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between
his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as
an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Captivating and inspiring, Teach Us to Sit Still is an intensely personal--and brutally honest--story for our times.

Author Notes

TIM PARKS is the author of novels, nonfiction, and essays. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask, and Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Italian Neighbors, An Italian Education, and A Season with Verona .

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

One of the least exalted physical conditions imaginable prompts a profound journey of self-discovery in this astringent medical memoir. In middle age, novelist Parks (Destiny) came down with excruciating chronic pelvic cramps and urinary difficulties that forced him to relieve himself six times a night. Instead of the prostate surgery his doctors recommended, he embarked on a self-help regimen of breathing exercises and Buddhist meditation, which, despite his contempt for all religious dogmas-especially the New Age variety-mysteriously eased his ailments. Even more startling was the psychological effect, as he started to question his ambition and busyness, his writing vocation, and the whole language-driven divide between mind and body. Like a latter-day Montaigne, Parks writes in an expansive, essayistic style that uses the pangs and humiliations of physical reality as a starting point for excursions into philosophy and literary criticism; his prose is mordantly funny, self-conscious but never self-pitying, worldly but introspective, attuned to the needs of a soul that he considers thoroughly material and mortal. The result is an absorbing, at times inspiring, narrative of spiritual growth. Photos. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

New York Review of Books Review

THE appeal of conversion stories often depends on descriptions of the darkness before enlightenment: we enjoy learning in detail about the presalvation misery, debauchery or sinfulness. The more detail, the better. The English novelist Tim Parks understands that principle. In his urbane, droll, weird yet far from charmless account of the pain and misery suffered by his body in general, and by his bladder, prostate, penis and related bits in particular, the conversion is from a cerebral, anxious, hunched-over and compulsively verbal kvetch (not his term, but the literal "squeeze" makes the Yiddish word seem appropriate) to something resembling the opposite. Like the reformed sinner who diverts his audience with lurid, prolonged accounts of nights in the fleshpots, Parks gives an amusing, anxiously over-the-top confession of his former condition: "I was nothing but tension. . . . I brushed my teeth ferociously, as if I wanted to file them down. I yanked on my socks as if determined to thrust my toes right through them. . . . When I pushed a command button, I did so as if it was my personal strength that must send the elevator to the sixth floor, or raise the door of the garage. While I shaved I tensed my jaw, while I read I tensed my throat, while I ate (too fast) I tensed my forehead, while I talked I tensed my shoulders, while I listened I tensed my neck, while I drove I tensed everything." This passage - much longer without my ellipses - extends over an entire page. The next paragraph begins, "And this is only the briefest summary of my chronically maladjusted state." In a hallmark of conversion narratives, the original mania reproduces itself as a mirror image: in the old days, hyperbolically anxious; in the new, hyperbolically anxious to enumerate the old anxiety. To his credit, Parks doesn't pretend otherwise. Moreover, his personal account, never preachy, engages some serious matters about contemporary life, notably what it's like to be a patient, as nearly all of us, sooner or later, are or will be. With due respect to the ranks of excellent, humane and dedicated physicians, the following list will be all too familiar: the cheerily vague or uncertain diagnosis; conflicting or ambiguous opinions; the surgeon eager to do whatever his expertise and training have perfected; the humiliating procedures and instruments (Parks provides grotesque illustrations of penis-probers, stirrup-chairs, medical cross-sections of the groin); the physician-friend or physician-relative who becomes impatient with the patient-friend's ambivalent feelings or ambivalent symptoms; symptoms treated as irrelevant because they don't fit a profile; the expensive practitioner who is immensely more courteous and attentive than most, but not really different; the moment when the patient realizes the doctor's "we" does not necessarily mean "you and I, dear patient" but more likely "my colleagues and staff and me." The patient is one who is acted upon. On his journey out of such passivity and misery. Parks discovers a book that offers him a first step away from pain, from the frequent urination wrecking his sleep, from the many frightful or nasty episodes involving what the Monty Python crew used to call the naughty bits. This book has the clumsy (Parks's term), ludicrous yet arresting title "A Headache in the Pelvis." (There's a clumsy quality in Parks's own title, quite possibly deliberate and intended to evoke the pathos of ailments that are embarrassing but serious matters. The subtitle makes this duality explicit. Parks gives his readers a sympathetic, even moving alteration between comedy and real desperation, in fluctuating measures regulated by "a skeptic" and his need for "health and healing.") "A Headache in the Pelvis," in Parks's account, replaces the reigning medical approach to "chronic prostatitis" as a matter of organs and their interconnecting tubes, instead, this book by a urologist (Rodney Anderson) and a psychologist (David Wise) emphasizes muscles, particularly tension in pelvic muscles. A chapter about the technique of "paradoxical relaxation" fascinates Parks: concentrating on a tense muscle in the pelvic floor and not trying to relax it. "Harder than learning the piano," as Parks quotes Wise, who himself suffered decades of pelvic pain, before his breakthrough. (A moment of Web surfing discloses that "A Headache in the Pelvis" is in its sixth edition, and has attracted many fervid testimonials.) But for Parks and his own pelvic headaches (or mental pelvic aches?), that book is no more than a useful guide away from unsatisfactory medical thinking. The ultimate conversion, the revealed prize of his quest, is to Vipassana meditation: "Something happened. In the midst of the usual fierce pains, with a strange naturalness and inevitability, my consciousness at last fused with my upper lip: the breath, the lip, the mind, these apparently incompatible entities did, in fact, fit together, flow together, were one. I was my lip bathed in soft breath. . . . Then, as if at the touch of a switch, the scalding rigid tensing thighs and hips dissolved. In a moment, the lower body sank into suppleness." This is conventional but it isn't silly. Though he can fall into the language of a devotee's cant ("a powerful sense of nowness," "I was in the cup, I was sticky with melon"), Parks is for the most part an aware, droll and intelligent guide to both his woe and to his salvation from it. One peculiar lapse runs through the book: an insistent, blindly total dualism between words on one side and the human body on the far distant other side. Words, Parks declares, are "pure mental material" and in them "mind and body part company." This absolute division is an odd assertion, especially for a writer. After all, writers habitually talk about "voice" and "shape" and "architecture" in ways that are more than merely figurative. Words aren't just conceptual. They're also vibrations that emerge from the human mouth. Leaving poetry aside, the different sentence rhythms of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the different consonant patterns of Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson, are in part bodily matters. If you imagine yourself saying the sentences of such different writers out loud, the physical sensation is different. The sentences in which Parks describes his (former) terrible posture or his (dispelled) urinary problems have sounds and cadences different from those someone else might compose. Yet Parks insists that words are purely cerebral, quite removed from the body. This seems especially strange coming from a bilingual Englishman who lives and teaches in Italy: how can he ignore the fact that the differences between the two languages are vocal - that is, physical as well as intellectual? Moreover, Parks is a clergyman's son who can recall the sound of his father's sermons: "I had his voice spot-on." Perhaps that's an important part of the story. In a moving passage near the end of "Teach Us to Sit Still," a leader in Vipassana meditation cites that most eloquent of converts, St. Paul: "For now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." At the leader's urging, Parks manages, after a struggle, to wish his dead father well. The convert's charity toward former selves, toward the past itself and central figures in it, is - to use a word Tim Parks earns in the course of this vulnerable, winning, oddball and maniacal book - healing. Parks discovers a path away from the nasty episodes involving what Monty Python used to call the naughty bits. Robert Pinsky's "Selected Poems" was published in April

Excerpts

TURP Shortly before my fifty-first birthday, in December of 2005, my friend Carlo sketched a tangle of tubes and balloons on a corner of newspaper. We were in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Milan. 'The prostate is like a small apple, right? Here. But it's getting bigger and more fibrous with age, it's pressing on this tube going through it, the urethra. It's choking it, see? So, what do we do? We sort of core the thing, from the inside. With a laser. Going up your penis. Make it wider.' I could see that Carlo had made this sketch many times before. Chewing a doughnut, his voice had a believer's enthusiasm. 'Then we just burn away a bit of this valve, or sphincter, here, to make sure it opens properly. That's the base of the bladder.' My bladder. I asked: 'Why?' 'So it empties better, then you go less often.' 'What about sex?' Now he needed a proper sheet of paper. He opened his briefcase. There was a complication. Expertly his surgeon's wrist traced out the same diagram a couple of times larger. 'When you pee, there are two sphincters that have to open, right? The one we've burned away a bit at the base of the bladder and another lower down. Well, when you climax, the sperm shoots in here, between the upper and lower sphincters. Got it? From the prostate into the urethra obviously. The lower sphincter opens and the upper one shuts tight. But, after the op, since we'll have opened the upper one permanently, you can get a situation where the sperm whooshes off up into your bladder instead of down through your penis. So you get a dry orgasm. Same feeling, but no stains on the sheets. An advantage really.' He smiled and took another bite of his doughnut. I examined the smudgy tangle of tubes and cisterns. It was a question of dodgy plumbing. My sink was blocked. The toilet tank needed looking at. 'What about the pain?' 'Not that painful. You'll be in bed for a few days, then a couple of months before you can start sex again.' 'I meant the pains I'm getting now.' 'Ah.' Carlo is a big man with an open, honest face. 'We can't actually guarantee they'll go.' I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself. If the operation didn't solve these problems, why do it? 'Your bladder will empty better. You'll pee less at night. The pains will probably recede, it's just I can't guarantee they will.' I said OK. In the meantime, I should try a variety of pills. 'These problems tend to be hit and miss,' he said. He would put me in touch with a colleague who was up to date with the most recent drugs; for the moment I could start with alpha-blockers. 'They inhibit the reaction to adrenaline, which is connected to the impulse to pee.' He thought I might wake up only once or twice a night instead of five or six times. I tried the alpha-blockers. After a couple of weeks I was still getting up six times a night, and now I was constipated too. I stopped taking the pills and after another week things were back to normal. Normal bowel movements, normal pains. It seemed like progress. Then shortly before Christmas, the 'up-to-date colleague' Carlo had sent me to, a small tawny-haired woman with a strong southern accent, handed me a sample of something absolutely new. 'Christmas present,' she smiled wrily. 'Different approach. Let's see what happens.' For a while I didn't notice any change. Then I was happy to find I wasn't peeing so often. Then I was concerned that I wasn't peeing enough. Come New Year's Eve I was in serious trouble. I hadn't peed for ten hours. I had the impulse. I stood over the toilet. Nothing but pain. I stopped taking the pills. I called Carlo, but his cell phone didn't respond. I didn't have his home number. In the end, he was only one of a circle of friends at the university where I teach in Milan, while I actually live in Verona, two hours away. Should I go to the hospital? The emergency room would be packed on New Year's Eve. There was also the consideration that I knew people in the local hospital. My next-door neighbor worked there. If I had gone to someone in Milan, it was precisely out of a childish desire for secrecy close to home. Who wants to admit to prostate problems? I blew off our small party and went upstairs to bed well before midnight. I lay there rigid and angry. I was angry with the doctor who had given me these pills. I was furious with life for dealing me this card. My body seemed alien and malignant. We couldn't get comfortable together. Perhaps I am a parasite in my own flesh, I thought; and now the landlord has had enough. In the past I'd always imagined I owned the place. From downstairs, I could hear my wife and youngest daughter chatting and laughing with the neighbors and their kids, who were getting ready to let off fireworks in the garden. Their voices sounded distant. I was locked up in this stupid health problem. The space between us, between myself and my family, suddenly presented itself to me as part of a story, a scene in a film. It was the story of my decline into a pissy, grumpy old man. When the New Year's fireworks began, I didn't get up and go out to the balcony to watch. All over town people were celebrating. I was in a dark cell, trying to figure how to get out, how to shake off this unhappy story that had started telling itself inside my head. Self-pity is a great teller of boring tales. I was at a turning point, with nowhere to turn. Toward three a.m. I managed a trickle of pee. It took a while, but afterward I felt better. To celebrate I found what was left of the champagne and drank it. A good half bottle. Then I went down to the basement, turned on the computer, brought up Google and typed in 'TURP.' Trans-Urethral Resection of the Prostate is the gold standard to which other surgeries for Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia are compared. This procedure is performed under general . . . 'Gold standard' seemed an odd term to use. But what if my prostatic hyper- whatever wasn't benign? Following surgery, a catheter is used to remove blood or blood clots in the bladder. I read through the same information on a dozen sites, then, without thinking, clicked on images. Immediately there was a photo of the grotesquely dilated opening of a penis suckering like a fish's mouth around a metal tube. I quickly moved the cursor and clicked on a more reassuring pencil sketch. A man in a doctor's coat and strangely old-fashioned hat was staring into something that looked like a cross between a telescope, a syringe, and a gun. About eight inches long, the instrument had little pistol triggers and flexible tubes entering and leaving from above and below. The man had his fingers on the triggers and an eye pressed to an eyepiece; at the other end of the tube was the tip of a penis, lodged in a conical opening. A rigid tube protruded from the instrument, traveled down through the penis, which was unnaturally straight as a result, and penetrated into a shaded area about the size of a squash ball just beyond the scrotum. Beneath the image, a caption announced: In TURP, a wire loop is used to cut away pieces of the prostate. I remember gazing at this sketch for some time. What struck me about it was the hubris of its clarity. This handsome, clean-shaven young doctor with his curious hat was Renaissance man exploring the heavens with his telescopes, Enlightenment man discovering the power of surgical instruments. He saw clearly right inside the body, my body, right into the quick of life, and he made neat, clinical cuts there with the most sophisticated equipment. I switched to the Guardian's soccer page and read about a game settled by two goals in injury time. I need not decide about this operation just yet, I thought. Excerpted from Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.