Two things. However briefly, I had made the pain go away. Done it myself, with no drugs. Presumably it could be done again. Maybe for longer.
Second. My body was different from what I had imagined.
The problem was time.
‘Many of our patients are simply too busy to dedicate themselves to our treatment,’ Wise and Anderson observed. These people, men and women, were not yet suffering enough. They still saw their pains as an irritating waste of time, a distraction to put behind them as quickly as possible. Hence they were drawn to accounts of their illness that saw a rapid solution in drugs or a surgical operation. No personal energies need be expended. It could be paid for. Hopefully by the government.
This described my thinking, at least until very recently, with ominous accuracy.
‘We strongly advise sufferers,’ Wise went on, ‘to accept these pains as part of the main curriculum of their lives.’
The main curriculum!
Would I have to stop referring to my pains as ‘stupid’?
Wise’s position, a little pious-sounding to my ear, was that this chronic and worsening condition was trying to tell me something about myself, about the way I had been living, and I was supposed to listen. I would have to give my pains the time of day.
An hour, to be precise. Every day. At least for the first two or three months.
Where am I going to find an hour a day?
‘But you have oceans of time,’ Rita laughed. Having always complained that I am ‘too driven,’ too interminably focused on my ‘precious work,’ this was a big told-you-so opportunity for my wife. She was loving it.
‘Eons of time!’ she insisted.
Rita was right. I was lucky. Aside from the university, no one was breathing down my neck. I wasn’t running a major multinational or running for political office, I wasn’t on piecework with an extended family to feed. All I had to do was to sacrifice an hour a day of writing. Turn down a few essay commissions.
The main curriculum of your life. No sooner had I read that phrase than I kept repeating it, mulling it over. Wise had scored a direct hit there. I saw at once that, far more than the time itself, the hour count, what was at stake here was a major principle. Instead of taking my work with me to hospital waiting rooms, dealing with my troubles as if I was getting the car fixed, my eye on my watch and my hand on my wallet, I would have to accept a radical shift of priorities. The pain must be allowed to come on board and take equal status beside my writing, beside my family, as part of the core curriculum.
A cat has climbed on board.
Six months previously I wouldn’t have been ready for this. Even now it galled.
OK, so, perhaps after lunch, I thought, an hour might be found, when I usually yawned my way through the papers online.
Or shortly before bedtime, when I leafed—
‘To be effective you must give it your best period of the day,’ Dr Wise warned. ‘Otherwise you won’t have the attention and concentration required properly to relax the pelvic floor.’
Every time I turned to A Headache, it seemed the good doctor had the measure of me. He closed my bolt-holes. I took a blanket and a couple of pillows to the office and made up the bed there.
Prime work time.
Again and again the hour would start with a feeling of time-wasting and humiliation. Why did it take me so long to settle down? I’d forgotten to remove my glasses. My watch. I’d forgotten to set the alarm. There was sleep in my eyes. My underwear felt tight. Take it off. Start again. Now the sheet—because I’d got between the sheets—was irritating my chin. My toes wanted to twitch. At this point I may as well abort. At this point it’s a lost cause.
But I lay still. ‘Your most sincere effort,’ I remembered.
It came to me now how difficult it had always been for me to sit still, to be still in any way. ‘Sit still, Timothy!’ My mother’s voice. I was squirming beside her on the pew. I couldn’t sit still through my father’s sermons. (Why is it always so tempting to imagine my troubles started with my father’s sermons?) Or even worse his long prayers. I hated prayers. I couldn’t sit still in church, couldn’t kneel still either. ‘Parks!’ A piece of chalk whizzes past my cheek. That was school. ‘Stop fidgeting, boy. Sit still!’ Happy days, when a teacher could throw chalk at a kid. What if he’d got me in the eye? Later in life it would be lectures, conferences, readings, faculty meetings. I couldn’t sit still to listen to my colleagues. I fidgeted through a fellow author’s reading. No doubt I’ve offended many. Parks isn’t listening. He’s drawing attention to himself. When I teach I have to move around. It’s essential. Otherwise everything dries up. I can’t teach sitting down. It’s fun in Italy, I’ve always thought, that you can gesticulate as you talk. You keep moving.
‘By all means move a little in the first few minutes,’ Dr Wise conceded, ‘to make sure you are quite comfortable. But then we would advise you to try to stay absolutely still for the full period of your paradoxical relaxation.’
The first few minutes have passed now. However excruciating, I must lie still. I breathed deeply and remembered Eliot. ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’
Don’t verbalize.
Then after a while something would happen. A breath breathed itself and I slid down into that dark landscape with its low sky and damp hills. At once the muscles of my face buzzed and sang with tension.
I say ‘something would happen’ as though these sessions were all the same. Certainly there was an element of repetition, particularly at the beginning: the itches, the fuss, the trivial adjustments, the mill of defeatist thoughts. But from this point on, from the moment I entered my bodyscape, as it were, every day was different. And as the first week moved into the second and third, things grew more intense, more—here was a real paradox—exotic.
There were curious pulsations. In my wrists perhaps. Not a regular wrist pulse of the kind you can check and count. Rather it might move along my right wrist, from hand to forearm, then ripple over into the left. Faster than an ordinary pulse. More fluid, mobile. The wave was picked up by a ticking in the stomach. Then a leg too. A sea swell of pulses were crisscrossing the muscles. The tension in my cheeks was exactly superimposed over the tension in my calves. The two seemed to be the same. Both were growing and changing, glowing and noisy. Suddenly, it was all so interesting that the mind found it easy to concentrate. More interesting than thoughts. As when you surrender yourself to strange music. It was so busy. Parts of the body were calling back and forth to each other with little rippling pulsations, as if the tide was lapping in and out across underwater weeds.
Stop describing it!
Concentrate.
Suddenly my belly drew a huge breath, absolutely unexpected, and a great warm wave flooded down my body from top to toe.
I nearly drowned. Shocked and tensed, I sat up and opened my eyes.
‘What in God’s name was that?’
The feeling had vanished at once. It was gone. But so too, I realized now, was the pain. The pain had quite gone. Not even a shadow of a pain. Not a ghost. I was lying still, painless.
I then spent half an hour trying to make this bizarre thing happen again. It must be the famous abdominal breathing, I thought. Though Dr Wise hadn’t said anything about the effects being this dramatic. I was so excited now that the fact of the pain’s disappearing seemed rather secondary.
I knew it would soon be back.
I tried and tried to conjure up that wave again; it wouldn’t be conjured. I was hugely disappointed. I’m a far more reliable companion, the pain sniggered. The proverbial bad penny was back.
I tried the next day. And the next. Nothing. I actually lost ground.
Perhaps a week later when I’d almost forgotten about it and had begun instead to concentrate on the muscles of my face, begun to realize that the muscles of my face formed a fierce knit of tensions that urgently required releasing, it happened again.
It was violent and very sudden. A great warm wave burst from the dry, knitted muscles of my cheeks and forehead to surge across this low landscape. Dike after dike gave way in its path. Nothing resisted. I was swamped, submerged from head to toe.
This time I managed to keep still. I felt it flood over and through me. But I was too excited. There! There! The wave again! The wave! You did it!
Afterward, back at my desk, I was reminded of a passage from Women in Love that I had sometimes used in translation lessons. I Googled it.
After a lapse of stillness, after the rivers of strange dark fluid richness had passed over her, flooding, carrying away her mind and flooding down her spine and down her knees, past her feet, a strange flood, sweeping away everything and leaving her an essential new being, she was left quite free, she was free in complete ease, her complete self.
That wasn’t quite it. The experience had been more sudden. More violent. But the business of the mind being flooded away, flooded clean, was definitely the same. It felt good. And ‘lapse of stillness,’ I realized, must mean lapse in the sense of thoughtlessness, unexpected unawareness. As in ‘lapsus.’ You had to be still to make it happen. I started to read around the passage.
This is a bizarre and embarrassing moment in Women in Love, one of those that prompted critics to jeer at the book. Birkin and Ursula have just had a big argument, then made up, during a country walk. An engagement ring gets tossed back and forth in fine melodrama tic style. After ward, the two find a pub, ask for lunch and are shown into a backroom where the landlady leaves them alone for a few minutes while she prepares the food. Here they have some kind of weird sexual-spiritual experience that involves Ursula kneeling open-mouthed at Birkin’s thighs. He is one of the ‘Sons of God’ and she one of the ‘Daughters of Man.’ Thus:
She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction.
‘My love,’ she cried, lifting her face to him, her eyes, her mouth open in transport.
Hmmm.
Still, you have to admire Lawrence for taking on this stuff in 1922. My idea, I remembered now, when I showed my students this lapse passage, had been to compare it with an earlier moment when Gerald and Gudrun first make love and afterward Gudrun spends a tormented night with her thoughts racing and churning away destructively. That’s the passage that has the untranslatable expression ‘destroyed into perfect consciousness,’ which I had talked about in India.
But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness. She lay motionless, with wide eyes staring motionless into the darkness, while he was sunk away in sleep, his arms around her.
What I was trying to show the students was the way the states of obsessive thinking on the one hand (Gudrun), and ‘thoughtfreeness,’ we might say, on the other (Ursula), seep into the syntax. The provocative thorniness of that ‘destroyed into consciousness,’ the serene elision of ‘lapse of stillness,’ the smooth rearrangement of linguistic furniture in ‘in complete ease,’ rather than ‘completely at ease.’ Along with this analysis, I confess, there would be a fair bit of banter with the students at the expense of the pompous pseudospiritual psychodrama of the passage. It goes on:
There were strange fountains of his body, more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.
But florid prose or not, it now seemed that I had had an experience that matched the one Lawrence was describing. Minus the sex, of course. I had not been up to sex for some time. In that regard I was the smitten rock without the fountains. All the same, and even though I would never have put it like this, ‘floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches’ made sense. That was what it had felt like. We were talking about the same thing.
Ineffable.
The only time I’d ever used the word was singing that hymn: ‘Oh worship the king, all glorious above.’ One of the verses starts: ‘Oh measureless might, ineffable love.’
What did it really mean though? Much the same as measureless, presumably. I went to the dictionary.
Ineffable: too intense to be uttered.
So, something you can only speak by saying you can’t speak it. And when you did try to speak it, at least with this experience, you found yourself talking water—it was the obvious metaphor—abundant, flowing, crashing water, ultimate antidote to thought, essential requisite for Leopardi’s sweet mental shipwreck.
The water at low ebb in my dreams.
But that wasn’t the end of Lawrence’s scene. A few lines later, when the food arrives (hopefully the couple have rearranged their clothing), Ursula serves her lover tea, and we have:
She was usually nervous and uncertain at performing these public duties, such as giving tea. But today she forgot, she was at her ease, entirely forgetting to have misgivings. The tea-pot poured beautifully from a proud slender spout. Her eyes were warm with smiles as she gave him his tea. She had learned at last to be still and perfect.
Learned to be still and perfect! Are such things possible? I wasn’t so ambitious. But I did hope that one day I might ‘forget to have misgivings.’
And so I did. Only the following week in fact. Waking at five a.m., pain miserable as ever, I brewed a cuppa and decided that, rather than surfing the Net, I might as well use this dead but wakeful time for the famous paradoxical relaxation. I lay on the sofa. Afterward, six thirtyish, I returned to bed. At which, my wife rolled over and, quite without thinking, we made love.
Perfect.