It was July and time to go boating. Months before I had booked three days with a kayak guide in Austria. More than once I had thought of canceling. I would be in too much pain. But it had been part of my strategy of denial never to cancel anything.
With life improving, I decided to go. These few days were a rare moment of escape from work and family. It was the first time I had booked a guide all for myself: a learning experience and a luxury. I dug out my whitewater kayaking equipment, packed the car and drove north.
Two separate people. How strange to wake with words on my lips, with a message for myself.
My selves.
Or from one self to the other.
Not Physician, know thyself, then, but, Parks, know thyselves!
Probably dangerous to take stuff like this seriously.
I decided to leave early and make a small detour into the South Tyrol to run a river with my friend Roland. A warmup. He’s a dark, wiry little guy whose native tongue is the local German dialect; it must be funny for Italians to hear us speaking their language, he with his Tyrolese accent, me with my English. Yet we are both, to all intents and purposes, Italians, Roland thanks to the border-drawing folly of Versailles, me of my own free will. We met at the autostrada exit for Brixen, drove up the Eisack, left my car at the get-out and strapped the kayaks on his van to go up to the launch.
‘What’s the water like?’ I asked.
He shrugged, rolling a cigarette as he drove along tight, winding roads, past wine taverns and crucifixes.
‘Fast, slow, safe, dangerous?’
A faint smile curled his unshaven lip. Far from Aryan, Roland has a pockmarked, gypsy look to him. Straggly hair under a sweatband, necklaces, tattoos. All I know of his past is that he once got himself a job with Italian public TV in Milan, so he must have trained at something. Six months later he was back in his remote village home in the Ahrntal. Perhaps he was afraid of a wound opening up between two selves: the Italian city man and the Tyrolese country boy. Now he teaches kayak and takes tourists rafting. He seems wonderfully at ease with himself.
‘So, is it difficult or not?’
He laughed, blowing out smoke. Roland always makes fun of my preriver nerves.
Eventually, he asked me what I’d been up to this year.
I’d just published a novel set right here in the South Tyrol, I told him.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘About a big-time media man, London TV celebrity, who kind of escapes here to empty his mind. Deliberately chooses a place where he can’t speak a word of the language, and high up in the mountains where there’s no one to speak to anyway. Above Luttach,’ I added.
Luttach was Roland’s village. He smiled again. All around us steep pine slopes rose to dizzying peaks of blue and gray.
Then, just as we turned down a track to the riverbank, I articulated something that had never come to me quite so clearly while writing Cleaver. ‘It’s a sort of death wish really. He’d like to look so hard at the rocks and trees that he becomes one of them.’
This time Roland nodded. ‘TV will do that to you,’ he said. About an hour later I nearly got the end Cleaver desired. It was a shock. The Eisack is a bouncy torrent tumbling through the boulders of a deep gorge, crossed here and there, high above, by the autostrada to the Brenner. It’s strange with icy water on your hands, spray on your face, splashings and gurglings in your ears, to think of those vehicles a hundred feet above, droning across the landscape as if it wasn’t really there. I suppose I go paddling to reconnect with the world, I thought. A moment later I went under.
I had made the mistake, even more unforgivable on the river than during Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation, of drifting off into my thoughts: not connecting with the world, then, but reflecting on connecting. Close to the right bank, Roland paddled over the top of a little weir and thumped down onto rocks below. Not concentrating, I assumed this was an error and moved left into the main stream. Roland was yelling now, but I couldn’t hear what. Then I saw that while about a quarter of the river’s flow did go over the weir in the center, the main current was dragging me irresistibly toward a gray iron barrier on the left. Below it, I understood at once, would be a grille for catching debris. A strainer. To be avoided at all costs. But it was too late. In an instant I was against the barrier, side on, and tipping with the pressure of the water.
Life happens quickly. This would not be a warm wave that swept the mind clean and left it in complete ease. It was a trap. The moment I went below, I would be thrust against the grille in the conduit beneath and that would be that. Not two selves, but none.
Squeezed between current and barrier, the kayak began to flip. Ignoring Roland’s shouts, lost in the watery roar, I yanked off the sprayskirt and launched myself out of the boat in a frenzied freestyle toward the weir beyond the barrier. For a moment I stayed uncannily still in the grip of two equal tensions, the downward pull to the grille and the sideways rush to the weir. Then I was released, weir-bound. I suspect my buoyancy aid saved me.
The accident made Roland talkative. Again and again he apologized. He should have warned me. He hadn’t thought. He marveled at the lightness of my injuries. ‘Move your wrists, OK? There’s a cut on your hand. Your neck? Roll your head.’ I had fallen three meters over the weir onto rocks taking only a bang on the knee and a fierce smack on my helmet. Freed from my weight, the kayak had floated after me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeated. He hugged me. ‘Rest now. You’re shivering. Cover up.’
Half an hour later I needed to pee. Once, twice, three times. In the car, my pains welled. But I felt euphoric. Got away with it! And optimistic too. The peeing and pain must be in response to the million-volt tension, the adrenaline. This reaction proved it. And however much I might need to change my life, I felt intensely that I did love it; I loved my body, loved Roland, loved the boats, the mountains, the smells of moss and resin, and above all the water, I loved the crazy, crashing, dangerous water. No death wish for Timmy, I thought. And when we stopped for a sandwich and I needed a fourth pee, I simply told Roland what my problem was. It was the first time I had talked about my health odyssey to anyone but wife and doctors. It was a release. And I knew it had been made possible by the breathing exercises, by my new state of mind and now this sudden swelling of emotion. I wasn’t embarrassed at all. ‘Yeah, I have this peeing problem.’ The accident had become part of getting better.
People with pelvic pain syndrome, Dr Wise said, tend to swing dramatically from catastrophic thinking to the opposite: an excess of excited optimism.
What to do but enjoy the ups?
I kept the story brief. When I’d finished, Roland told me he had a groin hernia that needed operating. For the third time. It was very painful. He grinned. His wife taught yoga, he said. He knew all about breathing. Lighting a cigarette, he shook his head. ‘So glad nothing happened to you.’
When we’d said good-bye, I found a side road and an empty meadow and lay down with the roll of my sleeping bag under my knees. One feels more vulnerable doing this kind of thing outdoors. I closed my eyes, then opened them. No one was sneaking up. A cloud had crossed the sun. There was a slight breeze on my skin. The thick grass creaked faintly. The pain was steady and strong.
I couldn’t empty my mind. Every time I tried to breathe deeply and concentrate on some tension, I was suddenly back there, trapped against the iron barrier, the kayak tipping, the current tugging. I saw my body sucked down into the strainer, my dead face pressed against the grille. I shivered and pushed the image away. It came back. It came back like the pain, I thought. Caught against the grille, it couldn’t flow. Blocked vata. After five or ten minutes, I realized there was no point in fighting. Go toward it then, as toward the pain. Go underwater.
For a while I studied my dead self against the grille in the dark of the conduit as the river plunged under the barrier. It wasn’t so frightening. There would be a couple of minutes’ choking panic, then the definitive calm. Paintings of drowned people, I thought, tended to show them serene. Millais’s Ophelia is transformed into something more beautiful than she was alive. The weeds and pond water suit her. And now I remembered a recent nightmare in which I found my son drowned in the bath. Tell me it isn’t true, I kept repeating. He was fully clothed, drowned in the tub. Please, it mustn’t be true! It can’t be! But at the same time I was thinking how beautiful he was, how calm and solemn, eyes wide and untroubled. Ophelia is beautiful because she has stopped tearing herself apart over Hamlet. We despair on seeing her, but she is free to become one with the natural world. Relaxed even. Phlebas the Phoenician forgot the profit and the loss. A current under sea picked his bones in whispers.
Still, I reflected more sensibly, how much better, if you could shed the torment without losing your breath forever, if you could stop agonizing over the prince of Denmark, or the consumer price index, without being dead. What my hero Cleaver had wanted, I clarified then, was not exactly to die, but to ‘die to this world,’ to the clamor in his head.
A religious expression.
Of course the more intensely one thinks about all this stuff, the less likely you are to chill out. I couldn’t make the pains subside. They were lodged there. Dr Wise’s paradoxical relaxation was not an emergency bandage. I needed another pee.
Back in the car, the only radio station I could pick up was a political phone-in. People were indignant about Guantanamo. There was also a question of whether the high court would allow a man on an iron lung the right to die. The presenter had various experts on the line, apparently selected for their vehemently contrasting points of view. A listener from Bari felt we should accept suffering as part of God’s plan. He was belligerent. Everybody seemed agitated. But I too get agitated about the news. There are days when I am more concerned about the American elections than anything else, days when I’m constantly online checking opinion polls. A listener phoned to say that rapists should be castrated. Rape seemed to be the main sport of Slav immigrants, he said.
Time to turn off.
My car, an old Vectra, must be one of the last models produced with a tape deck rather than a CD player. I always bring a few books on tape when I travel. Moby-Dick is an old favorite. I must have listened to it a dozen times. But before turning it on, I attempted a brief summary, thus:
You have problems peeing and related pains. You dream about rivers and beaches where water has run out, leaving only melancholic mud. For sport you go where water is abundant, violent, dangerous. You find it compelling. And you are attracted to literature that describes water as carrying away the mind, thoughts drowning in eternity. You imagine similar experiences lying on your bed relaxing. But when really carried off by the water, your mind reacts like lightning to keep you alive. And thinking.
The curious thing about Cleaver, I decided then, was how the novel had foreseen various developments in my life a year and more before I had been aware of them. Supposing myself creative, I had merely been scribbling down a memoir in metaphor of the months to come. Once again, some part of me had possessed and even expressed a knowledge that remained inaccessible to the voice that speaks in the head and calls itself I. Perhaps the two selves that had been announced waking up that morning were the one writing about Cleaver’s problems and the one denying my own. The first, literary self doesn’t do much to help the second, the sufferer. The literary self likes finding forms and words to talk about things metaphorically, to make them more dramatic and intriguing than they are. He thinks of this as art and congratulates himself when someone pays him for what he does. Meantime the sufferer tries to ignore his pains. The two selves don’t connect.
Call me Ishmael.
I spent the rest of the drive with Melville. It wasn’t silence, but at least it was a rest from my thoughts. I was crossing the Brenner while Ishmael got into bed with Queequeg and the Europabrücke as he met Captain Peleg on the deck of the Pequod. With all its excitement, the narrative relaxed me. I began to feel better. And again it was strange to think of the dislocations of literature, the mind and the flesh: Melville writing in New York, the whalemen setting out from Nantucket, me speeding across Austria, but far away in my head. Then an hour and more later, climbing the Inn valley toward Switzerland while the Pequod was becalmed on the Line, things came together. I stopped the tape and rewound to listen again. It was a passage about keeping watch on the masthead.
There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks.
Unnecessary excitements! In 1850 Melville had already understood how the media can make a man tense and dumb. He goes on:
Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
The blending cadence of waves and thoughts. It sounded so much like some of the sensations I had experienced. But in this trance the lookout misses the whale he had been watching for. The crew curse him. And I missed the turnoff for my campsite. I drove ten kilometers too far and had to turn back.
‘What’s that doing in the car?’ was the first thing Andy said. My guide turned out to be a gangly Yorkshireman. I have a lazy habit of just folding down the backseat of the car and sliding in my kayak.
‘Break hard and it’ll go shooting through the windshield, if it doesn’t take your head off first,’ he protested. ‘Strap it on the roof!’
It seems I’m always thinking but never paying attention. The following morning, after we’d run our first river together, Andy told me, ‘Well, I’m glad you can paddle. I was worried yesterday when you got out of the car and I saw that miserable stoop you have.’