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.
TEACH US TO SIT STILL
A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing
By Tim Parks
Illustrated. 322 pp. Rodale. $25.99.
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.
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