Teach us to Sit Still: a sceptic's search for health and healing
By Tim Parks
(Harvill Secker, £12.99 / €17.67)
Valerie Lawlor
The title of Tim Parks' autobiographical ''novel'' of illness, despair and, ultimately, redemption comes from TS Eliot's Anglo-Catholic Ash Wednesday, which has been read as a conversion poem, describing the stages of despair, renunciation, recovery and renewed faith at the time of Elliot's baptism in the Church of England.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines conversion as ''a change of condition or function'', a term commonly used to describe ''a turning in position, direction or distinction''.
Six segments
Conversion, as Tim Parks experiences and describes it (and as was also Eliot's experience in writing the poem, in six segments over three years) is a process. This novel takes us through his experience of that process.
There is an obvious parallel between his personal experience, and the plot of David Lodge's novel Therapy, in which the protagonist, a writer with a comfortable home, a long and happy marriage, children, personal and professional success, describes himself as ''feeling unhappy most of the time'' and embarks upon a crash course of therapies which do nothing to relieve his depression.
In both books there is an exploration of how literature and religion attempt to define the world and our place in it using intuitive and emotional processes rather than rational or empirical ones. Both men are writers, and the Graham Greene quote ''writing is a form of therapy'' is the epigraph to the Lodge novel. Both novels have ''conversion'' themes
Parks has inherited his evangelical Anglican parents' veneration for western scientific rationality and their contempt for ''alternative'' interpretations of illness or well-being. The book is his spiritual journey away from his world of words and purpose-driven activity, towards a place of ease and stillness and of living in the moment, meaning that his experience of the present moment is not sacrificed to an intellectual narration of the moment.
Concept
It is a lovely, well told story of a coming together of a mind and a body, an unblocking of ''vata''. Although Parks doesn't explain the term, it is a concept which Ayurvedic devotees maintain is one of the three pervasive (energy) forces of the universe.
It is also, therapeutically for Parks, a memoir of his relationship with his late father - ''light had fallen on a dark place''.
If you spend your days rigidly hunched at a desk, pouring over pages of words, drafting and redrafting, admiring your verbal dexterity, contemplating the success it will bring you in the future, you will relate to Parks' tension and its physical manifestation in his also ominously over-active bladder.
The success of the book relies on the seriousness of its endeavour. Parks comes to accept the depth and profundity of seemingly superficially trite tenets of the New Age faith. Sometimes, you have to open your heart; live in the moment; forgive yourself your failings; love one another. And, in the poet in Eliot's words, Parks too asks that his faith ''teach us to care and not to care; teach us to sit still''.
