Curing the Pelvic Headache
By ROBERT PINSKY
Published: June 24, 2011
Recommend
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
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Illustration by Alain Pilon
TEACH US TO SIT STILL
A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing
By Tim Parks
Illustrated. 322 pp. Rodale. $25.99.
