A few peeks over Murdoch’s paywall to see what Will Self made of Decoded by Jay-Z and The Anthology of Rap edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois:

“I well remember hearing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message for the first time released in the United States and the UK in 1982, it charted here in August and got some airplay for a while before dropping out of earshot (although Stateside it went platinum in a month). At the time I had an early-adopting friend who earnestly assured me, while wearing a capsleeve T-shirt, that this was the shape of things to come. I didn’t think his taste in singles quite as laughable as his singlet, but nevertheless disputed it. However, nigh on 30 years later he’s been more than vindicated, for if any genre of popular music can claim to be a global soundtrack it’s rap, and if any popular art form can be said to have been genuinely influential on mainstream culture then it’s hip-hop.”

“What makes Jay-Z’s story quite so engaging is his acute self-awareness of the issues involved, when he trots shop-worn analogy between drug-dealing and other pernicious forms of capitalism you listen, because he has had frontline experience as a crack dealer himself, as well as becoming another sort of entrepreneur. And when he details the terrifying near-decimation of his father’s generation that was wreaked by the drug, and the links between the crack epidemic and the corrupt financing of the Iran-Contra arms deals facilitated by the Reagan Administration, you listen as well, because Jay-Z isn’t blethering about conspiracy, but bearing witness to a chain, the links of which
he has minutely observed.”

“But ignorance is a great prophylactic – so long as you keep it on – and now these two intelligent and considered works have divested me of my prejudicial latex, I feel nothing but grateful to have been allowed to come up close and personal with such an astonishing body of inventive, subtle and assured lyrical work. I’m not prepared to assert that rap lyrics equate in quality to this or that part of the established poetic canon – such arguments are self-evidently factitious, song lyrics exist vitally only in a Gestalt that comprises music as well, whether they’re penned by Cole Porter, Bob Dylan or Jay-Z – but what I can sign up to wholeheartedly, is that far from being a derogation of African-American lyricism, rap may be its apogee.”

Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, £12.99

Do I have to say this? Yes, I suppose I ought: Tim Parks‘s digressive memoir of his debilitating but ultimately life-affirming struggle with pelvic pain made me leak a few tears, guffaw a lot, and besides quietly instructing me in some fresh perspectives – on such matters as Samuel Beckett and Buddhism (and that’s only the Bs) – ultimately taught me an eminently practical lesson about coping with age and mortality. Must I utter the blurbish cliché? Why the hell not: Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh it made me cry and it made me seriously think about taking up Vipassana meditation.

I’ve been aware of Parks’s writing for a number of years, but apart from his Booker-shortlisted novel Europa – which I liked well enough – this is the only other book of his that I’ve attempted. An elegant essayist, who describes well the tortuous labyrinth of contemporary Italy – where he has lived for 30 years – his pieces crop up from time to time in the literary reviews and are notable for their air of quietly insistent rationalism. Parks is one of those writers whose prose seems always to be muttering the subtext: You and I, we understand each other perfectly, don’t we, and in so doing we can comprehend also this crazy world.

It’s the sort of confident comity that Orwell inspires in his readers, and it speaks to me of a very English empiricism: this is this – and don’t you forget it. It was no surprise to learn in this book that Parks is the son of a Church of England vicar (albeit one who tended towards the charismatic) and that while he may have rejected faith in miracles when he was a teenager, Parks retained the concomitant – and equally Anglican – faith in science (so long as it knows its limits). Like his parents, Parks had a deeply ingrained resistance to all crystal-dangling, Om-chanting and tableturning – indeed anything that smacks of mumbo jumbo.

Up until his early fifties, Parks’s very familiar brand of lapsed Anglicanism served him perfectly well. From his own luminous descriptions of kayaking and hill walking, we gain the impression of a man who was comfortable in his body, and while not exactly brimming over with job satisfaction – what ambitious writer is? – he nonetheless found his work lecturing on literary translation in Milan perfectly rewarding. From the asides he lets fall, we can gather that he is also a thoroughly married and familial man. And apart from an infection of the prostate gland that he had had in his twenties (and from which, against the odds, he had completely recovered), Parks enjoyed good health. Then came the deluge: to be precise, intense and searing pains throughout the pelvic area that yet remained curiously nonlocatable.

Accompanying this was the irritable bladder, the six-times-a-night micturition, the need to be constantly within range of a facility, the creeping impotence – all the panoply of mental and physical discomforts that zeroes in on the ageing human.

Good Cartesian that he was, and so viewing his body as a mechanism that should be fiddled back into functionality, Parks immediately hied himself to the doctors. His experience from then on was wearily familiar: the tests, and then more tests – blood, urine, semen – the breezily overconfident consultants, then the firm recommendation of radical surgery.

In Parks’s case this took the form of a procedure known as a Turps (Transurethral resection of prostate surgery), which is precisely what it sounds like: laser-burning one highway through the pesky gland, while suturing up another. The medics were so keen to begin blasting that when they had him in the stirrups for another test – a cystoscopy – one suggested that they just do the other procedure while they were at it. But Parks cried, no! And he was right to do so, because the cystoscopy revealed there was nothing wrong with his prostate, while punching the words “prostate pain” into Google conjured up 6,820,000 hits, many of which turned out to be the cris de coeur of post-Turps patients who were in more pain than ever.

Of course, while by no means Damascene, Parks had already started his conversion some time before while on a trip to India for a translation conference he had consulted an Ayurvedic doctor. Dismissive of the astro-babble surrounding the diagnosis offered, he nonetheless took note when the doctor’s wife observed ? apropos of Western mechanistic medicine ? “You only say psychosomatic … if you think the mind and body are ever separate.”

What’s most interesting about Parks’s journey back to health is that he convincingly portrays, from within, what it’s like to abandon an assumption – the mind-body dichotomy – that is itself, of necessity, ineffable.

True, there are digressions into the neurotic compulsions of Coleridge, the subtle velleities of Virginia Woolf’s characters, and the radiant verisimilitudes of Velazquez, but the main thrust of this book is towards a new kind of gestalt. Parks’s turnaround came courtesy of breathing exercises he read about in a book with the deliriously unappealing title: A Headache in the Pelvis. The authors stressed that the “paradoxical relaxation” aimed for could be achieved only under their own medical supervision, but Parks was desperate – and disciplined – enough to go it alone.

The relief from his chronic pain was dramatic: “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?’.” It would be misrepresenting Parks if I portrayed him as going belly-up to his breathy belly – in fact, his journey back to health was circuitous, while throughout he retained his gentle but insistent scepticism – no credulous crystal-dangler he. Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the intense effects of these breathing exercises or the even more intense ones when Parks begins Shiatsu massage – then the Big One: fullblown Vipassana meditation.

Here is an insistent scepticism – and an even more insistent humour. I think it’s this ability to crack a deadpan joke, whether discussing his bowel movements or the doughnut addiction of a doctor friend, that makes Parks’s descriptions of the romantic internal landscape of the meditational pupil – jagged peaks of ego lit by lightning, deluges of watery remorse – so compelling. There’s this, and his screamingly funny pen portrait of an overweight and slightly lecherous American guru who nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – is wholly authentic.

I’ve been interested in Buddhism for years, but I would say that Parks’s account of the transformations that occur to him when he goes first on a three and then on a ten-day silent meditation retreat is among the most convincing I’ve read. The realignment that Parks achieves is not some high-flown transcendence, but more akin to GK Chesterton’s credo that “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits [is] extraordinary enough to be exciting”.

Then, towards the end of this elegant and rewarding book it began to bother me that I was enjoying Teach us to Sit Still quite as much as I was, simply because I was its ideal reader: another questing middle-aged writer with his own undelivered prize speeches (Parks digresses hilariously on the false humility of self-deprecating Booker prize-winners) and his own chronic pain. At the time of reading Parks’s book I was plagued by a torn ligament in my shoulder and, like the author, I am a stressed man who cannot find an hour in the day to sit down and breathe easily. The parallels don’t stop there: Parks grew up in Finchley, North London I was only a couple of miles away in East Finchley. True, I didn’t up sticks and move to Italy, and nor do I have the unusual mental diplopia – and again, Parks evokes this brilliantly – that comes with being bilingual.

And nor do I have Parks’s lightness of touch. It’s difficult to think of a memoir that manages to be at once as intrusive of its subject as a Turps laser, while still managing to leave the emotional tissue surrounding it entirely untouched so that while we hear of Parks’s wife and children, we never feel we have intruded on their lives.

But then, although I finished this book a few weeks ago and put it to one side, it has managed to stay with me, like an inverse corollary of the pain that it so marvellously evokes. In a world dominated by cheap self-revelation and quack self-help, I suspect that Teach us to Sit Still may be the real thing: a work of genuine consolation that shows the way out of the dark wood of middle age in which everyone, at some time or another, will inevitably find themselves lost.

This review originally appeared in the Times on 26 June 2010

In March I was on the panel for an edition of Question Time filmed in Canary Wharf. The big news that week — I say “big” but “awful” might be more accurate — was that Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys convicted in 1993 for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, had broken the terms under which he had been released on licence and was being returned to jail. Now we have the further atrocity exhibition of two boys — aged 10 and 11 — convicted of an attempted rape on an eight-year-old girl. With such crimes as these, surely — we must collectively ask ourselves — it becomes possible to explain them only by positing the existence of some exceptional depths of inner darkness?

It was predictable that a question concerning Venables would be put to the Question Time panel: the killing of Bulger (I refrain from using the term “murder” for reasons that will become apparent) had gripped the nation. While there were some of the usual liberal suspects who protested at the idea of ten-year-old children being put on trial for murder, English law remained quite unambiguous: the age of criminal responsibility was — and remains — just 10.

Terry Eagleton, in his book-length essay entitled simply On Evil, is quick to home in on the Bulger case as deeply illustrative of our contradictory thinking on the subject. He quotes one of the police officers who dealt with Robert Thompson and Venables as saying that the minute he clapped eyes on one of these culprits he “knew he was evil”. Eagleton observes that while the policeman seized upon the term as a badge to ward off the possibility of liberal apologias for the dreadful act, in fact the ascription of “evil” does nothing of the sort. It is by no means clear that anyone could be held responsible for being born evil.

This is precisely the contradiction that James Hogg teases out in his 1824 classic whatdunnit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the novel, a young Calvinist Scot encounters a mysterious figure who informs him that he is one of the elect (in other words, predestined for Heaven), and so encourages him to embark on a murderous spree on the basis that everything he does must be good by virtue of his exalted state.

Eagleton of course will have read Hogg, and the queasy equivalence between the non-responsibility of the virtuous murderer and the evil one wouldn’t be lost on him. As well as being a cradle Roman Catholic, he has also been a card-carrying Marxist. Although Eagleton may be heterodox in relation to both systems of thought, it’s nonetheless these two totalising ideologies that inform his quest for evil. For Eagleton evil is very definitely innate in humans, being a sort of French plaiting of Schopenhauer’s universal Will to Life, St Augustine’s Original Sin and Sigmund Freud’s thanatos or Death Drive. We are all born with this lust for annihilation, just as we are all born with an equal and countervailing drive towards going forth, checking out some nice tourist destinations and fruitfully multiplying. If I understand Eagleton rightly, evil arises not simply when individuals deviate from the good (this is mere wickedness) but when they try to cope with their own overpowering fear of death, pain and destruction by wreaking it on others.

Eagleton, of course, has to account for the great charnel house of the 20th century — its mass murders and genocides. On the face of it, this is where the commonsensical view that there is a line to be drawn between the merely bad and the downright demonic should favour the existence of Christian evil. Certainly Eagleton’s version of it allows for a distinction to be drawn between individuals who were carried away or coerced into abetting genocides and those who instigated and even gloried in them. But I’m not sure that he makes his case; he wants the Holocaust to be qualitatively different from all other mass murders, and so judges that it was almost uniquely purposeless — or, rather, was a collective enactment of the evil individual’s insatiable lust for autonomy.

The mass murders of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, by contrast, Eagleton believes did at least have a point — but did they, beyond the naked exercise of power? Surely inciting an entire nation to turn upon itself in an orgy of highly personalised violence — as Mao did — is just as bad (or evil); as is a regime such as Soviet Russia, where people were murdered with supremely brutal inefficiency.

And then there’s the worrying spectacle of those bureaucrats of death such as Adolph Eichmann, who inspired Hannah Arendt’s ringing phrase “the banality of evil”. With Eichmann Eagleton seems to want to have it both ways: the office manager of the Final Solution gave exhaustive testimony before his Jerusalem trial in 1961 — mind-numbingly boring to read — but while one is left with an impression of Eichmann as insanely deluded, vain and ambitious, it’s not at all clear that he was abetting murder to assuage his own fear of death. Eagleton acknowledges the potential for evil in all of us — so might not its banality be because it is everywhere we look?

Eagleton’s problem is that he needs evil to be special, different and achingly banal all at once. He needs this because his view of what human beings are remains very deeply conditioned by his religious upbringing and his political sympathies. For Eagleton humans are, first and foremost, rational beings with the capacity for freedom of will. Of course, being a superannuated Marxist as well, he also can’t help seeing them as mired in a false consciousness that stops them moving towards God/communism.
On the Eagleton definition, we cannot really know whether Thompson and Venables were evil or not — any more than we can absolutely “know” that anyone either is or is not evil. To have a definitive answer we would need to get inside their heads in a godlike fashion.

I fear that for Eagleton the debasement of the term “evil” is of a piece with the loss of Christian faith in the West. For the fact about evil is that it exists in a purely historical sense: there is no evidence for it in religions that much predate the Christian era — nothing in Eastern religion, Plato or even Biblical Judaism. It comes into the world through the teachings of Jesus as redacted by St Paul, and probably resulted in part from a cross-fertilisation by the very Manicheanism that Christians are always at pains to disavow (even unto burning such heretics at the stake). In other words — and to be fair to Eagleton, he doesn’t really dodge this — no Christian God, no evil.