Tim Parks - The Server

It’s not a play I can get up and walk out of .

Or, rather, it is a play, but I’m one of the paid-up actors. They don’t let you leave. Or if you do you die of hunger .

Disappointed with me, L suffocated Susie. If Susie took piano lessons, L also took piano lessons. To help her daughter, to outshine her daughter. If Susie studied Spanish, L also studied Spanish, with better results. To show her husband how much genius and potential had been sacrificed when she gave up her career for me, for Susie .

Then she drank for a couple of months .

Susie took up dance because L couldn’t. L is too awkward. L has a bad hip. Susie excelled in dance rejoiced in dance gloried in dance because her mother couldn’t dance, but soon learned everything there was to know about choreography. L soon knew every opening, every career track in the world of dance. L bought the clothes, the shoes. L drove her daughter to dance classes and back, talked about her to everyone she met. L promoted her at every possible opportunity .

L didn’t dance: she dazzled. With dance talk .

L stopped drinking to admire her daughter dancing .

I feel ill .

I feel there is nothing between us but the awareness that there is nothing between us. It’s the only thing we share. The knowledge of defeat. What intimacy .

That makes it more and more important to achieve .

Do L and I really care about Susie, or is it that we don’t want to have to tell people our daughter is a failure? Susie’s failed. We don’t want to have to tell people. We can’t enthuse about our daughter running off with a middle-aged alcoholic facing a gaol sentence for manslaughter. Our marriage hangs together thanks to shared pride in Susie’s success, career success. Without that, L’s sacrifices were in vain. Our daughter’s beauty and success justify our continuing (gangrenous) marriage. Gangrenous, paralysed, mouldering .

Is that it?

Is that what Dasgupta means by deep, deep sankharas?

I must do everything I can to get Susie to change her mind so we can keep our old stalemate going .

Stalemate. Stale meat .

Is that it?

Reminds me of The Keeper. Hero embalms whole family to keep everything as it is. House and home exactly as it is .

If Wordsmith goes under, we’ll definitely lose the house. Lose the bay window. Lose the garden. Lose the wisteria. I love the wisteria. Meditating this morning, strange moment, I unlatched the back gate, smelt the jasmine along the fence. It was so present. I brushed aside a few leaves and went through to the terrace. I was home. Safe at home. It was so intense .

If I had come to the Dasgupta twenty years ago, maybe there would have been some point. How can I detach in the middle of this drama that obliges me to be myself? I can’t change the conditions that long ago determined how my consciousness arises. My wife won’t let me. The banks won’t let me. The bookshops won’t let me. My authors won’t let me. I can’t tell the banks, sorry no self. They’re not familiar with the doctrine of anatta. They tell me what my responsibilities are, they show me where I signed on the dotted line. You are your signature .

The Keeper was definitely the best book Wordsmith ever published. Should have won the Booker. We was robbed!

Is this why Susie’s doing it? Not because she loves the bloke, but because she’s understood that her success is the only thing that keeps her parents together? She wants to blow us apart with this disappointment. She can’t choose her successful life because she feels we created it more for ourselves than for her. She damages herself to give us the coup de grâce .

Is that it?

The conditions of her arising. And falling .

Or is it that you don’t want to believe in her passionate love? Because you’re so incapable of it yourself. Passion shames you. Because when you should have walked off with T, you didn’t. You were in love with T and did nothing about it. You let your love die because you didn’t have the courage. You see Susie committing career suicide for love and you feel humbled, humiliated. You see the beauty of love, real love, sacrificial love, and you see your utter, utter failure to love .

She’ll save him and they’ll live happily ever after. Maybe .

Wasn’t the enigma in The Keeper that the three victims were embalmed years apart? The grandmother before the son, the son before the mother. So first the son, then the mother must have accepted the presence of a corpse/corpses on an armchair/armchairs around the house, for years, before falling victim themselves. Bizarre. But fascinating. Accomplices becoming victims. Even after seeing another accomplice become victim .

So what if the author borrowed the plot from some old fairy tale? Everybody else does. Wordsmith wouldn’t be on the brink if they’d given it the Booker .

Dasgupta says we must avoid mental proliferation/speculation/ daydreaming/second arrows etc., but how can I not speculate on the motives which are prompting my only child to throw away her talents to be with a drunken criminal the other side of the globe?

Is that inappropriate attachment?

Perhaps it’s our fault. She runs off for love because her parents show no love. She loves passionately because our togetherness is embalmed venom .

I should surely pay attention to something if it’s my fault .

Or is she clinically mad? Have her sectioned?

How can I benefit from the teachings of Dasgupta until this drama is behind me? How can anyone who is as involved in life as I am, as mixed up with others as I am, as bound to others hand and foot, how can such a person benefit from Dasgupta’s simplistic precepts, how can such a person MEDITATE when his wife is exploding in his head, his daughter is singing in his ears, his mistress is breathing on his neck, his wisteria is beckoning, his jasmine drenches the air with perfume, his beautiful lawn begs to be mown?

If only it was over. Truly over. The child dead, the mother eventually realizes she’ll have to bury him and let go. Pain is not pain when there is no alternative .

Maybe there’s really only one arrow, the second .

The first was hardly an arrow at all .

How can a newt suffer?

Talk about indecision. I can’t even decide which way to cross my legs now. Terrified before Strong Determination that I’ll choose the wrong position and be in awful pain. Do I tuck in the left first or the right? Meanwhile the guy behind me suddenly has a cold. At one point it felt like his wheezing was right inside my chest .

Dreamed of T. We were making love. Normal lavish rejoicing. Unbelievably vivid. Don’t know where my body ends and hers begins. Utter serenity. Until I realize we’re at home. We’re on the sofa at home, for God’s sake. L is walking by, she’s calling to the dog. Susie is tugging her sleeve. ‘Mum, look at Dad and Teresa. Look at Dad and Teresa! Why don’t you look, Mum?’ Susie knows. ‘Why don’t you see?’ But L doesn’t turn. L doesn’t want to see. L’s calling the dog. ‘Charlie. Charlie!’ And the dog is T’s husband. T’s husband is L’s dog!

‘ I’m pregnant,’ T is saying. ‘I’m going to have your child.’ No, she’s already had it, it’s already there on her bosom. A tiny newt is crawling up her cleavage to suck on her nipple .

That’s my boy .

Bizarre moment after two-thirty session. I’d just about held my position to the end. I’m getting to my feet, fighting pins and needles, when suddenly I’m transfixed by the sight of my blanket that I’d let fall from my back on to the cushion. I honestly can’t move for staring at the folds of my grey blanket. I’m fascinated by how complicated all the curves and wrinkles are and the way the light plays over the whole tangle and by the realization that no blanket will ever again fall in exactly that conformation. An intense awareness that the moment is unique, that all moments are unique .