Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

In the course of mundane education, children learn to ask the question ‘Who am I?’ only in the narrowest contexts — whose child? Whose sibling or friend? Whose pupil? We push children outwards towards the world, and demand from them nothing less than full participation in illusion, from the earliest possible moment. They’re going to hang that blonde lady because she shot a man who wasn’t her husband, but also because she isn’t really blonde and no better than she should be. No, darling, a mushroom cloud isn’t made of mushrooms . We defend children from the reluctant inwardness of tedium. Terrified of their boredom, we make them fear it themselves. We addict them to distraction and then feel better.

Less like melting

One thing that many people have noticed, though, is that children die well. Children are better at dying, as a rule, than adults, but then adults react to this fact with sentimental wonder. No one ever asks why it should be that dying should become harder as people grow up — as the world interprets growing up. What is it that makes dying less and less like a melting, more and more like a tearing? It has to be the way we come to accept the conditions of life.

I got only a mild dose of this conditioning. The great obstacles to enlightenment are the ‘I-am-the-body’ illusion, and the ‘I-am-the-doer’ illusion. The years I spent in bed were an apprenticeship in pain. The pain wasn’t always intense, it had its moods and its tides, but it never wholly went away. To see myself only in terms of my body was to define myself in terms of pain. I wasn’t tempted. Looking for an alternative was as natural as any physical reflex. When pain is continuous you come to realise that you have an aspect that pain doesn’t touch. Without conscious effort I started to construct a different mental organisation, in which I might be able to live continuously where pain was not.

I had every incentive to develop a sense of myself that wasn’t dependent on sensation — since my sensations were so overwhelmingly negative. The road to satisfactory sensations was blocked by the piled-up wreckage of my health. If pain prevents us from remembering ourselves, then it is a great obstacle. If pain keeps us in the present then it is a great advantage.

In the whole of the Western tradition there’s only one text, as far as I am concerned, that has any illumination to offer on this subject. It’s a poem actually, and it goes,

There was a faith-healer of Deal,

Who said, ‘Although pain is not real,

When I sit on a pin

And it punctures my skin,

I dislike what I fancy I feel.

A limerick, in fact, and not on the surface sympathetic to my philosophical position. It sets out to lampoon quackery and to champion common sense. It has no time for the transcendent. I get it, really I do. It’s droll. But how easy it is to draw the teeth of the satire! All it takes is some additional punctuation in the last line, leaving every word intact. The last line should read, ‘“‘I’ dislike what ‘I’ fancy ‘I’ feel.”’ That’s all it needs. Just a little re-pointing dissolves the mockery, and the final meaning is straightforward Hinduism.

As for the second illusion: I was able to do so little for myself in those years that I likewise loosened my ties to ‘I-am-the-doer’. If I was the doer, I was making a bad job of it.

Unperceived daily waterfall

When I tried years later in life to do yogic breathing exercises, pranayama , I found that some specialised respiratory patterns were already familiar to me. I had learned how to calm myself using only the body’s untapped resources. I knew how to raise or lower body temperature with different styles of breathing, and when the pranayama exercises called on me to inhale or exhale through a single nostril, I found that the knack was easily acquired or recovered. I’d already been practising in all innocence.

It may be that I was also meditating in an amateurish way, without benefit of a mantra, seizing on any remembered object for contemplation until I had worn it smooth, turning it into a mental pebble cool to my mind’s touch. If the main obstacle to successful self-realisation is uncontrolled thought, then I had a head start. There was so much less for me to shut off, only a dripping tap rather than the unperceived daily waterfall of distracting sensation.

From my bed I sniffed the wind and could smell the weather changing. I just couldn’t decide what exactly was happening. The emotional climate around me was complex and hard to read. There was change on the wind, undoubtedly, but the change didn’t correspond to the workings of a single season. It was as if the trees were shedding their leaves and coming into bud at the same time.

Then Mum told me I would be going to school. Decisions had been made. It would be a school with other boys and girls in it . I tried to bank down my excitement, but still it came fizzing up. Going to school! I could wait a lot longer without moving, if that was to be my reward. I could wait another year if I had to, so long as school happened in the end.

Mum and Dad didn’t spell out the exact character of the education that awaited me. They knew the things to say which would keep me happy. Yes, there would be teachers, many teachers and many other children. There would be books — any number of books — and there would be blackboards. There would be as many blackboards as I wanted. There would be chalk and learning, maps and sums and foreign languages. There wouldn’t be the Collie Boy. Her work was done.

Contaminated tongue

In fact her life’s work was done. Soon after she stopped teaching me Miss Collins ate some contaminated tongue and died. There must have been something quite hard and cruel inside me at this time, because I didn’t mourn her. My main regret was that she had taken with her, as she departed from the earth, one of the few delicacies that I would reliably eat. She had been wise to the whoopee cushion on her chair, but not the sliced tongue on her dinner plate. That got her good.

Tongue had been just about my favourite food, being so silky and tender, and now I learned that it could be poisonous. From then on I could only look at it wistfully, knowing that if I was tempted to eat it again I would probably die. I hadn’t fully realised that tongue was meat until then — let alone what it really was. Compressed bovine lingual flesh. The possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that this silky food had the same name as the talking muscle in my mouth, but it looked nothing like. I assumed that there were two different words that only sounded the same. There are plenty of words like that. Like pain hurt and pane window. They might even be spelled the same, like bark a dog’s voice and the bark that was a tree’s skin.

I tried biting my own tongue, even chewing it a little, to see if it had the same sort of flavour, but again there was no resemblance. Mum had worried so much about the weevils in flour, the worms that never grew despite my hopes, and all along she had been feeding me something really dangerous, something close to poison. I’d never take that chance again.

So Miss Collins was out of my life, and her own, and there was also another good-bye that was harder to say. No pets were allowed at the school where I was going, so Charlie would be staying with Mum. This bit of news gave me a pang, but I got over it. Charlie was my best friend, but that had a lot to do with his being my only friend, and if I stayed at home with him I’d never get another. And besides, wouldn’t I be coming home at weekends? Yes, John. Every weekend? Not every weekend — some weekends. Now and then. And will there be holidays? Yes, every now and then there would be holidays. Then I’ll see Charlie on my holidays. Cheerfully I sold out my only friend in the interest of getting a proper education.