Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The song on the radio every few minutes was Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, an oddly solemn and gloomy song, more dirge than anthem. I loved it — even before I was told that the group took its name from a pedigree Burmese cat. I loved Burmese cats in their own right.

Nurse Oliveira, a pretty Singhalese girl on Ward Three, was also mad about the song, and wanted to know the words, which were notoriously cryptic. I listened every time it was played, and had soon caught most of them. I wrote them out as neatly as I could and gave them to her. She was thrilled and said, ‘Now it’s my turn to give you something,’ and she wrote something out in her native script. It was wonderful — so much nicer than our alphabet. All those pretty curls. Tendrils and serifs luxuriantly multiplying.

She had another gift for me, a little book which revived my love of such things, the style of mini-book (not even 30 pages) that Dad disparaged as a ‘tract’. It was called The Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life , a lecture on a Buddhist text delivered by V. F. Gunaratna (Retd. Public Trustee, Ceylon) to the Education Department Buddhist Society, Colombo. It was printed at the Sita Printing Works in Kandy for the Buddhist Publication Society as No. 60 in its series The Wheel .

I liked the stress in the little book on Anapana-sati , mindfulness of breathing, as a key to unadulterated blissful abiding. As he breathes in a long breath, the Buddhist monk knows, ‘I am breathing in a long breath.’ As he breathes out a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing out a long breath.’ Ditto with short breaths. Ditto with John, though no Buddhist monk. ‘When practising mindfulness of breathing, attention should be focused at the tip of the nose or at the point of the upper lip immediately below where the current of air can be felt.’ I had groped my way towards this practice with my breathing games during bed rest, and more recently after the McKee pins.

It was good to be told, too, that the lotus position or padmasana was optional (‘nowadays rather difficult to many, even to easterners’). And there was ripe irony in being urged to set aside ‘a special time for sitting-practice’. Why else was I in CRX? When I wasn’t learning to totter again, with two semi-functioning hips, I was learning to sit.

The emphasis on mindfulness was refreshing, and new to me. It made sense to tame the mind by concentrating it on humble processes, to use its strength against itself.

One set of exercises was a bit like spiritual isometrics, to be practised wherever you happened to be, on the bus, in the queue at the bakers, in the doctor’s surgery. This was spirituality that demanded no sacrifice, content with scraps of time to do its work. ‘You come tearing down in your car and as you approach a junction, the green colour of the traffic lights have just given place to amber. You curse youself, and come to a halt. It is all tension for you as you impatiently wait a seeming eternity until the red colour gives way to amber and another seeming eternity until amber gives way to green.’ In those two seeming eternities you can retire into the silence of your self and practise a little mindfulness.

You were supposed to see everything as it was, not as it claimed to be. Be a ‘bare observer’, not a partisan one. So for instance you would see a banknote as a piece of paper, no more and no less, divorced from the illusion of its buying power. This was an exercise designed to neutralise the workings of imagination, which finds so much more in the world than there is. This was a rather risky piece of chastening in my case, since my life was more or less entirely imaginary. But perhaps that was the point.

Presumably as you got really good at this game you would reach a point where The S atipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life itself became no more than sheets of paper and arbitrary squiggles of ink. Then you could lay the book aside in a state of blissful blankness, the Nibbana — curious spelling — mentioned in a text whose meaning had now dissolved in fulfilment of its own teaching. This was the disappearing-ink idea which I had loved so much as a child, given a mystical twist, flowing by capillary action into the Indian Rope that would perform the Trick of fulfilment by vanishing.

Fathom-long carcass

There were aspects of the teaching that didn’t sit quite so well with me. Buddhist monks are supposed to reflect ritually on the repulsiveness of the body, from the soles of its feet up, and from the top of its head-hairs down, this ‘fathom-long carcass’ enveloped by skin and full of manifold impurity. They are supposed to itemise the body’s individually repellent elements in their meditation, thinking, ‘There are in this body hairs of the head, hairs of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, gorge, fæces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid, urine.’ Curious that synovial fluid hadn’t been left out. Did I have any of that transparent viscid lubricant left in my joints, after so many years of Still’s?

There were moods when I felt that the task of finding my body (this bag of tubes) repulsive could safely be left to other people. There was one nurse, for instance, Derek, who would sometimes sail right past me, ignoring my requests for help. I knew that nurses were busy people — I had been studying them for years in their natural habitat. They weren’t servants, and they weren’t responsible for me alone. Still, how hard is it to say, ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, John’? All the other nurses seemed able to manage it. When he was wiping my bottom, a procedure that didn’t give white-goose joy though much improved since my first days at CRX thanks to those slide-away panels, he completely ignored my attempts at chat. Perhaps repugnance came into the picture.

Derek wasn’t a physical genius in the Jack Juggernaut class, but he was still easy on the eye. He was blond even if he wasn’t tall — well, everybody’s tall (except Edith Piaf), but Derek was no taller than many of his female colleagues.

What made being ignored by Derek so wounding was that he was very thick with another young man with Still’s. David Webb. I say ‘young man’, but although at fifteen David wasn’t much younger than me he still seemed a boy. He still had a piping voice. I had to admit he looked quite cuddly — it’s only now that I see the cuddliness as a consequence of steroids, nothing more or less.

Derek always found time for David, who was blind. So the question for me was: am I too disabled to attract Derek’s attention, or not disabled enough? Perhaps it was the bonus of David’s blindness that gave him a competitive edge in the nurse-attraction business.

Understandably the question of physical repulsiveness was much on my mind at this period. I decided that simply finding my body repulsive, à la Satipatthana Sutta , was too easy to count as a mental discipline. My task was more complicated: first I had to promote my body to equal status with everyone else’s, and then despise it along with all the others in its class. I tucked away for later chewing-over a rebellious quibble: if indifference is the goal, then isn’t cultivating feelings of disgust an odd way to attain it?

When Derek was chatting to little David, it was as if he wanted everyone on the ward to know about it. He was loud about everything he did. Loudly he cultivated David, and loudly he ignored me.

Nothing he said seemed to be private. One day I heard him boasting about his knowledge of drugs. There wasn’t much he didn’t know on that subject, to hear him talk, from opium to purple hearts. You could hear him from several beds away. I was feeling very starved of his attention. I may as well admit that. So when I had finally got him cornered I told him I’d heard about this stuff called mescaline, and it sounded just the ticket for me. I tried to whisper to get a nice conspiratorial atmosphere going. I like a good conspiracy — the good ones are the ones that don’t exclude me. He was practically shouting, and couldn’t seem to catch the name of this funny drug. He wanted to know if it was written down somewhere. I said no, but I wrote it on a piece of paper for him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’ I was certainly intrigued by Lophophora williamsii , but once I had got Derek’s attention it was mission accomplished, really.