WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Most revolutions have begun in the head – or even higher up, in the clouds. When the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes came to satirise his fellow-Athenian Socrates, in his play The Clouds, he called the philosopher’s imaginary world “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land”. Starting with Socrates’ pupil Plato, philosopher after philosopher has redrawn the map of humanity with ideas; they have held that the secret of turning around the benighted vision of human beings, chained in their cave facing away from the sun, lay in the most rarefied essence of thought. Even though Karl Marx announced a new philosophical praxis that would change the world, and not merely interpret it, Marx’s prescriptions generated unprecedented waves of ideological interpretation.
But I have also come to learn from a philosopher-physician whose revolution starts, quite literally, in the gut. Dr Franz Xaver Mayr was the Austrian doctor who became convinced that most of 20th-century Western man and woman’s problems were digestive. One of the first connections he made was between the the digestive tract and the spine. Patients who came to him with terrible posture, and related back, neck, shoulder and leg pain, soon revealed swollen and sagging livers and bellies. The pressure of these distended organs was distorting their spinal structure, causing no end of misery. The connections, Mayr realised, went further: bad eating habits led to bad digestion, affecting not just the digestive tract and the organs of cleansing – the liver, gall-bladder and kidneys – and then the spine and posture, but also the heart and lungs. Eating affected the beauty and smoothness of the skin – even, ultimately, the mind and spirit.
This is my second time going through the Mayr cure on the shores of a lake in Carinthia. Readers with long memories may recall that the first time I became so depressed by the withdrawal of my familiar supports – my morning tea and cappucino, my evening pint of beer, my claret and autumn port – that I contemplated jumping into the blue-green water (Europe’s purest, according to the Carinthia publicity material), not just for a dip but for a more permanent date with oblivion.
This time I am in maturer mood, wiser perhaps but also more swollen. The Mayr diagnosis was unsparing: hard and enlarged liver, poor posture, yellow eyes, red nose, general tiredness, strain on the heart. A few more years of this and I wouldn’t even need to jump in the lake. The prescription has been a fast: nothing but tea for my first three days. After that, slow munching on spelt rolls and sheep’s yoghurt. Fasting – a spiritual exercise in the Christian tradition – is seen here as the royal road to regeneration of the tired and overloaded organs.
We have been sharing our table with a retired Finnish lawyer who has been through the fast and come out smiling. Faced with his first square meal for many days (which I gazed on with hopeless longing), consisting of two slices of beef and a beautiful selection of root vegetables, he left nearly half of it, saying he didn’t feel hungry. In fact, he said he hadn’t felt hungry at any time during his fast.
Now into my second day of fasting, I am beginning to believe him. Amazingly, for someone who so enjoys his food, and finds the idea of fasting so repugnant, I would not say my main feeling was of missing or craving food – trying as it can be. Fasting seems both a spiritual exercise and a digestive one; it makes you see things differently, appreciate small mercies; and, despite its name, it slows you down.
I linger over my evening “meal” of herb tea, a small serving of honey, and a few centilitres of fresh grapefruit juice, with the intensity of a connoisseur sipping Lafite. I never realised how delicious freshly pressed juice could be; the richness and purity of the honey is a revelation.
The Mayr cure is often seen as merely a way for rich people to lose a few pounds (as it were), but it strikes me that it is potentially one of the most profound and promising of the responses to ecological crisis. Here you become aware of over-consumption in the most intimate and convincing way; you realise you have been eating too much, too fast for most of your life (and that is just the tip of the iceberg). You actually feel better and become happier by consuming less, and more slowly. Mayr’s prescription that each mouthful should be chewed 50 times was aimed not at self-punishment but at a way of eating that might almost approximate to meditation.
Fasting is also a great leveller. Here the proudest captains of industry and leaders of their professions are brought down to the base tribunal of the bowels. Fasting is tiring and brings on headaches and attacks of depression. Many faces are glum; one of the most cheerful belongs to a lady with brain cancer. When she lost all feeling in one side she decided to remember how her children learnt basic motor movements from scratch. Now she is walking and talking, eating (in moderation), and even, quite often, smiling.
