The divine is effortless
AESCHYLUS
Yannick Noah loves music. Singing gets him high. Dancing is pure pleasure. One day, he promises, he’ll make it his career. For now, he’s a professional tennis player. He hasn’t won the French Open yet. It’s December 12, 1982, 7 in the morning in a Toulouse nightclub, and he’s giving it all he’s got on the dance floor, drunk as a skunk, with a group of friends. It’s party time. Except that in a few hours, six, to be precise, he has to play in a final against the Czech, Tomáš Šmíd, at 1 p.m. on the dot. This is what happens when your friends suggest just popping out for one drink, and you can’t say no. When the club closes, it’s bright daylight. For reasons not clear to him, he undresses, throws his clothes into the astonished market crowd, rolls around in the gutter, and goes back to the hotel in his underpants. By the time he finally shuts his eyes it’s already time to open them again (you will be familiar with that feeling that you’ve slept for only a minute even though your watch might say something different). It’s ten minutes past midday. Black coffee, croissants, aspirin, Alka Seltzer. Soon after, he appears on court. And contrary to all expectations, particularly his own, he wins 6–3, 6–2, while in a complete trance.
What happened? What can we learn from this story? Firstly: sport doesn’t always have a moral, but it does have its own logic. Hangovers are not recommended as training or preparation for top-level competition, but on this occasion, it worked: instead of brooding alone in his room, thinking about the next day’s match and ending up with insomnia, by partying through the night Yannick succeeded in forgetting what was at stake. With his brain cleared of all worry, the athlete, more rested than he thinks, can play in a state of complete relaxation because he has no expectations. His relative indifference to the outcome means he can trust his body completely and experiment with letting go, that so-called miracle remedy for the stress of modern life, which usually eludes us in direct proportion to the degree to which we seek it out. This is to be expected: if I say “let go!” you will focus on doing so, and become tense. Like a snake consuming its own tail, it’s impossible to let go if that’s all you’re thinking about. Whereas thanks to the alcohol, his body was on autopilot, without being hindered, or only very slightly, by consciousness. A form of self-forgetting, of non-thinking, a kind of spontaneous Zen state in which one succeeds at everything, because one has ceased to aim for anything. Relaxation is a precondition for such a state. One must trust one’s own body completely, and put it in charge of the controls. And if it sounds a bit like being drunk, yes, it is! Don’t tell anyone, but all the signs suggest that a sleepless night with lots of booze is the closest you can get to a state of grace. Tightrope walker Philippe Petit admits to having had the same experience as Yannick Noah: “Drunk with alcohol, I have proved that a body that knows what it is doing does not need a mind to lead it.” The way the body—the expert—steers itself when in a state of inebriation, or, rather, the way it acts on autopilot, when we’ve given it permission to steer itself, is not an exemplary method, but I mention it here by way of proof. It is proof that it is possible to let the body do its own thing, when it knows. If it knows, you’ll say, it must be because it’s learned, irrespective of how many hours it’s done. Tightrope walker and tennis player alike, for you to trust your body to the point of allowing it to do its thing, it has to have been trained. It’s not just about the number of hours spent, as we saw in the last chapter. Then what is it about?
The next year, in 1983, this time sober and well prepared, Yannick Noah won the French Open. As he scored the match point he felt light: “My feet are off the ground, I’m flying, I’m lighter than air. Like in a dream? No, not even that, it’s like . . . well, like nothing else.” It’s a feeling he would only ever have once again, a few years later, one morning in bed, only half awake: pure, unadulterated happiness: “From the tips of my fingers to the ends of my hair, I am happiness. Nothing can touch me. Twenty seconds. I can’t see him, but I sense the presence of my grandfather.” A grandfather who is no longer of this world, but who appears in it. A mystical but above all a physical experience. An experience, sadly, that never seems to last very long. But when you’ve known happiness like that, you can never forget it. You just hope for one thing: that you’ll find it again.
Zinedine Zidane might say the same thing about the World Cup in 2006. He had left the French team in 2004, but suddenly decided to come back for a grand finale, after a late-night conversation, as in a dream, with a mysterious stranger who persuaded him to don the blue shirt one more time. He won’t say more than that about it but this admission is extraordinary from such a famously reserved player. It was to be both a comeback and a final farewell: “For me it was everything, I put everything into it, everything I had inside, right to the core.” And the man they said was too old, that some had said was finished, the man for whom every match might have been his last, was better than he’d ever been. Spain and Portugal would pay the price. But, as in 1998, he played his greatest match against Brazil, this time in the quarter final, on July 1, 2006, in Frankfurt. A perfect match, from start to finish. Every time he touched the ball there was magic. Jean-Michel Larqué, a former international player himself, and legendary commentator for the French national team, known for his sharp tongue, still raves about it: “I’ve never seen a player do that on the pitch. A work of art.” Zidane keeps it more prosaic: “We got into the match straight away . . . We were facing Brazil, so what the hell—if we lose we lose.” Paradoxically, because the Brazilians are so good, it’s easy to play against them: there’s absolutely nothing to lose. Even less in 2006 than back in 1998, because it wasn’t even the final. The atmosphere between the two teams in the corridor from the dressing rooms to the pitch was genuinely relaxed; there was laughter, hugging—they were just happy to be playing together. Sometimes you play against someone, but this time they were playing with. Brazil was an opponent unlike any other; it would have been every soccer player’s dream to play them. No pressure, just pleasure. And you could feel it: “We were really into the match, properly into it. We had that feeling you get, that at this point nothing could go wrong. You’re just out there having a great time, enjoying yourself. Especially when we scored. When we scored we felt like we were on cloud nine.”
Bixente Lizarazu confirms this: “He was just like an angel in that match, I’ve never seen anything like it. You felt he wasn’t human.” Zidane is modest, but also knows he was exceptional that day: “What can I say? It’s subjective, it’s always subjective when people say I did things that were somehow different. They said the real Brazilian out there that evening was Zidane. All I know is that if I’d been out there alone I’d have done nothing.” It was all down to team spirit, and perhaps just spirit. A sense of invulnerability, perfection, eternity, of being outside of normal time: “We were in the dressing room, we were like, OK, what the heck, we wanted to go on playing, it was just so great. It was so great. It was . . .” Zidane smiles, lost in memories. That day, for the first and last time in his career, he danced naked, up on the physio’s table. There are no words. Yannick Noah, who watched the match, like everyone else, tries to find some:
He was in a state of grace. I’ve tried to find that state, I’ve worked on it, I try to transmit it, to dissect it. There are days when all of a sudden you’ve got all the elements in place and it comes naturally, because you’ve been working at it for fifteen years, and suddenly for no obvious reason, you’re touched by grace. I remember various moves he made, I remember them winning, of course, but mostly his moves, and especially his face. His face, look, even while I’m telling you this, I’ve got goosebumps, it was just so extraordinary. And the way he just kept looking up at the sky. You know, it was . . .
Noah is lost in the deliciousness of the memory too, and his conclusion is the same as Zidane’s: there just aren’t any words; “those moments really are rare.”
Once his playing career was over, Yannick Noah became the captain of the French Davis Cup team, which won in 1991, 1996, and, after a big gap, 2017. Since he’s been training other players, he has continued to refine his thoughts on the conditions required for surpassing oneself, individually or in a group. He doesn’t like to talk about a state of grace, even if he did when talking about Zidane. “It’s a beautiful expression, but the problem with it is that it implies that the person in that state has no real control over what’s happening. When in fact it’s the exact opposite.” So he prefers the expression “in the zone,” which implies, contrary to the state of grace, a total mastery of the situation. Someone “in the zone” plays to perfection without needing to think about it; everything becomes instinctive, natural, easy. It has all the advantages of being drunk, without the hangover. You can enter and leave the zone by chance, but the aim is to be able to enter it at will. Grace is something you receive, the religious origins of the term suggesting a kind of passivity or prayer; the zone is something you conquer, it’s a word synonymous with activity and industry, and also territory, which can be occupied. Grace is a state, while a zone is a space. Etymologically, “zone” comes from the Greek for “belt” or “girdle.” Personally, I prefer to talk about a “point of action,” the point where you meet with yourself, where you’ve eliminated the gap between intention and action. The point of action is a natural point, where you no longer need to think about what you are going to do, because you’re already doing it. It’s the point where you are both the most at ease and the most active, a point of concentration and forgetfulness, where you are most yourself because you’re no longer thinking about yourself. Where everything you do is true to yourself and is in tune with your idea of life. It’s the point where everything comes together and makes sense. A point of concentration, where your relationship with yourself and with others and the world is harmonious. It’s a happy point, is my point.
It doesn’t matter whether you like or loathe sport, practice it or not: the question of ease or grace touches everyone, and all areas of life. Sport is our example here because it is particularly easy to understand. It’s easy to see when someone isn’t “in their body,” or the opposite, when someone is “in the game” or “in the race.” Françoise Sagan, describing her own point of action, her moments of grace in writing, also used a sporting metaphor:
when it “takes off” it’s like a well-oiled machine that functions to perfection. It’s like when you see someone run one hundred meters in ten seconds. You see the miracle of sentences mounting up, and your mind functions almost outside itself. You become a spectator of yourself. When that happens, I write really easily, and I just can’t stop. And when it works it’s fantastic. They’re really blessed moments. Yes, sometimes, you feel just like the queen of words. It’s extraordinary, it’s paradise. When you believe in what you’re writing it’s an incredible pleasure. You feel like queen of all the earth.
For pianist Hélène Grimaud, who is as famous for her conservation work with wolves as for the beauty of her playing, the artist at the keyboard is in a state of “visitation.” They “vibrate” with the intuition of a presence, their “thought suddenly receives a kind of illumination, and in turns moves the body accordingly.” Here the vocabulary is no longer that of the sports field; it’s both religious and supernatural.
Through hard work, the pianist prepares for the moment of visitation. As I walk across the stage, I’m alone, and the moment I start playing, I cease to be. A presence is protecting me. Is it the presence of the music? Of the composers whose work I’m playing? It’s as though there are two of me and I can watch myself playing at the same time as continuing to play—sometimes I see a light come down that casts a halo around the piano and I know that that light is them.
This “being two of me” is similar to what Françoise Sagan refers to when she talks about the “miracle” you see happen as though you were a “spectator” or in “paradise,” a state in which you function “almost outside yourself.” Hélène Grimaud dispenses even with the “almost”—not her style—and describes an experience that is both mystical and physical—as you might expect of a true mystic. She becomes, she says, “a witch, a medium,” and summons the spirits of composers as she plays their music. You may smile—or shudder—at this. Or simply admire the fact that a professional pianist should not be content simply with performing the music but seeks to experience it in a prophetic state. One may also receive illumination without already being enlightened, and Hélène Grimaud is able also to explain the nature of this illumination, to describe it analytically. The experience of grace is, in the first instance, an alteration of one’s relationship with time: each time the pianist “turns a page, they are also turning time, as the future rises to meet them, rather than their being borne toward it.” When you perform a score you’re traveling in time, or rather watching time travel toward you. The pianist “gathers everything in an endless present; at the very end she rises, in rapture: the ground vanishes into the distance below her fingers.” The present may be without limits, but it is natural that it should also meet the past, and allow one to come into contact with the composer, who has had similar experiences. Through playing a piece by a composer, you feel what they felt, live what they lived, you feel their presence in their work. Hélène Grimaud says she is particularly sensitive to Robert Schumann; the moment she discovered his music she felt as if she knew him. Nothing surprising there, really: artists are all in some sense mediums, who can communicate beyond space and time with each of us, through their works. Everyone’s had the feeling that a book, a film, or a piece of music was made for them. Artists are our soul mates, who look for moments of grace in order to share them with us. The paradox is that in that state of grace, we are so “inside it” that nothing else exists, there’s nothing to share: “There are moments,” Schumann writes, “when music completely possesses me, when sounds are all there are, to precisely the point where it’s impossible for me to transcribe anything at all.” When “it works,” it’s impossible to stop what you’re doing and take notes. Similarly, when it’s not going well, there’s not much you can do about it: “Piano went very badly yesterday, as though someone was holding back my arm. I didn’t want to force it. Doubt and darkness seemed to cover all people here below, and the skies above.” Robert Schumann and Hélène Grimaud both know there’s no point in forcing it. You must prepare for the visitation, but hard work is no guarantee that illumination will come. Work is just the anteroom of grace.
So grace is never guaranteed, and the very best, like the rest of us, are reduced just to hoping. But to know this kind of grace, to feel yourself king or queen of the earth, you don’t need to be a champion of anything: soccer, tennis, literature, or music simply serve here to underline the oneness of the experience, of the point of action, when “it takes,” when “it works,” when it’s “just great,” when “it” is impossible to express in words or transcribe with notes, because talking, like composing, means detaching yourself from what you’re experiencing, coming out of it and commenting on it, instead of staying “in it.” The best way of talking about the point of action, then, is through the dot dot dot of an ellipsis . . .
But how do you reach that point? If you’ve already experienced the “zone” or “grace” or “the point of action,” the best way to get back to it is to reconstitute the route by which you got there. Yannick Noah calls that “Tom Thumb’s pebbles.” What were you doing in the hours leading up to it? What environment were you in? Which objects, which people did you have around you? What were you thinking about? Relax, just let those memories and those feelings come. Take note of everything, mentally, or in writing. For example, for Françoise Sagan, who answered many questions from journalists on this subject, it might work something like this:
I work at night, because it’s the only time when you can get on with your work in peace, without the phone ringing, or people dropping by . . . without being disturbed. Working at night in Paris is like working in the country. A dream! I work from midnight till six in the morning. Daytime is monstrous, constant meetings. Nighttime is like a smooth sea, it’s endless. I like to see the sun come up before I go to bed. I can write a novel over several periods of ten to fifteen days. In between, I think about the story, I daydream, and I talk about it. Some ideas I lose. In the country, I work in the afternoon. The good thing about the country is being able to get up and go for a wander outside, look at the grass, the weather that day. In the afternoon, around 4 o’clock, you say to other people: “I have to go and work now.” You complain, you groan, you put on a little act. And what is so charming is that when it’s gone well with your typewriter or your pen, you forget it’s time to eat. That’s not to say I work better in the country. I can work pretty well anywhere: on a bench, under a tree, I’m a bit like a pregnant woman. She doesn’t think about her child all the time, but every now and then she feels a kick that reminds her it’s there. [Sometimes] it’s in the middle of the night. I switch the light on, I look everywhere for a pencil, I note down my idea on a piece of paper and the next day I’ve lost it. I make lots of notes, but only to do with ideas. It’s important to be lazy. Books are made to a large extent out of wasted time, daydreaming, thinking about nothing.
Yannick Noah wrote a whole book about the question of whether a method exists for “getting into the zone,” and if it can be applied to the whole of one’s life: Secrets, etc . . . (notice the ellipsis in the title). Without giving away those “secrets,” we can touch on a few of them here, the first one being perhaps the most important: “In 1991,” he writes, “when I decided to draw my career to a close, the discovery of yoga fundamentally transformed my perception of life. I realize that I could have played tennis for pleasure and relaxation, but as I wasn’t familiar with those concepts, I played forcefully, ferociously.” Ironically it was just when he stopped playing that Yannick Noah discovered the virtues of gentleness and letting go. The first condition of the appearance of grace is not trying to force it. Yannick Noah’s situation is quite unique: as a player, he only ever really experienced grace once, at the French Open in 1983, and ever since he has been trying to work out what he was missing in the following years, so he might repeat his success. Grace eludes whoever seeks it “ferociously,” but once he gave up playing, Noah finally understood it and tried to share it with others.
Zinedine Zidane also wonders about the origin of the grace people associate him with. Of course, he doesn’t use this word. He is suspicious of it. And rightly so. He knows better than anyone how hard he worked, he knows what sacrifices he made, from a very early age, to reach the highest level. But he also knows, because he experienced it several times over, that there is something higher than the highest level, something or someone even higher, that has the last word in this story, in his story. Why, for example, in the 1998 World Cup, having not scored a goal in the whole competition, did he suddenly wake up and reveal himself in the final, scoring two goals, one after the other, against Brazil? When it really counts—in fact, when it counts double? Two headers, even, when he would be the first to admit that they’re not his forte. Or to give another example: how, in the 2002 Champions League Final, did he find the nerve to hit the ball on the volley and send it into the net? A perfect gesture, supernatural in its clarity, as though his body was simply taking orders. Zidane says, in a documentary justly titled Zidane, un destin d’exception (Zidane: An Exceptional Destiny): “It’s one of those things that happens once in a lifetime. OK, so it happened to me. Afterward you wonder about it, you say: ‘Did someone help me or didn’t they?’ At any rate, I always say . . . someone’s looking out for me . . .” Who is that “someone” that might be helping? Is Zidane religious? He doesn’t say. But in saying this he admits that he feels someone’s with him, protecting him with a supernatural power, or at the least, a lucky star.
When you watch Zidane execute what is considered one of the most beautiful goals in the history of the European Cup, you get the feeling it’s easy for him, that he just had to want it, and it happened. You know, even as you watch, that you would be incapable of doing the same thing. But where it gets interesting is that Zidane feels exactly the same. That gesture, which no one could have predicted, is impossible to reproduce, even for him. He says quite calmly that he has never managed to reproduce in training what he managed to do without thinking in that final. The important words here are “without thinking.” It was an “uncontrolled” kick. By not thinking about it, Zidane succeeded. Or to put it more precisely: he succeeded because he didn’t think about it and because he’s Zidane. Not thinking about it won’t make you play like him. That would be too easy. But when you’re Zidane, there comes a moment when you don’t need to think anymore, when it’s much better not to. When soccer has become second nature to you, an instinct, and when your body just knows—then you have to let it get on with it.
What’s most remarkable in what he does here is not so much the actual move as that he dared attempt it at such a moment. It wasn’t just the final, it was a final that Zidane had already lost twice, in 1997 and 1998, while playing for Juventus. His greatest fear was that he’d lose again, this time playing for Real Madrid, and become, in the eyes of his teammates, of the soccer world, of everyone, the “black cat” who puts a jinx on things. Zidane’s greatest achievement, in this match where the stakes were so incredibly high, was not allowing this thinking to paralyze him. How did he manage this? He doesn’t describe his method, and I’m not sure he actually had one, but he can describe his mental process at the moment when, four years later, in 2006, in the World Cup Final against Italy, he had to take a penalty after only seven minutes played, against Buffon, a legendary goalkeeper who knew him like the back of his hand, having faced him many times during Zidane’s years playing for Juventus. Taking a penalty is a mental test like no other, especially for such a great player, who has everything to lose. Missing a penalty in the World Cup Final would mark him forever, particularly as this was the last match of his career. When you take a penalty, irresolution is the worst of all evils, as Descartes said, several centuries before soccer was invented. As Zidane himself explains, the penalty is a particular move. Since it isn’t a piece of action within the game, and you do prepare for it, there’s no way you can rely on instinct: “It’s better to know in advance where you’re going to put it, because you may get a surprise.” You have to decide before you start moving, choose a side, how hard you’re going to kick it, how high, and not change your mind in midstream. The slightest doubt, the slightest hesitation, due, for example, to a movement by the goalie, and you’ll immediately suffer for it. As Zidane moved forward to shoot, the whole world held its breath. Usually he shoots with the inside of his right foot and crosses the ball into the left-hand corner of the net. Against all expectation, all logic, and all caution, Zidane permitted himself to do something crazy: a Panenka (named after its inventor). He shot at the center of the goal, straight at the goalie, but with no great effort, just jabbing at the ball so that it dropped in like a dead leaf. He was counting on Buffon anticipating, and in fact Buffon had already set off to the right, where he knew Zidane usually placed it. Wrong-footed, the Italian goalkeeper had time to stop his movement and turn around, to see the ball bounce behind his goal line after hitting the crossbar. It was a bit like if a tennis player on match point attempted an unlikely drop shot on the line, instead of the easy, expected, smash. Yannick Noah is admiring: “Just when millions of others would have been terrified and gone for the safe option, he decides to play around. Incredible, isn’t it?” Incredible but true. Why do something so risky, in the World Cup Final, with millions of people watching? According to him, even the man himself has no idea. Zidane: “It’s actually something instantaneous. I think . . . Between the moment when I put the ball down, I take my run-up, I’m about to shoot, it’s then, that’s when it happens. Not even before that. It happens then, in those ten seconds. I say, OK, that’s what I’ve got to do.” Apparently Zidane, against his own recommendation, did not know what he was going to do before he did it. It just happened. But if you listen very carefully, in the moment just before he kicked, he did know. Zidane confirms Descartes’ second maxim: in order to make a good decision you don’t need to think about it for long, or even think about it at all. You just have to make it and stick with it. In this case it was instant. It coincided as far as was possible with the execution. No place for doubt. No time, quite simply. It goes so fast that it’s hard to tell if Zidane made the decision or the decision made Zidane. This immediateness, this instantaneousness, is a condition for success. So Zidane does have a method: even if the penalty can’t be an instinctive gesture, in this case he managed to make it as instinctive as possible, by thinking about it for as little time as possible. He managed both not to think about it and to make a decision. There is a kind of blindness or inspiration—it comes to the same thing—that allows you to risk the impossible, and pull it off. There’s something impersonal too. When you find yourself at the point of action, it’s as if you were no one, as if nothing, not even your own mind, can stand in the way of what the moment dictates. The point of action is also a point of inaction. When Zidane says “people are watching me,” he’s admitting he doesn’t feel as though he has much say in what he does. He just knows he has to do it. As though it had been decreed, and he was simply carrying out his destiny. At the same time he recognizes a kind of premeditation in his move: “It had to be memorable.” For his last match, precisely because it was a World Cup Final and everyone was watching, Zidane wanted to leave his mark. It couldn’t be a penalty like any other. When Noah admires the fact that Zidane wasn’t paralyzed by what was at stake, and just gave himself permission to “play,” he’s missing a vital element: what was really at stake, for Zidane, wasn’t just winning the World Cup a second time, but winning it his way, his exceptional way, so he would go down in history once and for all.
The idea of destiny is often taken as a reason not to try. If everything has been foretold, you might be tempted to put your faith in higher powers and no longer take an active part in your own life: give up wanting, or trying, and quit the game. But destiny, if we understand it properly, is not a defeating but a liberating force. If everything’s already been decided, then why worry about it? You might as well just play all out. You just have to be as fully yourself as possible, disregarding what’s at stake. Far from being condemned to our destiny, we get the chance to be ourselves. It’s our destiny after all. The idea of destiny is an invitation not to renounce, but to ease up. And that easing up, Noah explains, lets you play the very best game you can. Once you’ve rid yourself of the responsibility and the fear of doing badly, of “playing it safe,” good-bye fear of winning, and farewell fear of losing. At last, just the pure joy of playing. For nothing; for pleasure.
Yannick Noah believes in destiny, as other people believe in a god. Faith, whatever its object, frees the body from thought. Nothing is more useful to someone undertaking something difficult than believing that somewhere it is already accomplished. Perhaps this is the reason why boxers, particularly heavyweights, the most dangerous, seem to have such great religious fervor. No one can forget Muhammad Ali, originally Cassius Clay, who converted to Islam. Certainly not George Foreman, his famous challenger in the “fight of the century,” the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974, who at the end of his career became a pastor in Texas. There is no doubt that believing in a god, any god, helps you get through difficult experiences and stand firm when the blows come crashing down. We suffer less when we believe our suffering has meaning. We feel less afraid if we know that God is watching over us. Philippe Petit, taking his first step out on the wire, is also doing something very close to religious faith. But if he does utter a prayer, it’s to the gods in his feet and his legs, the gods his life depends on, and who, thanks to faultless preparation, chose to take up residence in his body. When Philippe Petit was arrested in the biggest cathedral in the world, St. John the Divine in New York, for having performed an illegal tightrope walk (as he had already done at Notre-Dame), James Parks Morton, the dean, immediately asked the police to release him. Far from being an intruder, he explained, the tightrope walker belonged to his cathedral:
High-wire walking and cathedrals are sort of two sides of the same coin. It’s a tradition. All you have to do is look in medieval manuscripts and you see towers and you see wire walkers. It’s one of these tremendous moments in which everything is in the balance. It’s life and death and it’s heaven and hell. So it’s a great offering. A cathedral is stone but a wire walker is a cathedral in motion.
When asked what he thought about the fact that Philippe Petit wasn’t a believer, he replied wittily: “He doesn’t need to believe in God, God believes in him.”