Life is what I’m looking for, always
AUGUSTE RODIN
Ease is not an idea, it’s a position. Sometimes it takes only the slightest adjustment, one small change, to feel comfortable in your armchair. It’s important, so you need to take your time. Posture makes a big difference. You’re not obeying some school or parental rule such as “Sit up properly!” or “Sit up straight!”—you’re just finding the position in which you feel most at ease. Everything comes from that.
Before you can act you have to be “on receive.” Not as an armchair passively receives your body, but more like an antenna receiving radio waves. It’s up to you to position the antenna, to pick up clearly what’s out there. Because everything is already out there, within reach. Whatever your situation, this is the first thing to get right: the position of your antenna, your position in the armchair. There’s nothing you actually have to do; just allow the position to take shape by itself. The right position can only come from you, from your body, and not from a command or an order. Either it will come easily or it won’t come at all. One thing is certain: no one will be able to force you into it. So take your time.
If you opened this book hoping to find a way of making your life easier, start by realizing that dream right now. Trust your body. Let it do its thing. Let yourself go. This is how all real change comes about. To escape difficulty, you need to stop resisting. Ease will come once you give it a chance.
Even in martial arts—especially in martial arts—your position comes first. That’s the first thing you learn. If your posture is good, your breath comes more easily. Your joints won’t hurt, your energy circulates: the state of rest is already an action. When I talked about the subject of this book to my friend Alexis, a mathematician specializing in time, who practices yoga and tai chi, he immediately started talking about François Roustang, an unusual psychoanalyst. A pupil of Lacan, over the course of a few years he went from traditional analysis based on language to using hypnosis as a therapeutic method. Not hypnosis like in films, where the subject is the victim of manipulation of which they are unconscious and which they can’t remember afterward. No. Hypnosis is just suggestion, which one is free to follow or not. As when someone suggests: “Allow yourself to be put in the position that suits you,” rather than “Put yourself . . . ,” which feels too violent and limiting. It’s equally nothing to do with the aggressive strategy of aversion therapy, where you oblige someone to adopt precisely the behavior that frightens them, supposedly with a view to liberating them from it. As though it were enough to relive one’s fear in order to make it disappear, as if fear could be worn out by being felt, when most of the time the feeling increases it, confirms it, anchors it deep inside you, and even makes it permanent in its intensified form: the fear of fear. We are afraid of being afraid, and justifiably, because once we fear it, we’re already deep in it, with no way out. But how could you not anticipate fearfully the trial that is supposed to free you from fear? Fear always precedes its object. Hubert Grenier, my philosophy teacher in Louis le Grand lycée, would use the example of the Place de L’Étoile in Paris, for car drivers. Here, twelve straight avenues converge on one huge roundabout, where lanes are meaningless, and cars circle the Arc de Triomphe in an endless rush, often five-deep. It is so notoriously dangerous that rental companies offer two sets of car insurance for Paris: one including the Place de L’Étoile and the other excluding it. It can be terrifying. In this, as in many things, we feel the fear in advance, when we think about it. Whereas once we’re out there, we just do the best we can. We are delivered from fear by action. This is why there is no need, for example, to force yourself to go up in a plane or into a flight simulator if you’re afraid of flying, or to jump into a swimming pool if you’re frightened of water. Repeating the trial over and over is not going to resolve the phobia. All you need to do for this, François Roustang says, right here and now, in your armchair, is adopt a desirable position. And the only desirable position is the one that brings you comfort. Careful now—relaxation is necessary for comfort, but true comfort isn’t limited to relaxation:
a comfortable position is one in which you are not just relaxed, but in which all your limbs and your organs are mobilized. You need to feel that all your articulations are supple, and that energy is circulating in a constant flow, like a breath of wind passing from your head to your feet and from your feet up to your head.
Philosopher Michel Serres has coined a beautiful expression: to describe the body of the tennis player leaping for a volley or the goalkeeper waiting for a penalty, he speaks of the “possible body.” Of course, the body is always the most real thing there is. But if the body manages to remain open to every eventuality, in other words, to anticipate nothing so as to be able to adapt to what happens, the body becomes “possible,” ready for anything. It arranges itself as openly as possible, without allowing thought to interfere with feeling. Relaxation is not the opposite of action; it is the requirement for its being possible. If you wish to act, you have to be capable of a state of complete relaxation, from which action can burst like a thunderbolt. Relaxation, oddly, when you think about it, functions here like a spring. The greater the relaxation, the more concentrated and intense will be the action. Relaxation, in fact, allows energy to build up and circulate. What cures phobias is comfort, not suffering. The body, far from being made listless by comfort, on the contrary becomes available, ready for nothing in particular, and thus ready for anything. When your body is calm, your energy “circulates uninterrupted, like breath.” This is an obvious first point, but sounds somehow surprising or paradoxical: a relaxed body has more energy than a tense one.
Before going any further, a quick question: how do you picture energy? What image does it conjure up? When you think of energy do you see a large muscle straining with effort, like the biceps of a bodybuilder or a heavyweight boxer, or do you see the slender silhouette and fluid movement of a long-distance runner? To help you choose, I suggest we visit the private collection of Auguste Rodin, in his company. The piece he is most proud of is a Greek statue of Hercules, hero of legendary strength, who triumphed in the famous twelve labors. How do you imagine it? If you see a superhero with massive muscles, huge arms, giant thighs, and big pecs, like a lifeguard in Baywatch, you’re on the wrong track. “It is a statue,” says art critic Paul Gsell, “that looks nothing like the great Farnese Hercules. It is wonderfully elegant. The torso and limbs of the demi-god, in all the pride of his youth, have an extreme finesse.” Rodin’s Hercules’s strength is not massive, but light and lithe, his force slender. He has the frame of a long-distance runner, not of a sprinter on steroids. How else could he have outrun the deer with bronze hooves? The impression of robustness given by his body comes not from overblown muscles but from the harmony of its proportions. “Strength is often allied with grace,” Rodin remarks, “and true grace is strong.”
It took Rodin a while to understand this paradox. When he was young he confused strength with effort. “I reached the age of thirty-five without daring to abandon this false way of working as a sculptor. I always wanted to make strong, powerful things, but whatever I did, they looked small and lifeless. I knew it, but I couldn’t help it. And even though I continued to work in this way I felt it wasn’t right.” In late 1875, having been stuck for months on a sculpture that would later be called The Age of Bronze, which he was desperately trying to rescue from failure, he suddenly decided to set off, at first on foot, then by train, for Italy, to see Michelangelo. Just a few days in Rome and Florence turned his life around and freed him from academicism. The very thing that Rodin had been searching for in vain for years by following the artificial rules of the Academy suddenly became clear to him when he beheld the naturalness of Michelangelo’s statues. The evidence was right there before his eyes, the idea that all one has to do is follow nature, and it’s easy; but he needed to go to Rome in order to discover what he could have found at home, or anywhere else.
A few years later, by now a teacher himself, Rodin—while in no way revoking his admiration for Michelangelo as a sculptor—expressed profound reservations regarding the meaning of his art. As we’ll see, it’s all about the position of the body. If you take a Greek marble, a Phidias, for example, you will notice that everything about it is harmonious, very supple, that the body is stripped of all effort, balanced, at rest. We can observe four directions in the sculpture,
which produce a very gentle wave throughout the body. And this impression of tranquil charm is also created by the verticality of the body itself. The vertical line passing through the middle of the back of the neck arrives at the inner ankle bone of the left foot, which bears the entire weight of the body. In contrast, the other leg is free: it only touches the ground at the utmost tip of the toes, thus merely providing a second point of support: if necessary it could be lifted without the balance of the whole being disturbed.
It is a “posture full of abandon and grace. The way the sway of the shoulders is mirrored in the sway of the hips further adds to the serene elegance of the whole.” To truly grasp what Rodin is saying here, I suggest you take up the posture of a Greek statue for a moment. Stand up. Put the whole weight of your body on your left leg, and place the right leg in front of you, touching the ground with the tip of your foot. Place one hand on your hip, let the other arm hang down, and your head should tilt naturally to one side. Your chest should be open, turned outward, convex, receiving the full force of the light. This position of rest, both nonchalant and attentive, sums up all the art of antiquity, which comes down to “joy in life, quietude, grace, balance, reason.”
Now let’s go over to the dark side. I suggest you adopt a “Michelangelo” position. Remain seated. Turn your legs to one side, keeping them squeezed together, and turn your upper chest the other way. Bend your torso forward as though you’re going to pick something up. Bend and press one arm against your body and bring the other behind your head. If you can see yourself in a mirror without having to twist any further, your attitude should express both extreme strength and “a strange sense of effort and torture.” If we look at the perpendicular, “here it falls not onto one foot, but between the two: thus the two legs support the torso with what appears to be an effort.” Instead of four planes there are now only two, one for the top of the body, the other going in the opposite direction, for the lower part.
This lends the pose a feeling of both violence and constraint and provides an arresting contrast to the calm of antiquity. Both legs are folded, yet rather than being at rest, the two lower limbs seem to be working. The concentration of effort presses the two legs together and the two arms in against the body and the head. Thus all the space between the limbs and the trunk disappears: there are none of those openings which lightened Greek sculpture, created by the free disposition of the arms and legs: the art of Michelangelo creates statues in a single block.
Furthermore, your position is shaped like an S, typical of all statues of the Middle Ages, an attitude suggesting effort and melancholy, expressing suffering and disgust with life. This shape, “the console,” “is the Virgin, seated, leaning in toward her child. It’s the Christ nailed to the cross, his legs buckling, torso hanging toward mankind, whom his suffering must redeem. It’s the mater dolorosa crouched over the body of her son.” The concave torso, arched forward, where in classical art it was arched backward, produces very sharp shadows in the hollows of the chest and under the legs. “In short,” says Rodin, “the most powerful genius of the modern age celebrated the epoch of shadows, while the Ancients sang of the epoch of light. His statues express the painful folding-in of a being on themselves, an anxious energy, the will to act with no hope of success, the suffering of the creature tormented by unrealizable aspirations.” Michelangelo is the last and greatest gothic artist, appallingly tortured by melancholy. His favorite themes are the ones Rodin mentions: “the depth of the human soul, the holiness of effort and of suffering. [They] have an austere grandeur. But I cannot approve of his scorn for life. For my own part, I try constantly to make my vision of nature calmer. We should always tend toward serenity. There’s no danger of our ever losing our Christian anxiety before mystery.” Rodin distinctly prefers the sunny genius of Greek art to the tortured genius of Michelangelo.
You can trust in a sculptor: there is nothing more important than the position of the body. Depending on whether you start from grace or from effort, you will go either toward life or against it. If you want to try for a personal synthesis of grace and effort, just look at the example of the Venus de Milo, “marvel of marvels!,” according to Rodin:
an exquisite rhythm, but beyond that, a pensive quality; for here we no longer have a convex form; on the contrary, the torso of the goddess is slightly bent forward, as in Christian statuary. But there is no anxiety or torment here. This work is inspired by the very best of antiquity: voluptuousness governed by restraint, a cadenced love of life, modified by reason.
Now that Rodin has enlightened us on the meaning of the positioning of the body, let us return to our armchairs, in the company of François Roustang. See if you can retain a bit of that love of life and Greek voluptuousness in your posture. Once you’ve found a position that suits you, allow yourself to ask the question again: how do you imagine energy? Is energy, for you, something you stock up in a reservoir and then consume, like gasoline? Something you compress, then release, like steam? Something that’s constantly circulating, like an electric current or a fluid; or, to return to François Roustang’s image, “like a breath”? Is energy something you produce and that comes from you, or something that passes through you, or again, something that exists outside you, that you ride on? It may seem like a small thing, but it’s crucial. The way you think of energy is decisive, because your way of imagining energy will either galvanize you or not; will either make it possible for you to refresh it easily or not. In a word, your imagination is at the heart of your life. It’s what forms your body image and structures the nature of the exchanges between yourself and the world; it’s what weaves you. The imagination nourishes the will, by supplying it with images. Imagining that energy is solid, liquid, or gas gives you access to different types of energy. If you think of energy as an individual tank, on the model of fossil fuels or a combustion engine, you will have a limited tank, and will have to find outside sources of energy to “fill up.” If you think of it as an element, along the model of the sea, then rhythm will override quantity in your imagination. And gradually you will begin to take on the idea that energy can be renewed without effort, like the breaking and backwash of the waves, which never cease to move. If energy is a breath, you need only breathe in to get more energy, and breathe out as long as possible, to empty your lungs and allow your energy to renew itself, as one clears the air in a room by opening the windows. So examine your images of energy and test out François Roustang’s proposition: rather than thinking of energy in terms of tension and explosion, experiment with the breath, which circulates freely. The gods of the wind, with no apparent effort, were always the most powerful. Aeolus has a more decisive effect on the life of Ulysses in the Odyssey than either Poseidon or Zeus. Energy like the breath, like the sea, like lightning: whichever image you choose, give it a chance and try to live it, naively, genuinely. Let each one inhabit you, try them out, as you might try out a new car, with no speed limit. Try to find out which one works best for you, energizes you most, makes your life easiest. Look for the image that’s most comfortable for you. Comfort, in this method, is everything. The point of departure and the point of arrival: phobias are resolved indirectly, out of the corner of one’s eye, without thinking about it. They will be resolved because they dissolve into something far greater than themselves, or they disappear. And hypnosis, explains François Roustang, is nothing other than “the practice of an art of action that would cure us of many purely fabricated ills. If, under its influence, problems are resolved as though by magic, this is simply because the person needed to act them out, instead of torturing themselves by thinking about it.” Obviously I can’t hypnotize you here; this is a book, not a therapist’s room. But the goal of hypnosis is to induce a state with nothing illusory or artificial about it, which allows one to resolve with disconcerting ease difficulties that one believed to be insurmountable. There is no reason why we can’t reach this state by ourselves, more gradually than through hypnosis—or at least catch a glimpse of it and understand its principles. The first of these principles being: stop thinking.