Water like a skin
That no one can harm
PAUL ÉLUARD
You’d know him anywhere—the distinctive hat, the long gray hair, the uncut nails to avoid touching anything with his oversensitive fingers: all these details give him away, but no one recognizes him here, because here no one knows him. It’s true, he’s ventured a long way from his familiar universe. For one evening, the walls of books will make way for walls of water, the rows of university desks will yield to banks of sand, and the logic of meaning to the thrill of great waves. For once, the philosopher who is so fiercely protective of his privacy and so very much in love with silence will plunge into the crowd of overexcited young people at the Grand Rex cinema, who like him have come to “Nuit de la Glisse” (literally, “the Night of Slipping,” or sliding or gliding), a film festival devoted to surfing and extreme sports. Why has he “slipped” into this event, to which he is suited neither by age nor by temperament? Because he has written a book on Leibniz called Le Pli (The Fold) and surfing is exactly about that, about catching the fold, or groove, letting yourself slide into the wave. And isn’t the purpose of philosophy to explicate, i.e., to explore the folds in the world? In Latin it’s the same word (ex-plicare): to explicate is to unfold. Philosophy can learn from surfing, so Gilles Deleuze has accepted an invitation from the magazine Surf Session to come and discover the most spectacular films about this discipline. In Pourparlers (Negotiations), he unfolds his idea:
Movements, in sport as in customs, change. For a long time we lived with an energy-based concept of movement: either there’s a pressure point, or you are yourself the source of the movement. Running, throwing a weight, etc.: that’s effort, resistance, with a point of origin, a lever. But today movement seems to be defined less and less in terms of the insertion of a leverage point. All the new sports—surfing, wind sailing, hang gliding . . . are based on insertion into a preexisting wave. The origin is no longer the point of departure, it’s a way of putting oneself into orbit. How you gain access to the movement of a great wave, or an upward column of air, how you “join” instead of being yourself the source of effort—all this is fundamental.
“Joining,” slotting in, slipping into the fold, means no longer having to start the movement, just continuing it. Slotting in is always a delicate art, but it’s easier than having to start from scratch. It requires turning all one’s attention outward, listening, first of all, to the world rather than to oneself, adapting to what is already there, and considering oneself a tiny part of the whole, which one can weave gracefully in and out of. You also need a sense of rhythm to enter into the dance rather than imposing your own tempo. All this without effort, since there is no pressure point, and no lever effect: the movement is already there, you don’t need to create it—just find the right position and glide on the wave.
But there is also an elementary aspect: while you can have an airwave, or a wave of water, there is no such thing as an earth wave; no one surfs on an earthquake or a mud slick. And yet, among the “new sports” there is also skateboarding, basically surfing on concrete, which, though it doesn’t use an actual wave, should nevertheless be considered a kind of gliding, of slipping into the urban landscape. The skater weaves everywhere, introducing a glide where one wouldn’t normally exist: on staircases, ramps, benches, etc., transforming every obstacle into both a pushing-off point and an imaginary wave. The skater seems to have arisen from the ancient model of energy, and yet he behaves like a modern surfer. He brings the idea of the wave into the townscape, sets concrete in motion, lifts it with the powerful breath of imagination. Here we find a very particular case of what Gaston Bachelard calls dynamic imagination, as though the power of the oceanic metaphor, the dream of the wave could actually sweep across the concrete urban landscape and bring it to life, start an interior movement that might soften it sufficiently to turn it into a wave.
On snow it’s a bit different, but not much: the mountain is experienced as an ocean, where the slope and the momentum it gives transform bumps into waves. Downhill skiing has always been seen as a “gliding” sport, unlike cross-country skiing, which is based on effort. Sailing too: a sailboat seeks the wind, adjusts to a current it doesn’t create. Gliding, whether on water, on air, or on snow, always involves trying to ally oneself with a wave one has not created oneself. It’s no less tiring than other sports. An hour of surfing is usually spent mostly paddling and falling. But it is more immediately exhilarating because one is in direct contact with the element. Water and air, at the moment when they’re most dangerous, as wave or wind, carry us along. Then it’s no longer a sport, in which individuals compete through the energy they create, but principally a sensory and imaginary experience, an elementary pleasure. The aesthetic is more important than performance, and the surfer’s main priority is to “take” the wave well, to cut a beautiful line across it. As for people who surf the “big ones,” who throw themselves into waves in excess of twenty meters, their pursuit of the giant wave is less like chasing after a record than the quest of a hunter or an explorer. “When the sea is calm, when there are no waves,” confides Laird Hamilton, the legendary surfer, “I feel like a knight with no dragon to slay.” Subduing sea monsters is, of course, sport, but most importantly it is a mythical dream.
Joining an existing movement, a preexisting wave, is not unique to gliding sports (or board sports, as they’re more commonly known). In horse riding too, animal energy preexists the rider. In rodeo, you literally surf the animal wave. There are two ways of learning to ride a horse, the philosopher Henri Bergson used to say to his friends. The first is that of the sergeant major, who seeks to dominate, master, and break the animal, to subdue it: tension, effort, injury, wounds. The other way is to do the opposite, to mold oneself to the movement of the horse, to follow it with suppleness, to “sympathize” with it. To obey the animal so that one day you will be in a position to give it orders, and not the other way around. Horse riding is also a “gliding sport”—you surf on the movement of the horse—with the one crucial difference that you may eventually end up being able to steer the animal wave, but never that of the ocean.
Finally, the opposition proposed by Deleuze, between ancient sports founded on effort and new sports founded on gliding, is not so inflexible as you might think. As with horse riding, there are always two ways of looking at the world of action: the “sergeant major” version, with force, purely mechanically; and the “dancer” version. Think back to Zidane for a moment: his “grace” rests primarily on his way of passing in between, inserting himself into the movement of his opponents, avoiding them without touching them, as though surfing over them. He looks like he’s dancing because he never enters into violent contact with his opponent; he attains his goal without brutality, softly, lightly, in rhythm. He explains, when discussing the art of heading the ball, that what gifted headers like Zamorano have is a sense of timing. They always jump at the right moment, and follow the trajectory of the ball. It’s not a question of size, it’s not enough just to be tall. You need to sense the right moment. Like a dancer. People who excel in the “old sports” practice them as though they were gliding sports rather than contact sports. Zidane is a surfer; he can catch the wave of the ball and think of the game as an element or a wave. You may think a soccer pitch is just a flat surface, with two dimensions. For a great player it’s an ocean, a living surface, in three dimensions.
Time too is a wave. Tennis players know something about this, because for them matches have no predetermined length. Andre Agassi says there is a moment in a match when you physically feel two opposing currents, two forces, one drawing you toward victory, the other toward defeat. The player is at the delta of these two forces, their meeting point, and whether you turn one way or the other can sometimes hang on a single point. They are like currents in the ocean. You have to be able to seize them. And not force, hurry, or seek to accelerate time. Acting can also mean waiting, even when you are in the process of acting. You have to negotiate time as you would negotiate a bend in the road, follow its curve, or its descent, not try to resist it or to hurry it along. In tennis you ride time as you would ride a wave.
In the end it all comes down to attitude, imagination and . . . prepositions. You can be “against,” or “in” or “on” or “with.” You can strain, struggle, compete, or you can relax, accept, and give in. It’s like learning a foreign language. Here too you have two ways of doing it: the first is the one used in school, the sergeant major’s method with grammar lessons, vocabulary lists, tests, and grades. It doesn’t usually get you very far: even after years of effort it’s still impossible to have a reasonable conversation with a native speaker. As though you were to try to surf while staying on the beach, or swim while staying at the edge of the water. The second way is total immersion: spending a few months in the country, understanding nothing at the start, basking in the language from dawn till dusk, observing, soaking yourself in it, imitating, muddling along, until one day you end up speaking it. With ease. In English we speak of fluency: to be fluent is to be fluid in a language, to allow it to flow through you, without having to think about every word before saying it. Language is a flux, a stream, a wave to be surfed; you have to trust it. To learn to speak a language you have to speak, and act as though you already knew it. The same goes for dance: you learn not by watching but by doing. Not to say that you shouldn’t take dance classes, but you can only correct a movement once you’ve started it. You can only correct a phrase if it has already been said. Desire, not scholarly obligation, is what teaches us to speak or to dance.
So “pretending” is also a condition of success. In order to learn to speak a language, I have to start by pretending I know how to speak it. Bergson is saying the same thing when he recommends that we yield to the “grace of horse riding”; in other words, that we act as if we already knew how to do it by slipping supplely into the movement of the horse, without resisting. It means trusting the body, and allowing it to learn by itself, to enter into horse-becoming, to use Deleuze’s expression, instead of clinging fearfully to one’s human-being.
There is so much we can learn from animals, especially when inserting ourselves into an element. You need only look at the metaphors we use to evoke a sense of ease: to be as free as a bird, to feel like a fish in water. These are not just metaphors, they are examples to be followed. The bird is, above all, a wing, a sail in search of the wind. The fish flies in the water, its fins are both wings and oars; it can also hover, or accelerate suddenly, using both its strength and its ability to glide. It surfs in three dimensions. A dolphin does it both on the surface and underwater, almost in four dimensions. The equipment of gliding sports is inspired by animal forms and properties. Here, imitation is the rule. Lightness and resistance in the materials, the balance between flexibility and toughness in the flippers, the ribs in the fins, the improvement of the gliding movement through the tapered shape and waxing of the boards. But above all, the attitude of the practitioners of these “new sports” follows animal models.
Even freediving, which is based on the suppression of the respiratory reflex, can be thought of less as an unnatural effort made against nature in a hostile environment and more as a natural insertion into a welcoming element. To the scientists who covered him in electrodes, riddled him with X-rays, and bombarded him with analyses in an attempt to understand how, without breathing apparatus, he could descend to a depth of over one hundred meters, and withstand a pressure of more than ten atmospheres, Jacques Mayol explained with an amused smile: “When I dive, it’s not complicated. I feel as though I’m in love with the water! But how do you say ‘love’ in mathematical language?” You can’t say it, or rather you can’t measure it. But you can feel it and see it. Because he didn’t take humans for his model, Jacques Mayol thought of himself not as a sportsman but as a dolphin, or rather a Homo delphinus, a man in the process of dolphin-becoming, and even of dolphin re-becoming, since he thought of his deep underwater adventures as a return to our repressed aquatic origins. After all, our cells swim about in salt water, don’t they? The living cell, since Charles Bernard, has been thought of as an interior micro-ocean. Our lack of fur, the shape of our noses, and even the tears that constantly bathe our eyes surely indicate clearly that we first appeared not on earth, but in water. How else can we explain our capacity to hold our breath underwater for long periods or all the things we have in common with marine mammals—in particular the “blood shift,” which allows us to descend below fifty meters in water without our lungs collapsing under the pressure—in short: how can we explain Jacques Mayol? One thing is certain: he himself experiences freediving as an insertion into the sea, rather than a struggle against it; as a loving relationship, not a conflictual one. Exactly like people who choose to learn horse riding by following the movement of the horse, he learned to free dive by taking as his master—or mistress, almost—a female dolphin called Clown, whom he met at the Seaquarium in Miami, Florida. He says he felt himself genuinely fall head over heels in love with her, “as though Clown were a woman! In particular, I had that very special feeling all lovers get, that I’d known her for a very long time. And I swear it was the same for her!” He attributes his ease in the water, his relaxed way of being, his elegance and the efficiency of his movements to her, but above all, to his love of the element, his love of the water, and deep down, right deep down, to love, period. “There’s a calm deep inside you. And at the bottom of that calm—there’s love. The dolphins taught me that. It’s thanks to them I broke all my records.”
His main adversaries—and partners—in this conquest of the deep, the Italian Enzo Maiorca and the American Robert Croft, who each broke the world record on several occasions, give you the feeling they opted for the first way, training based on conscious methodical effort, and the invention of techniques that made it possible either to increase their lung capacity or to inhibit their breathing reflex. Croft practiced lung packing, or air packing, which, once you have filled your lungs right up, consists of continuing to pump air by puffing out the cheeks and sending it down to the lungs. Maiorca, on the other hand, used hyperventilation, which consists of speeding up the rate of inhalation, so as to greatly reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the blood, thereby delaying the respiratory reflex, which is governed by this level. He also trained by very slowly climbing and descending a three-story flight of stairs without breathing, wearing huge lead belts. “It’s even harder than under water, because under water you really have no choice but to hold out, whereas there you could simply open your mouth and breathe. The temptation is terrible. You have to resist. That’s how you train your willpower.”
I’m not for a moment trying to reduce Croft and Maiorca to representatives of a caricatural, strength-based approach, while handing Mayol a monopoly on subtlety and gentleness. But training on the ground, suffering in stairways, thinking at every step about not breathing—it just doesn’t have the same attraction as playing for hours in a huge tank with someone you love. It’s the negative world of will against the positive world of desire: on the one hand you resist the temptation to breathe, on the other you pursue the pleasure of the game. “You have to resist” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “deep down there is calm, and love.” This love without an object is a state of well-being rather than a feeling. It’s closer to meditative bliss than to intense passion. It’s a form of profound peace with oneself and with the world, conducive to relaxation, to forgetfulness of self and thought. An impersonal and timeless experience, which puts the necessity to breathe on the back burner. Jacques Mayol:
The first big mistake to avoid is struggling against the passing seconds. As soon as there’s struggle, there’s conflict, and therefore contraction, both physical and psychic. Which brings about the opposite of what you want, which is to go with the flow, allowing yourself to be carried along, in a state of total relaxation. To hold your breath properly, paradoxical though it may sound, you have to not think about holding it. You have to do it without thinking. You have to become the act itself. Like an animal.
Jacques Mayol doesn’t resist the water; he passes between the droplets, lets himself be carried along in the flow. He doesn’t resist the desire to breathe; he forgets to think about it. It’s not even enough to stop thinking about it—he actually imagines himself to be a dolphin. His thought is neutralized, but his imagination is active. He doesn’t float in the ether of unconsciousness, he swims in the bliss of his dreams. Like a dolphin in the water.