Life can be explored but not explained
FRANÇOIS ROUSTANG
October 19, 1983. 2:24 p.m. The October sun casts its golden glow over the Isle of Elba. It could still be summer. On board the Corsaro there’s total silence. The sea is beautiful, we’re a mile out from Pareti. In exactly six minutes Jacques Mayol will shed the 110-pound cast-iron weight whose job is to take him down into the deep. The countdown begins. Seated on the deck of the boat, with his legs in the water, he watches the departure of the safety divers, who will position themselves at various depths to watch out for him and help, if needed. What’s he thinking about? Maybe his friend Yoshizumi Azaka, whom he met in 1970 in a temple in Japan, at Izu, and who taught him Zen by repeating “No thinking! No thinking!” while striking him on the shoulder with a stick—the famous Zen master’s stick, for banishing stray ideas and bringing the attention of the meditator to the here and now. Or perhaps he’s thinking of his friend Clown. In playing with her, he realized that when he had negative thoughts, she felt it and distanced herself from him, as though to say that he needed to get rid of them, to clean his spirit. The dolphin and the monk were in agreement: “No thinking!,” as though thinking were something that could be done on its own, a purely mechanical activity, a compulsion or a tic one could get rid of at leisure, by a simple gesture, like turning a doorknob. No thinking. Easy to say. Maybe Mayol recalls Dr. Cabarrou, the French doctor who warned that below fifty meters, the thoracic cage of a freediver holding their breath must necessarily suffer fatal collapse. And yet he has done it. He’s been down below fifty meters. Enzo Maiorca has even been below sixty meters. Mayol thinks again about his first attempt to break Maiorca’s record. It was at Freeport, in the Bahamas. As he dived with his eyes shut, he had asked one of his safety divers to give him a tap on the back at fifty meters, so he knew how far he’d gone. But this contact had also brought him out of his trance. He had opened his eyes, seen the flag attached to the cable, ten meters below him, marking the depth Maiorca had reached, and stopped. There was nothing he could do to compensate: his ears just wouldn’t go down any farther. This abrupt reminder of reality, the sudden intervention of thought, had broken his momentum. He had to come back up. It was only a postponement, and he did finally go down farther than sixty meters, but he never forgot the incident. The greatest danger for a freediver at this depth is thinking. Maiorca’s best was sixty-two meters. Robert Croft went down below sixty-four meters, then sixty-six meters. At this point Mayol decided to spend several months in the temple at Izu, to prepare himself for the record in a way quite unlike the insistence on honing the physique, or by forcing the breath. Instead, he would learn not to think. Non-thinking, combined with yogic breathing exercises, would give him the last word when, on September 11, 1970, he went down to seventy-six meters. And it was the last word because in December 1970 the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (CMAS), the diving federation that had until then overseen attempts at record breaking, decided to abolish the discipline for safety reasons. Good-bye sport, hello experimentation.
Back in October 1983, could Mayol be thinking of Dr. Roger Lescure, who deemed it criminal to pursue this kind of experience, because at eighty meters, in his estimation, the freediver had only a few seconds of conscious life left? What is Mayol thinking about, with only a few seconds of the countdown to go? Impossible to say. 2:30. He lifts his hand. He positions his nose peg, grasps the iron bar hanging in front of him, takes a normal breath, no forcing, and vanishes into the deep. He’s fifty-six years old. The cutoff disk awaits him at 105 meters. If he’s properly prepared, he won’t be thinking about it.
Not thinking about a challenge isn’t always enough. Before she goes out on stage, Hélène Grimaud gets stage fright, which she prefers to call the “adrenalin phenomenon.” Her heart races, blood drains from her extremities. Her breath shortens. And yet she’s thinking of nothing. She is both concentrated and vacant. Her stomach pounds. Her legs scarcely hold her up. As a child she played with pleasure, fearlessly. What happened? It all started just before she recorded her first album. A mad choice, a piece that was too difficult for her, in the opinion of all her teachers. A whim. A dream. A few minutes before entering the studio, her body let her down, the “adrenalin phenomenon” took hold of her for the first time, and has never let her go. Ever since then, her body thinks for her, and like a scratched record, it goes over and over the same groove of fear, which is definitively scored into her, burned into her, forever. How can she stop her body thinking? Willpower won’t work, and neither will thinking. She uses her breath, and thinks simply about completely emptying her lungs, and drawing in large belly breaths. Her blood rushes back, she re-centers herself. She replaces thinking with imagination and lines up some mental projections. She fixes her attention on three things, always the same ones. She concentrates on the first, then the second, then all three together, like the three cherries in a slot machine. She explains:
This technique draws me into the rhythm, till I reach illumination. The principle is to perfectly control one’s breath while focusing one’s attention on the passing images. When you reach the alpha brain state, you enter a trance, the ideal rhythm, like with Buddhist mantras. The aim, as you continue the exercise, is for the brain to stop formulating distinct thoughts. There’s another exercise I really like: imagine yourself in a place you love, or that you’d love to visit, the top of a tower, for example, from which you have a lovely view out on the world. You see a staircase: at the bottom of the staircase you see a room; at the end of the room is a door; you open the door; you go into the room and there you find something or someone. What you find, usually, is a loved one, or someone who’s died; in fact, your own inner voice.
In other words, she practices self-hypnosis. Therapist François Roustang confirms the benefits of this method. Focusing on one’s breath is the best means of coming back into the body, of suppressing troublesome thoughts. Unease always comes from rigidity blocking the flow of life. Breathing well, breathing slowly and deeply, is a way of reestablishing this flow. To suspend his thought entirely, Roustang uses three exercises: the first consists of fixing his gaze on a limited part of an object—for example, the point of a pencil, the handle of a cup, or the pattern on a cushion. The aim is to isolate what you’re looking at from its context, banishing everything else into the background haze. In the second exercise you transport yourself in your imagination to somewhere you love, in the country, or in the town, or the mountains, it doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s a place you associate with pleasant feelings. In the third you use language in a nonsensical way. This is the most unsettling exercise. “This is a strange experience because it’s expressed in absurdities: ‘Take a path you don’t know, to reach an unknown place, to do something you’re incapable of doing.’ Phrases like this, though apparently meaningless and highly risky, once heard and put into practice open up a space of freedom and pleasure, where existence can be renewed.” Using language in this way means you can’t visualize anything precise, and this is exactly the point of the exercise: to reestablish a sense of the possible. Not by having a very clear goal or image, but by accepting confusion and vagueness. And this is perhaps the most surprising and fertile idea in this method: anyone who hopes to find a way to act and to reinvent themselves should not start by fixing clear goals, but rather should start in a floating, indeterminate state, in a fog, which will allow action to take shape. Night makes the light shine, just as the cloud creates the bolt of lightning.
It’s not just about overcoming stage fright. You can actually learn to stop thinking any time you have to act. Excessive thinking can contaminate a whole existence and even threaten it. Hélène Grimaud explains how her meeting with a great violinist, Gidon Kremer, at the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, completely changed her life and her relationship with the piano. Having previously prided herself on her intuition, and allowed herself to be guided by the ideas that simply arose from it, after this encounter she began to analyze her own playing. And as she began to consider all the possibilities, she gradually cut herself off from reality:
I asked myself so many questions that I stopped being able to detach myself from the score, or step back enough to actually get on with playing. Some days, I felt like I understood, I would briefly sense what could be and would be, I knew exactly what it was meant to be. But between those brief moments of lucidity, those rare illuminations, I was going around with my eyes closed. I thrashed about trying to solve my difficulties, sometimes for weeks, without finding a solution.
She began to suffer from genuine instrumental paralysis, and eventually fell ill.
I couldn’t work, except on the score. I spent my time reading, always reading; books, and especially music. I was entirely focused on my inertia, and I wouldn’t leave the apartment. I marinated, ruminated, despaired, I was weighed down by a great jumble of fictional characters, of different acquaintances. I didn’t want to see anyone. I was tormented by a sense of powerlessness, or worse still, of uselessness. My suffering was like an action in itself and the contemplation of this suffering was an abyss. A great black hole took shape in my chest. The hole didn’t communicate with infinite space, or the cosmos, or the dizzying architecture of music but, like a hole in the bottom of a boat, with the murky waters of the deep, and it drank up that darkness too. I was living through an experience akin to self-dispossession. The abandon of the self by oneself, after the departure of everyone else. In 1989, at the Festival de La Roque-d’Anthéron, where I was due to appear for the third time, I was in a total slump. I believed, I really believed at that time, that I would never get out of it. For the first time in my life I felt a wild, brutal, irrepressible desire to disappear.
Rumination, which stands in the way of action, an excess of interpretation that stops one from experiencing, a loss of curiosity for what’s going on in the world, an end to the lightness of being: Hélène Grimaud neatly diagnoses this major crisis in her existence. By overanalyzing her playing, she stepped out of life, off the pitch. When they ask how you are, the Swiss aptly say: “How’s it playing?” Once you’ve stopped playing, everything stops.
Hélène Grimaud, through sheer intelligence, lost her instinct. How do you get out of such an impasse? How do you rediscover your ability to play? François Roustang warns that you’re obviously not going to cure someone of excessive analysis by excessively analyzing them. More thinking won’t cure someone of too much thinking. First you must try to put an end to rumination,
which dwells on remorse, regrets and resentment. Then you must close down the route that leads us to search for the causes of and reasons for our problems. To do that, to stop thinking, or to succeed in no longer thinking, you need to have thought for a long time, tiring out your thought as you might tire out a wild horse in order to mount it.
Wear out your thinking, so you know from the inside that it’s useless to you, so that at last you are ready to act.
Beware the trap of “I want to understand.” In a chapter entitled “L’illusion du sens” (The Illusion of Meaning), Roustang writes: “The symptom is already isolating, it holds back life’s flow, arrests us, and sets us apart. By focusing on it we run the risk of reinforcing it.” The solution is not to dig into the problem until you’re so deep you’re stuck, or to keep going round and round it till you end up just turning in circles; it is to leave the problem where it is, there in the middle of everything else, one detail in a moving ensemble, rather than an immovable focal point, fixed, petrified by the desire to understand it.
In hypnosis therapy, everything is already there, and we allow what is indistinct to emerge, the wave of the whole range of thoughts, representations, feelings, perceptions, sensations: everything that produces a state of confusion into which we launch ourselves, without a compass or a rudder. The symptom is then submerged, carried off, loosed from its moorings and thus constrained to accept or to submit to all aspects of the shape or flow of life.
The “trance” of hypnosis is a “trans,” a crossing, an intermediate state. The point of action is also a point of passage.
Which means that contrary to the entire psychoanalytical tradition, in order to feel better, you don’t need to look at yourself, to waste time self-examining: “self-analysis is pernicious; you end up looking at yourself instead of living.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Secret Notebooks, written during the First World War: “When you feel yourself coming up against a problem you need to stop thinking about it, otherwise you can’t get free of it. You have to start thinking at the point where you can sit comfortably. Above all, do not insist! Difficult problems must resolve themselves before our eyes.” But how can you resolve a problem without thinking about it? This idea is even stranger coming from a philosopher as focused on science and logic as Wittgenstein was. It is hard to see how a theorem, for example, could demonstrate itself. Would you not rather need to pay attention to it, in the strongest sense of the word? And if attention is something that can be paid, doesn’t that suppose an effort? Teachers order you to “pay attention!,” in the certainty that if only you’d make the effort you’d understand. Wittgenstein recommends the opposite: don’t insist, don’t get bogged down, stop thinking, let problems resolve themselves. “Before our eyes,” he says. Just because we are not trying too hard doesn’t mean we mustn’t keep our eyes open. In keeping them open we pay a kind of attention that doesn’t try to force anything, but is simply a “gaze,” without tension. The secret of this “gaze” is comfort: “start thinking at the point where you feel you are sitting comfortably.” Comfort first, then thought as a consequence of comfort. Comfort as a prerequisite to the resolution of any difficulty. If you want to feel at ease in your life, you need to start by getting comfortable in your chair. And then, a bit like at the cinema, as long as you don’t try to intervene, you’ll find your problems resolving themselves. This is a long way from the educational model of forced attention, authoritarian command, discipline above all else. It is only by renouncing the idea of solving the problem directly that we have a chance of getting rid of it. Wittgenstein says: “The solution to any problem you have in life is a way of life that makes the problem disappear.” Roustang adds: “The solution to a human problem will never be found in a response to the question why.”
When, after crossing between the towers of the World Trade Center eight times, during a display that lasted forty-five minutes, Philippe Petit finally came down from the wire, and was immediately arrested. The first question he was asked, by an American journalist, as he was being taken to the police station, was “Why?” To which Philippe Petit responded, without thinking: “There is no why.” If there was a why, there would be no tightrope walkers. The tightrope walker is the response to a question that need not be asked. Who could find a reason to go and risk his life on a wire stretched 400 meters above ground? Reflection is the enemy of the tightrope walker: “Every thought on the wire leads to a fall.” So, don’t think. It’s easy to say, but how can you think about not thinking? Instead of thinking about the void, you have to do it. Stop looking down; look straight out ahead. “The feeling of a second of immobility—if the wire grants it to you—is an intimate happiness. If no thought came to disturb this miracle, it would go on and on forever.” But “the wind of our thoughts [is] more violent than the wind of balance.” Thinking is the enemy. It need not even have any particular content. It is at the same time an imbalance, a wind, forever reborn and always on the attack. Thinking is moving out of the moment to look at yourself acting, leaving the point of action and projecting yourself into the past or the future—and projecting yourself when you are on a rope means falling. If you suspend a philosopher in a cage between the towers of Notre-Dame in Paris, says Montaigne, even if he sees that it is impossible to fall out, the sight of the extreme drop is bound to frighten and paralyze him. Or “if, between these two towers, one places a beam broad enough to walk along, there is no philosophical wisdom, however strong, that can give us the courage to walk it as we would do if it was on the ground. There are some people who can’t even bear the thought of it.” Pascal repeats Montaigne without quoting him, and recognizes the same domination of the imagination over reason. “If you stand the greatest philosopher in the world on a plank, however wide, if there is a precipice below him, though his reason will convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prove stronger. Many people cannot think of it without growing pale and sweating.” How does Philippe Petit manage not to give in to fear and the thought of fear, which is already vertigo? It’s simple: he doesn’t fight it. He tries neither to pick up this thought nor to move forward with it. He allows it to float, like everything else. Because reflection means tying oneself up. Re-flection is always a doubling up; the prefix “re” suggests an insistence, a consciousness that is stuck in a rut, folding the problem in upon itself: perforce . . . to force. When you pull on a knot every which way to undo it, you succeed only in making it tighter. Insistence makes the problem worse, or even creates the problem in the first place. Before acting, you have to unknot yourself. Don’t think about it; don’t do anything.
But how do you do nothing? And how can you think about not thinking, without thinking? It’s a vicious circle. If I say to you: “Don’t think about a frog,” what else are you going to do? Fortunately, this contradiction disappears when you put it into practice. The secret of non-thinking is to appeal not to thought but to the body. No reasoning, just an action: simply finding the right position in the chair. Roustang again:
Doing nothing means doing nothing in particular, not stopping on any particular thought or feeling or sensation. This doing nothing becomes letting things happen. Now, letting things happen is the equivalent of a state of receptivity without limitation. When you are open to everything and nothing, you really have no preferences, no wishes, and no plans whatsoever, what you touch and what you receive is pure force of action. You are at the source of the action. The individual who just lets things happen is constantly adjusting themselves to what comes toward them, and that’s the beginning—and already the fullness—of action.
The hardest thing to accept with this concept of action is that it isn’t the outcome of thinking, or the result of a project or decision, and that it seems to make us spectators rather than actors in our own lives. But if we think back to Françoise Sagan’s “blessed moments,” to Yannick Noah’s “rare moments,” or to Hélène Grimaud’s “visitation,” it is clear that when “it works,” when “it takes,” when you reach your point of action, “it” works of its own accord, “it” takes us, “it” happens to us as if it were nothing to do with us. The idea is thus to rediscover the physical state of indifferent attention in order to notice what is taking form, to be present at the appearance, not simply of a project (which would again be a thought turned toward the future), but of an action (the first step, in the present, of the execution of this “plan” that isn’t a “plan” because it is already under way). This might seem to contradict the call of action, when you’re not always free to just take your time, when a crisis demands speed. But this state, once you’re familiar with it and can identify it, can be rediscovered instantaneously, as Zidane shows when he talks about his Panenka in the 2006 World Cup Final. The decision coincides with the execution. He knew what he had to do even as he did it. It was the right decision, because it was not so much considered as received. Zidane, like Socrates, obeyed his inner voice, his “genius.” Once you have found the right wavelength, all you have to do is connect to it. It is like a radio station—you just have to find the right frequency.
The primary model for “facility” is animal. Instinct succeeds without thinking, unlike intelligence, which is often clumsy because of its conscious and indirect nature. When you have to think in order to act you lose the advantage of immediacy. Instinct asks no questions; it is what it does, no more, no less. Intelligence thinks the action, dominates it, and thus is always at risk of preventing it. Instinct is a form of idiocy, of blissful ignorance, which succeeds without thinking. What is really difficult, for an intelligent being, is reaching this state of idiocy without losing any of one’s intelligence, constructing a second nature in which intelligence becomes intuition. This natural state is what athletes aim for, and actors as well: “When I played Danton,” Gérard Depardieu says, “I was guillotined on the first day of filming. My head was gone, I couldn’t think, I had nothing to do but be.” It was very clever of the director, Andrzej Wajda, because that way he was allowing his actor to act not with his brain but with his gut. Depardieu appreciated this move, and even made it a life principle that he could apply to the rest of existence:
No more ideas about anything. It’s a win-win. When you feel a certain joie de vivre, for example, if you start thinking you’re happy, or worse, asking yourself why you’re happy or why you’re not unhappy, you are already less able to enjoy the joie de vivre. You lose an essential part of it. Joie de vivre simply has to be experienced in the present moment.
This immediate experience, without introspection, may sound a bit brutal, even animal, but that doesn’t bother Depardieu. “I never try to appear kind or sympathetic. I simply live. And I never calculate.” No effort, ever, just the ebb and flow of life, without a backward glance. Ceasing to think allows one to commit to the present. For an actor, the difficulty lies in reaching this state of calm indifference in spite of the presence of other people, whether that’s the technical crew in filmmaking or the audience in theater. Depardieu says:
It’s always terrifying to be alone on stage in front of the audience, not speaking. Forcing yourself simply to be. That’s why actors in the theater often rush in too quickly, too loud. Régy taught me to take my time, to play with the wait, feel the silence, till the moment when the words simply have to come out. In the end it’s less about saying something than knowing how to hold back.
Ceasing to think is a remedy for, as well as a test of, impatience. By not projecting himself into the future, the actor acquires density, truth, presence, a form of splendid slowness, the tranquility of a wild animal, and therein lies the richness of his style. Even if theater director Claude Régy was one of the people who set him on this path, Depardieu considers it a training that has very little to do with teaching: “You don’t learn anything at school, you learn things with your body. Through watching, through breathing, through feeling.” It’s more a question of attention and perception than of knowledge or work. Depardieu is making a case here for a form of ignorance:
I’m much more at ease when I don’t know much about things. I don’t explain them, they come of their own accord, without barriers, with no agenda. Everything comes to me loose. It’s like when you throw grapes into a vat. One fine day it starts to bubble. Or not. It takes or it doesn’t. There are good years and bad years. You can use a whole load of artificial stuff for making wine. I make wine the classic way. Let’s just say I put my trust in nature. Nature is always right if you don’t contradict her. It comes out the way it comes out.
It might surprise people that an actor who is accustomed to performing the great works, in a variety of languages, should be so unconcerned with the question of meaning. Doesn’t performance necessarily require having an idea about the text? Don’t you have to have reached the meaning hidden in a work through profound analysis before proposing, as they say, your own reading? Depardieu explains why exactly the opposite is true:
When I act in a foreign language, I don’t care if I don’t understand the text of my character. The punctuation is more important to me than the words. I perform more like a musician than an actor. When I read the part of Cyrano, I feel the music long before the words. In I Want to Go Home, by Alain Resnais, we were filming in English, and I didn’t understand a word of what I was saying, I just acted out the situation, in the present moment. It all went really well till the day Resnais translated some sentences of the dialogue and explained the meaning of my words to me. That was it, I couldn’t act after that, I couldn’t be true, I was paralyzed by what I had to say. We had to film the scene dozens of times.
Not understanding what he’s saying is not only not an obstacle for Gérard Depardieu, it’s actually an opportunity. In order to perform, he needs not to focus on what he has to say or do. After all, no one expects a violin to understand the music it makes possible. The actor is like an instrument through which the music passes. He may feel it is beautiful, as long as he doesn’t know how or why. Paradoxically, it is this distance from the content of the text that allows one to give the truest interpretation, to resonate with it:
When I read Saint Augustine, even more than the text, which is often quite demanding, the audience needed to feel its vibrations, to touch them deep within their soul. Beyond the words, they were in a state of prayer with themselves. For me it was like reading a story to a child who’s falling asleep, led by our voice into its own world, where the imagination can do its work.
What is true for a text or for the scene is also true in life, and most especially in love: “The minute you try to control it, it’s dead, it ages suddenly and the flame dies.” Depardieu is not on the side of the will, or of effort; he is on the side of desire and what is natural. Through his words and his actions, Gérard Depardieu, actor/thinker, but above all thinker in action, advocates a kind of generalized negligence that makes him look primal in the eyes of imbeciles, but which is the sign of a higher intuition that says no to analytical reason and yes to the genius of life. “Of course you can give analysis a go, I did it for thirty years before I realized that in the end it was just one more self-indulgence. If you dwell on your regrets, your remorse, your grievances, you end up saturated, and you can’t open your arms to life.” It’s almost like listening to François Roustang, with whom this profession of faith would chime perfectly, since he himself affirms:
It is one of the characteristics of life that it can never be understood; you can never completely grasp its complexity. The only true thought is the one that is prepared to plunge into life, with no turning back. Thus what might look like idiocy in fact becomes intelligence in action. The thought is accomplished once it falls mute in the silence of action.
And this is why François Roustang prefers hypnosis to straightforward analysis. Hypnosis allows one to get back to oneself, or rather to put one’s self back into the world, in its place and in perspective. Hypnosis offers the experience of self-forgetfulness. We forget the self that is beset with problems, and in so doing, we rid it of that which is weighing on it, and bring it back to its fundamental substance: being alive. To be alive is to be no one, to be life, and nothing but. Not life in general, but my life, that life that flows through me, which is myself. “Myself ” then becomes just a detail in a far greater ensemble. The Greeks called it a cosmos, a world in which each being is in its place, and happy to be there. “When someone is able to reduce themselves to the state of just being alive, then they are already cured. Because they re-situate themselves in their own body, in relation to their own body, re-situate themselves in relationship to their milieu, to the environment as a whole . . . That’s enough.” No need to aim for any goal, not even that of being cured. If I had a problem, it’s now resolved. If I was a problem, it melted away, as I did, in something much larger: life. “You don’t know what is happening, but if you stay calm, many things do happen.”
You reach your goal by forgetting it. Or, rather, once we renounce a goal, it comes toward us. “The arrow, before it even leaves the bow, is already at the center of the target [ . . . ] there isn’t really any distance between the one and the other, otherwise it would be impossible to shoot and reach the goal with your eyes closed.” This presupposes the “abandon of all intentionality, the loss of the self that takes aim and directs the operation, in short, an impersonality that participates in the movement and is the finished gesture, and cannot be distinguished from it.” You have to know how to wait. This waiting has nothing to do with fear, indecision, or, as for Hélène Grimaud, perfectionism. It’s a way of respecting the idea that the time for action is born out of the action itself rather than out of us. To put it differently, if I put myself in the position of desiring nothing, if I bracket off my fear and my impatience, then the rhythm of things will be dictated by the length of time natural to them. It’s a rather vegetal approach, but the affairs of mankind also have their seasons and duration, which should be respected. If an action isn’t ripe, if it’s not yet time, there’s no point in forcing the decision. It’s not I who take the decision and force my will on the world, but it is I who, by stepping aside, put myself at the world’s disposal and decide to listen to its demands. Action will arise from total renunciation.
Most human problems that cannot be resolved by reflection can easily be resolved through action. Take shoelaces, for instance; it is much easier to show children how to tie their laces than to explain to them with words. Here, explaining involves doing. In the same way, if you want to understand how to tie shoelaces, the best thing is to just give it a go. Then undo them. And do them again. Certain difficulties can be resolved only by getting your hands dirty. It’s your hands that learn to tie your laces. If thought plays any part, it’s inside the action, thanks to it. What the hands understand is how to do without the head, to use it sparingly. A skill that is directly inscribed in your body is more easily acquired and preserved. We often take the example of the bicycle: balance can’t be thought about; you find it by falling, and then by not falling, and finally you get it and never forget. The body’s knowledge is what remains after you’ve forgotten everything. And to be more exact: it’s what is left because you’ve forgotten. There is a way of forgetting that preserves, and which is called habit. You don’t have to think about it to summon it. That knowledge is always there, close at hand and even in your hand, in your body, available, easy: whether it’s cycling, driving, or reading a foreign language. When you’ve learned your lesson well you never forget it. And contrary to what you might think, “doing nothing” is an apprenticeship of this kind.
Artists are familiar with this phenomenon. When Picasso writes: “I do not seek, I find,” this is not the statement of an arrogant genius, but rather the avowal of a determined and modest worker, who recognizes the impossibility of making the slightest connection between effort spent looking and the event of discovery. It is not enough just to seek in order to find—this is the tough law of the artist’s task. You can miss your target a thousand times, and never hit the bull’s-eye, and not even get close to it. Roustang writes:
Brahms used to shut himself up for days on end and wait, before starting to write, till he found himself in a state he himself called hypnotic. In this state, he knew not to seek, just to let himself find. If such creators do find, it is because they’ve stopped looking or because their seeking has reached a point at which it is clear that it is pointless. All their trying and their effort have led to a moment of despair that they will never find anything. During a certain period of his life, Picasso would get up each morning quite certain that he had painted his last ever painting the previous day. Convinced he would never paint again, he could allow himself, in the evening, to be possessed by a frenzy of painting.
To find, you have to have abandoned all hope, have sincerely renounced both yourself and any aim. Then, “if you stay calm, many things do happen.” And everything happens easily.
What is true for art is also true for life in general, during which each of us is in a permanent state of creation. If we wish to achieve real change, there’s no point in relying on the will, or planning. The shortest route to understanding oneself does not pass via the self: “The solution to our problems lies outside, in a new way of apprehending our situation. For this, we need to allow everything around us to come find us.” Roustang takes the example of a young woman who came to see him because she couldn’t leave her own child in peace, and was constantly nagging him. “I invited her to cross her index fingers and wait for them to come apart, without any intention on her part, and without any desire to achieve this end. She let herself go to the point of forgetting entirely why she had even come. After a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, her fingers separated and she wept.” When she came back the next week she reported that her relationships had changed for the better, not just with her child, but with everyone around her. In other words, there’s no point in thinking about it: a movement is enough. This is what Roustang wittily calls “the mystique of the café waiter,” which consists of shouting “Coming through!” and of thrusting forward, without thinking about looking at the drinks he’s carrying on his tray. “It’s vital not to think, but to allow life in all its variety to show us the way.”
Allowing life to take the orders, trusting in disorder and not being frightened of chaos, is perhaps the best definition of “French flair,” a term born on the rugby pitch. In a couple of memorable matches, just when everything seemed lost, the French team suddenly, as though hit by their own personal thunderbolt, turned into a band of irresistible flickering lights, and set the pitch on fire. Take, for example, that stroke of collective genius that’s gone down in the history of modern rugby as the “try from the end of the world.” And indeed, on July 3, 1994, the French were a long way from home. In Auckland, New Zealand, to be precise, where they were playing the All Blacks, who were leading 20–16 three minutes from the end of the game. They had nothing to lose.
Behind the twenty-two-meter line, Philippe Saint-André, winger and captain of Les Bleus, picks up the ball and instead of doing the usual thing of kicking it into touch, abandons all logic and decides to take a direct run at the opponent. Surprising everyone, he takes out three players, is caught by the fourth, who’s slow to bring him down; he stays on his feet waiting for support from the heavy brigade—the two props, Bénézech and Califano—then frees the ball for Gonzalez, who also decides to do something unexpected. Instead of joining the fray, as a good hooker should, he slips into the role of scrum-half and brings the ball to life, it comes to Deylaud, then to Benazzi. Benazzi too does something unusual for him; he opts for a feint by extending his arms, dodging a tackle, and neutralizing two opponents: “I think that was the first time I’d ever done anything like that, but we were in the heat of the moment and I just felt it could work.” Ntamack, then Cabannes. Then it gets even crazier: Cabannes senses that Delaigue is behind him and judges his pass to the millimeter. It’s beautiful, clean, fluid, the French seem to be a beat ahead in everything, they’re inspired, bold, everything is turning out right for them. Delaigue cuts left, and looks for a split second as though he’s used the ref to screen himself from an imminent tackle, then sidesteps and opens the way for Accoceberry. The line is still fifteen meters away, but Delaigue has his arms in the air. He knows his pass is perfect, that the moment has to work, and that in spite of the three All Blacks bearing down on him, the try must be made. Accoceberry just has to clutch the ball to his chest and dive. The line is there. But it’s not over yet. He is not alone. On his left are Sadourny, along with Saint-André, who has kept up with the ball and is following the action somehow, despite being tackled right at the start of this passage of play. Laurent Cabannes describes what happened: “We’d lost all sense of the crowd, there was no noise, we were one meter from paradise, behind that ridiculous little line of chalk, and at that point there could be an off-side call, a scrum, anything.” Accoceberry only has to score to go down in history, but he plays collectively and shifts the ball to Sadourny, who finishes the move. Eighty meters run, twenty-seven seconds played, ten French players have touched the ball. If anyone asks what French flair is, it’s that. The French won with a move of utter brilliance at the very last moment. Champagne!
What’s the formula for this kind of alchemy? Even the players themselves don’t know. Accoceberry acknowledges: “You can’t take the action apart when you are on the pitch, because everything happens very fast and you’re only involved in it for a few seconds. Afterward, without television everything would be a bit of a blur. When you watch it again, it’s incredible, because the whole move is perfect, like something you try in training and you know you can never reproduce.” And yet Philippe Saint-André, who set up the try, thinks it’s the fruit of a certain culture:
It was the end of the match, we were at the other end of the world, the goal line was still a long way off. But for me, it was really a typically French try, a mixture of three-quarter advances, crossing passes, keeping close, chisteras [neat back passes], flair . . . That try represented the whole tradition and culture of French rugby, so that we’re playing against an Anglo-Saxon team, but at the eightieth minute we can score a try that comes from nowhere. It’s an amazing memory!
And even if it is impossible to reproduce the try exactly, marked as it is with the seal of collective improvisation, you can pick out the principles that made it possible, the spirit and the panache of this game played “French style.”
In fact, it wasn’t the first time France had won the day through an exploit defying all logic in extremis. There must be an explanation for this phenomenon. Could the French have a monopoly on the collective stroke of genius? Serge Blanco, himself an icon of the French style of game, and generator of a try of the same type at the end of a legendary World Cup semifinal against Australia in 1987, pours cold water on such extravagant notions:
What is “French flair” exactly? It’s when you think all is lost and you say to yourself: we’ve nothing left to lose. It’s even a kind of cowardice, this “French flair” . . . It means we create situations in which, because we believe all is lost, we manage to turn the situation around. So if we were truly honest with ourselves, why not play in the first minute the way we are capable of playing in the seventy-fifth minute?
Indeed. If French flair can be born out of a sense of powerlessness, if it’s just another name for the energy of despair, then it’s nothing much to be proud of. But French flair isn’t just that. To put it simply, where the Anglo-Saxons play with reason, the French take a bet on their intuition. Pierre Villepreux, who was a player and then trainer for the French team, is considered one of the principal upholders of this tradition and says: “There was a time when, compared to the more pragmatic, stereotypical English game, France developed a more inventive style of play. ‘French flair’ was this way of taking the initiative, often in a surprising way. It required some intelligence in reading the situation, which not everyone is capable of.” It is not therefore simply the fruit of chance or despair, but the ability of the whole team to act both as a unit and as a fluid ensemble of individuals, each of whom has the freedom to read the game and to adapt in real time to disorder. Whether “inspiration” or situational intelligence, call this capacity for improvisation what you will, the aim is to act on the pitch like a jazz ensemble, always poised to follow and support your partner for as long as is required. René Deleplace, who is considered the theoretician of “total rugby,” the idea that led to French flair, was not just a rugby man (a player and then trainer in the fifties and sixties), he was also a teacher of mathematics and above all a musician (French horn). He was a proponent of the idea of perpetual motion rugby, of seeking harmony between the lines in an ongoing improvisation. He was basically the designer of French flair. The paradox of rugby is that even when it is being played intuitively, it requires constant awareness and a detailed knowledge of the rules. Even if improvisation is the capacity to bring order to disorder, it is not an uncertain science itself; it consists of a series of micro-decisions taken rapidly, but always with an eye to the evolution of the game in real time. In rugby, you never stop reflecting; you simply think and decide at the speed of the ball itself.
But in the end the real inventor of French flair was Descartes himself. Stopping thinking in order to act doesn’t mean despising reason; you’re simply putting it in its place. We’ve talked about hypnosis, yoga, non-thinking, archery . . . Yet it was the inventor of modern rationalism who drew a distinction between thought and action with such exemplary firmness. When you’re thinking, you have all the time in the world. You can shut yourself away for a week, meditate, write, dream, perhaps. There’s no hurry. But as you learn in the second maxim of his Discourse on the Method, when life, with its demands, calls upon you—there’s no time to lose. You must decide, most of the time with no real certainty. Descartes started out life as a soldier. He understood that it’s less the content of a decision than the strength of your resolution that will either finish you off or get you out of trouble. The following episode was what convinced him.
Around 1621, aged twenty-five, Descartes left the army and traveled for pleasure. After a long journey, curiosity led him to visit East Frisia, in north Germany, so he hired a boat just for himself and his manservant. The “mariners” he took into his service, finding the Frenchman wealthy and inoffensive in appearance, decided to knock him senseless, rob him of everything he had, and throw him into the water. A stranger from a foreign land, he was known to no one, and no one was likely to miss him. They discussed all this out loud in front of the young man in question, never imagining for a moment that he might know any language other than his own. And what do you suppose our philosopher did? Did he, like a good rationalist, try to convince them it was a bad idea? To negotiate a deal in exchange for his life? To appeal to their religious feeling by reminding them of divine punishment? No, nothing of the sort. He who set such store by the power of demonstration decided this time to make a demonstration of power. At this point, there’s no going back: he must succeed, or die. If they sensed the slightest wavering in him, he would have been done for. Adrien Baillet tells us:
Monsieur Descartes, seeing that the moment had come, rose suddenly to his feet, with a greatly altered expression, drew his sword with unexpected pride, spoke to them in their language in a tone which at once caught their attention, and threatened to run them through that instant if they dared to insult him. It was during this encounter that he came to realize the impression that can be created by boldness that on other occasions might simply be seen as mere saber rattling. The impression he gave on this occasion had a most marvelous effect on the spirits of the wretched men. The horror it inspired in them was followed by a sense of shock which prevented them from seizing their advantage and they treated him as delicately as he could possibly have wished.
Yes, the greatest philosopher of the modern era was also a man of action. A French knight first, thinker second.