It’s pointless to act against your will, that is to say, against your dreams
GASTON BACHELARD
For many years, Alain Passard roasted meat. People came from all over the world to taste the meat dishes in his three-Michelin-star restaurant, L’Arpège, a stone’s throw from the Rodin Museum and the gilded dome of the Invalides. He understood meat better than anyone, particularly how to cook it. He had learned the “art of fire” from his grandmother, an exceptional cook, who showed him how to always keep one eye on the flame and to listen carefully. “I can still hear her oven whistling when the fat began to sizzle at the bottom of the dish.” To understand the song of fire you have to have perfect pitch. Cooking is a timeless art, with its own secrets. For example: “The burned surface is a whole art in itself. Cooking on a wood fire is a kind of cooking where the fire leaves a far more powerful imprint: you can taste the flame in it. A browned surface comes from a damper cooking, and that’s different.” It’s like listening to a ceramicist or an alchemist talking. In his La Psychanalyse du feu (The Psychoanalysis of Fire), Gaston Bachelard has a similar recollection:
Filling her cheeks and puffing into the steel tube, my grandmother would bring the smoldering flames back to life. Everything was cooked together: potatoes for the pigs, then better-quality potatoes for the family. A fresh egg would be cooked for me in the ashes. There was no timer for the cooking: the egg was cooked when a drop of water, often spit, evaporated on the shell. I was very surprised when I read recently that Denis Papin used to watch his pot using my grandmother’s method.
Whether you’re a physicist or a cook, the lesson of fire is always the same: you must give it your full attention. And such close attention will be generously rewarded. “If I was behaving myself,” Bachelard goes on,
they’d get out the waffle iron. Its grid pressed down on the blazing brushwood, as red as a gladioli head. And in a moment the waffle was in my apron, hotter to the fingers than to the lips. Then, indeed, I was eating fire, I was eating its golden flames, its smell, and even its crackling, as I crunched the burning waffle between my teeth. And in this way fire proves its humanity every time, providing the pleasure of a kind of luxury, like a dessert. It doesn’t just cook, it crusts, it gilds the cake. It gives form and substance to the festivities of men. As far back as you care to go, gastronomy wins over nutrition and it was in pleasure and not in pain that man discovered his spirit. Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
Alain Passard could certainly sign up to this idea, since he is only able to work in a state of pleasure; ever since he was fourteen years old he has experienced cooking as a dream. But there was a certain point when meat lost all meaning and interest for him, and even began to disgust him. Was it those pictures of mad cows filling our screens? Or because of his relationship with the dead animal? Or because of blood? He’d had enough. The man who lived only for carving, larding, boning, browning, flambéing, cooking salt-crusted beef ribs, shoulders of lamb, and duck breasts, could no longer bear to look at or touch, let alone smell, animal flesh. He had lost all pleasure in it. His desire was thwarted. His joy had gone. His dream had become a nightmare. What happened to the flame? Alain Passard loved cooking so much, but he’d made up his mind: he had to give the whole thing up, right now. It was 1998. Farewell calves, cows, pigs. And above all, farewell L’Arpège.
A year later, Alain Passard returned. He had decided to change career. He had been a roaster of meat. Now he was a painter: “Look! Let’s make a family, we’ll take one color as the starting point. I like orange shades, and I’m going to have fun. Watch, I’ll make a bouquet—bam! Like a painter. Here’s a little touch of green. Let’s set that off with a leek. Look: here’s my dish.” A painter who makes bouquets—so a sort of florist. We can see this in his Tarte aux pommes bouquet des roses (Rose bouquet apple tart), a creation he is very proud of, and which demands a goldsmith’s skill to roll the thin ribbons of apple into flowers: “Cooking is like the jeweler’s craft . . . What counts is the hand, the gesture. It’s important to have that sense of precision and exactness. In cooking, you have to know how to delicately hone your senses, as if you were a great parfumier.” Creating correspondences, giving a color a taste, being at once a parfumier, a painter, a florist, a jeweler, a couturier, a sculptor, and a musician. Anything but a roaster of meat. Because, Alain Passard’s big idea, his saving “eureka,” which, though born of solitude and painful retreat, enabled him to come back firing on all cylinders, was to ditch the meat and keep the fire. From now on, the vegetable would be king. That’s all he would cook. After all, one can cook a salt-crusted beetroot, celery can be smoked, onions flambéed, carrots grilled. Like a vegetarian Prometheus, he decided to steal fire from meat and apply it to vegetables. A mad and heretical idea for a three-star chef, almost an insult to French gastronomy, but that’s what he decided. The meat nightmare was over; enthusiasm and the will to create were back. He was back, as he puts it, with a new touch, a new look, new flavors, new scents, different cooking sounds. And he had recovered his sense of pleasure. Anxiety over blood yielded to vegetable dreams. Vegetables mean earth, slow growth, the rhythm of the seasons, deep roots and the promise of fruit. Everything Bachelard calls “relaxing dreams.” Dreams that speak to the ears of people worn out by city life, dreams made to be shared: “I grow my vegetables,” Passard explains, “so I can tell a story, from plant to plate.” Because in the heat of action he has become a gardener. Not just any gardener. There too reverie transforms métier into art. “It’s the same mind-set as a winemaker’s. When I talk about a beetroot or a carrot with the lads in the garden, we talk about them as we would about Chardonnay or Sauvignon. The idea is to make a vintage of vegetables and above all to make gardening the profession of the future.” This is both a lovely dream and a dream of loveliness, in which the particularity of the soil and the wisdom of the seasons are more important than hydroponics and strawberries in January. In Alain Passard’s world, you may hear such phrases as “the tomato harvest is a rendezvous,” and at once it is clear that this means a rendezvous between lovers. It means the soil is a real thing and a vegetable is a real person.
Alain Passard’s eyes are shining again, just like his grandmother’s in front of the fire. He has rediscovered his taste for cooking, thanks to vegetables, and above all, which is the point I was coming to, thanks to the dreams that vegetables make possible. “Take away dreams,” Bachelard writes in La Terre ou les rêveries de la volonté (Earth and Reveries of Will), “and you will weigh down the worker. Neglect the dreamlike power of work and you’ll destroy the worker. Each kind of work has its own dream world, each substance worked upon brings with it its particular reveries. The dreamlike aspect of work is a necessary condition for the mental health of the worker.” For work to be happy, it must be sustained by a dream. But be careful. Not a dream in opposition to reality, not a compensating dream of the Freudian kind, or a dream of greatness as with ambitious people, but an elementary reverie engraved on the material and in the gestures it makes possible, a reverie that plays with the powers of fire and the secrets of the earth. Every sincere worker is first and foremost a dreamer, and that is what makes his or her work easy, each of his or her efforts successful. When the imagination works in harmony with the hand, the whole being vibrates with the joy of making. Whether for a metallurgist or a cook, the fire gives light to their labors. The earth, meanwhile, bears both the dreams that issue from the will and those that come from relaxation. And nature is a generous goddess, working for you: “Harmonies,” says Alain Passard, “create themselves. I don’t have to say to myself: is that going to go with that? No. It’s fine. Because it’s produce that ripens together. The finest cookbook was written by nature. You just have to observe the calendar that nature has defined.” If you follow the rhythms of nature you will rediscover the true sense of the word “work,” as adventure, journey, conquest, but also as rest, since winemakers and gardeners know that trusting nature means letting her work and knowing when to let her rest.
“A farmer’s muscular effort pulls up the weeds, but only sun and water can make wheat grow.” The ultimate dream for Alain Passard is for himself to be like the sun and water, to walk as lightly as possible upon the earth and to forget skill and return to what is natural.
This balance between the dreams of the will and those of rest is the true treasure that is hidden in the earth. Alain Passard admits this: “I have never felt so well as since I’ve had my gardens.” Cultivating one’s garden, the philosopher’s advice and the alchemist’s dream, allows you to see a beetroot as a precious stone and a potato as a golden nugget. Although I hated vegetables as a child and thought of them as a medical imposition, an unavoidable dietary inconvenience, the collateral damage of meat eating, I have to recognize that thanks to Alain Passard, I have experienced a revolution in taste, and that hearing him speak about vegetables has led me to think of them differently, as marvelous gifts rather than the recommendations of some dietician. What is more, you need only see him waiting every morning with his colleagues for the delivery of fruit and vegetables from his gardens: Passard respects the seasons, there will be no tomatoes after October 15, and yet every day is a feast day . . .
There are dreams inspired by fire and by earth, and there are also those inspired by water. For as far back as he could remember, Jacques Mayol always dreamed of the sea.
I often went diving with my brother Pierre. We had fun pretending to be pearl fishers and we dreamed of the extraordinary dives that we’d do one day in Tahiti and all kinds of other places around the world, as soon as we were old enough. We stayed in the water from dawn till dusk, discovering day after day the beauties of the deep, fish of every color and magnificent shells.
It was his mother who taught him to be at ease in water, introducing him to holding his breath at a very early age: “When she gently put my head under the water in our family bathtub, she was trying to teach me that the first thing you have to do to familiarize yourself with the world of the sea is to hold your breath.”
Today his mother would be proud of him, and perhaps a little anxious as well. He’s already fifty meters down, the depth at which the Boyle–Mariotte law, well known to deep sea divers, predicts the crushing of the lungs of the freediver who is not breathing air from bottles. This doesn’t bother Mayol. He has already known for twenty years what is awaiting him: “It’s a wonderful feeling at sixty meters, when you feel two huge hands squeezing you but without hurting, gently, making your blood flow to the lungs so that you can go even deeper. You mustn’t be afraid of letting yourself go. And then you feel as though you are an integral part of the universe.” These inter-thoracic spasms, followed by an extraordinary feeling of well-being, are called “blood shift” or “peripheral vasoconstriction,” as mentioned in chapter 6. It’s a rush of blood enriched with red corpuscles from the peripheral regions of the body to the noble organs, situated in the interthoracic cavity, and up to the brain. “On the one hand, this rush creates a sort of cushion that can resist the effects of pressure. On the other hand, it sets up a supply of fresh red corpuscles to those elements of the organism that most need it at that moment. This has been observed particularly in the case of whales, when they dive very deep.” This blood shift, described by doctors as a physiological phenomenon, is for Jacques Mayol a much more dreamlike and personal experience. He literally puts his life in the hands of the sea. At the age of seventeen, Jacques signed up for the air force, dreaming of being a student pilot in a flight school in the United States. He ended up in Agadir, as a translator/flight controller in a control tower. It doesn’t matter, because today he is flying in water, like an astronaut, but going down. He doesn’t care about the sound barrier, because on November 23, 1976, just off the Isle of Elba, he broke the hundred-meter barrier. He remembers it as if it were yesterday: “I had a moment of delirious joy, a little like what Neil Armstrong must have felt when he set foot on the moon. A sort of nirvana, one hundred meters down.” That was seven years ago. He was forty-nine years old. Now he is eighty meters down. In almost total darkness, broken only by the light beam from the diving weight. He thinks of Clown, the dolphin friend who has trained him so well. Even today he would have preferred a dolphin to lead him to the bottom, rather than a weight. He decides to remove his nose clip. The seawater immediately fills his nasal cavities. “More than ever before, I had, at that moment, the feeling of being transformed into a marine animal. I felt a vague drunkenness, as if unknown faculties were awaking deep within me.” He broke the hundred-meter barrier without noticing. The rest happened as in a dream, as his attitude reveals: “Exactly eighty-four seconds after the beginning of my dive, the heavy weight hit the depth indicator with a boom.” Dazzled by the lights, Jacques cannot make out the faces of Guglielmi and Araldi (his safety divers). He is extraordinarily calm. Noticing that one of the two metal buckles linking the resurfacing float to its gas bottle is slightly caught, he takes the time to free it. Then he takes hold of one of the little alcohol bottles on which the depth of 105 meters is written. He slips it under the top of his diving suit. His gestures are slow and completely relaxed. Then he gives a twist to the tap on the gas bottle and the float gently swells up with a hiss. A few more seconds to have a look around and he is on his way up, slowly at first, then faster.
At fifty meters, Jacques feels so good that he decides to let go of the grip of his resurfacing float and continues his upward journey by hand, completely relaxed, pulling himself up the cable with his arms. From time to time he looks upward, to where the light is getting stronger and more welcoming. His movements are open and synchronized. At thirty-five meters he stops for a moment, just to shake the hand of one of his divers, Guiseppe Alessi . . .
Another handshake at fifteen meters with another diver, and another stop of a few seconds one meter below the surface to take out the little alcohol bottle that is his proof. Three minutes and fifteen seconds after entering the water, he breaks the surface and then almost immediately dives down to twenty meters again, to shake the hand of Guglielmi and Araldi, who at that depth have begun their long periods of decompression. Then he comes back on board and in a completely natural way, helps the sailors to haul in the cable with the 110-pound weight on the end. His face shows not the least sign of tiredness.
The most striking detail of this record dive is less the exploit itself than the facility with which Mayol accomplished it, as if he had all the time in the world, no hurry to get back to the surface, wanting only to extend his immersion as long as possible and to get back into the water as quickly as he could. That is less the ease of an athlete than the natural state of a dreamer. Mayol was in his element under the water. In Water and Dreams, Bachelard, who also associated water with love, gave a precise analysis of the world of aquatic dreams. What water promises is that life can float like a dream. If one compares the imaginary world of Jacques Mayol to that of his rivals, Robert Croft and Enzo Maiorca, radical differences are apparent. The American, Robert Croft, a military instructor in the navy, whose job was to teach recruits to get out of a submarine in difficulty on the seabed, developed his ability to hold his breath within the framework of his duties. Training took place in a water tower above the ground, thirty-six meters high, in Groton, Connecticut, a long way from the sea. The Italian, Enzo Maiorca, on the other hand, had an approach both athletic and human, which seemed to be founded on self-knowledge and an understanding of his own limits. “When holding your breath,” he said, “you end up by assuming your exact own size, making your suit fit perfectly. When he is below water, the freediver sees himself in the depths, where he can, if he wishes, make a true X-ray of his heart and soul.” The Frenchman, Jacques Mayol, was apparently the only one to maintain a real elementary dream, less about staying human in a foreign milieu than about melting into it, and becoming a dolphin. In Homo delphinus, the masterpiece that he compiled over many years, he sums up the path that seemed to have become his destiny: “Research into the diving reflex in humans. I am deeply convinced that this reflex, which we have from our origins, and which it should therefore be possible to bring to the surface again, even partially, from our genetic memory, is in total harmony with nature and excludes any artificial procedure.”
Where Robert Croft imagines trying to escape from a submarine with his lungs as full as possible, and thinks of breathing according to the model of a military resource; where Enzo Maiorca steels himself not to breathe, following the model of athletic exploits; Jacques Mayol looks for relaxation and what is natural, following the model of the dolphin. A dream of difficulty overcome as opposed to a dream of facility, a dream of survival or human performance as opposed to a dream of becoming an animal. Who is right? Who is wrong? That is not the question. You don’t have to judge the value of an imaginary system by its measurable output, nor reduce a dream to the role of adjunct to the sporting performance; you just have to notice the degree to which elementary dreaming can make effort easy and above all give life as a whole the fluidity of a dream. Someone who imagines himself as a dolphin will be as happy as a fish or, rather, a whale, in water. “Man,” Jacques Mayol wrote, “will never die as long as he is able to dream. And the dream of Homo delphinus will live for as long as man protects the sea.”
For Mayol it was dolphins; for Hélène Grimaud it’s wolves. Two years after her serious moment of melancholy at the Festival de La Roque-d’Anthéron, the culmination of a depressive period in which she lost all pleasure in life and in playing, she had an unlikely and extraordinary encounter with a Canadian female wolf called Alawa. When she touched her,
I felt this sudden spark, a discharge through my whole body, a single touch but which spread through my whole arm and chest and filled me with a kind of softness. Just softness? Yes, coming from her imperious way of being, and drawing out a mysterious song from me, the call of an unknown, primordial power. She had this strange fur, with very long hair, and intense yellow eyes, and in her company I felt happy, whole, absurdly young and strong.
This was in 1991 in Tallahassee, Florida, and from that moment on, nothing would ever be the same. Grimaud developed a passion for wolves, deciding she must know everything about them and opening a refuge for them. Thanks to wolves, she reconnected with her own intuition, and rediscovered a form of immediacy that she had lost through plunging herself into endless analysis of musical pieces, instead of playing them. A few years later she became an icon, “the pianist who runs with wolves,” but she didn’t care: she knew they were far more than just an accessory to her success. She knew there was an instinctive bond between them. That is, until the day when she was invited to Boulder, Colorado, to make a film with some wolves she didn’t know, and was badly bitten. She admits:
To be honest, I had to fundamentally rethink my relationship with the wolves. I reached the painful realization that what had been happening until Boulder, this perfect symbiosis, my own animal side in harmony with that of the wolves, was completely abnormal, in the sense of being outside all norms. My unconscious, that feeling of complete invincibility, and sometimes even of immortality, that was my very essence, had imprinted my gestures with a kind of assurance which in the animal world only the dominant beasts possess. But I wasn’t a female wolf, I was just a woman, and the rest, everything else, was just a privilege. So would I be able to reestablish this lost innocence? I realized I was asking the question the wrong way. The big mistake was to believe, “if I love him, he loves me too.” The episode at Boulder taught me a lesson that I’ve applied ever since when I enter the wolves’ enclosure. I always keep in mind the wolf’s own terms, its rhythm and vision, not mine . . . I have learned to be extremely vigilant, and to be intensely engaged, down to my last fiber, my last neuron, in the relationship at that precise instant, as though it could slip away from me at any moment. And what is true for wolves is true for music too.
The wolf, first experienced by Grimaud as a dream, became a reality. But by adjusting to this painful new reality and losing her innocence, she acquired a new sense of presence and intensity. The call of the wolf first brought her out of her sadness by offering a dream, and then its bite brought her out of the dream, to show her reality. Hélène Grimaud realized the full meaning of this particular lesson when she was able to apply it to music, which she had lost her taste for. That was in Como, after a long, slow walk.
I sat on the stool and placed my hands on the keyboard and then, at last, I was what I hadn’t been for a long time. I was alone with the instrument without any pressure and with nothing more at stake than the joy of playing. For once I could be in contact with works without doing anything other than reinventing them. For myself alone. For my pleasure alone. To find momentum, life, and joy again. So I played. I played without aim, without sadness, without sorrow. All that had vanished. I played for hours and hours. And after all those hours I saw the light.
That was the end of the perpetual discrepancy between the soul and its envelope, the end of being out of kilter with the world, the end of rumination. The wolves gave her back the pleasure of playing for nothing. The pure pleasure of playing, without a goal, by obliging her to return to reality. A difficult lesson for an unrepentant dreamer, lost in her reading, her scores, and her conviction that she was a wolf. “Now it makes me smile because I’m in a different place. I’m in space. I occupy it. I inhabit the gaps between wolves, music, and writing. And that’s where I am at my best.” Slipping into the gap, passing in between, weaving one’s way through, what better definition could there be of playing? Where there is play, life can start to circulate again. But Grimaud did not renounce her dreams; she simply learned from them to be intensely attentive in real life.
Even if Hélène Grimaud, as Deleuze might say, was caught in a “wolf-becoming” that saved her life by restoring to her the possibility of metamorphosis, she never actually believed she was a wolf. She recognizes the boundary separating her from the animal world, and doesn’t take her dream for reality. Jacques Mayol, who went much further—perhaps a bit too far—in his “dolphin-becoming,” knew, however, that he was at best only a human amphibian, and that a total return to a watery existence was not possible. Others have not had such luck, or such wisdom. In Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a documentary, we meet Timothy Treadwell, who dreamed of becoming a bear and went to spend all his summers among the grizzlies in a wild region of Alaska. He said that he was ready to die for them, and that’s precisely what he ended up doing. Eaten by a bear that, to be fair, he did not know. The power of dreams is always ambivalent. The power that inspires can also destroy. We can be broken by the dream running through us. But what are we to make of Treadwell? He died for his dream but he lived it out before dying. For thirteen years. A considerable length of time. But if we look more closely, wasn’t this Californian bodyboard fan surfing bears rather than being their brother? Wasn’t he hooked on the risk as much as on the animals themselves? And by living on their territory in the belief that he was protecting them was he not, on the contrary, lacking in respect toward them? Didn’t he realize there was a price to be paid for crossing a border that both men and bears had respected for 7,000 years?
When Philippe Petit was balancing on his rope more than 400 meters up between the Twin Towers, perched like a bird, he says that he had a strange encounter. With a bird, in fact. Not a very friendly encounter. Probably curious about this intrusion into its space, the bird made a sufficient impression on the tightrope walker to convince him to obey the orders of the New York police and return to the human world below. Philippe Petit does not confuse the tightrope walker’s dream and the dream of being a bird. The bird-becoming that he experienced has nothing to do with an illusion of changing into an animal.
Philippe Petit is a perfect example of the balance between dream and reality that separates unconscious madness from a feat accomplished. His preparation is unbelievably demanding. For example, he trains himself to “remain balanced on one foot until the pain is no longer bearable, and then prolong this suffering for another minute before changing feet.” Why does he put up with the unbearable when nothing forces him to? The answer is in the question: because nothing and nobody forces him to. “I believe the whip is necessary only when it is held by the student, not the teacher,” he says. And he goes on: “The glory of suffering does not interest me.”
His suffering is part of the story of realizing his dream. He doesn’t seek pain for its own sake, he’s not a masochist, he takes it for what it is: a sign that the body has reached a limit. And if you want to push back a limit you need to know exactly where it lies. Yannick Noah: “Pain is the athlete’s barometer. The athlete likes to recognize signs of progress.” It is only in this way that pain can be delicious. It gives proof that you are literally exceeding yourself. This enlargement of our being is a joy. The aim here is to engrave equilibrium upon the body. Philippe Petit: “When the positioning of each foot has become quite natural, the legs will have gained their independence, and your step will have become noble and sure.” The skin suffers, but understands why. Changing skin comes at a price. “But I promise that when your feet slide to rest on a cable bed, you will astonish yourself with a smile of deep weariness. Look: on your sole there is what my friend Fouad calls the Line of Laughter. It corresponds to the mark of the wire.” The aim of all these efforts is to make effort disappear. Effort is useful, inevitable, necessary. But it must be directed, limited, considered, and expert. And aim toward its own disappearance. Effort is only a scaffold, a halfway house toward equilibrium and repose. In the end, the tightrope walk must be pure pleasure and facility. And to those who say that is impossible, Philippe Petit replies: “Limits exist only in the souls of those who do not dream.”
What’s more, if the tightrope walker starts to suffer, it’s never because he is trying too hard. Even when the rope begins to shake and you “want to calm it down by using force, you have to move smoothly without going against the rhythm of the rope.” Being attentive to the rhythm of the rope, so you can tune in to its music, lessens the sensation of pain. Not only does the dream give meaning to the effort, it also has analgesic powers. When you are following your dream you don’t experience pain in the same way. Petit considers training less of a trial than a hunt, a conquest: “You must not fall. When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. You must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward. You must win. Conquer!” You don’t fall, you jump. Similarly, when you’re chasing your dream, there is no place for tiredness: “Before setting foot on the ground, you must have reached a limit, however minimal: you are staking your reputation as a tightrope walker in order to win and so you have to leave your rope on a high, rather than because you’re tired.” There is therefore pleasure in effort. Far from being a stage on the road to a final dream of facility, the effort itself becomes, if not easy, then at least enjoyable. Philippe Petit, like Montaigne, might say: “Someone who only takes pleasure in pleasure, who only wins when he is at the top, who only likes hunting at the moment of the kill, has no business in our school.” Pleasure, far from being reduced to the final moment of the kill, is spread throughout the hunt and coincides with it. The pursuit of happiness is already happiness itself. A dream worthy of the name is accomplished as one dreams it. If Philippe Petit is capable of walking without shaking, not on a “beam so broad that we could stroll along it,” nor on “a plank wider than necessary,” but on a simple rope stretched between the tops of the towers of Notre-Dame, if he seems in this way to refute both Montaigne and Pascal, this is not as a result of some new kind of philosophical wisdom, which is stronger than the imagining of vertigo, but of an even stronger imagining and an even grander reverie. The tightrope walker’s dream is more powerful, vaster, and more euphoric than vertigo. Philippe Petit never had to struggle in vain against the fear of falling. This fear simply doesn’t exist for him and has neither the time nor the occasion to come into being. It’s not reason but imagination that triumphs over imagination: the dream cancels out the nightmare, quite simply by taking its place.
Yannick Noah agrees: “I don’t believe in effort for effort’s sake, I believe in making dreams come true.” You play better when you know why you’re playing or who you are playing for, when your effort has meaning. “Already as a junior player, I had won the title of champion of France, easy peasy, for a good reason: in the stands there was a girl from the Languedoc with a sad look, I couldn’t get her out of my head. That day I pulled out all the stops and played much better than usual.” Knights could always count on courtly love to give them wings in battle. Noah, who is still the only Frenchman to have won a Grand Slam tournament, has only ever done it once. He knows he could have done better, but nobody at the time told him how to go about it. What was he missing? He ended up by understanding it for himself, and too late. When you reach the summit, the problem is to find a new dream. Something else to conquer. An adventure rather than one more title to your name. “If I’d had in my head the metaphor Dan Millman is so fond of, describing a career in terms of a difficult climb up a high mountain, if I’d had the idea of setting off with a map like gold miners, I would certainly have accomplished greater things.” Yes, you read correctly. What he lacked was not training or talent, but a metaphor to rekindle his desire and justify his efforts. If someone had told him that winning the French Open was only a step up and not a summit, that there was still a hard climb awaiting him, his life would paradoxically have been easier. Yannick Noah was hungry for images. It was his imagination that needed nourishment, not his willpower. As a trainer he has grasped this necessity and tries to feed the minds of players with rich and inspiring images. It’s less the dream of victory than the reveries and focused imagination that work miracles. Imagining yourself as a gold miner when you’re playing tennis might seem a bit beside the point, and yet the gold miner is on a quest, he knows no discouragement, he is ready to dig as deep as he must to find the seam. Gold, as alchemists knew, is the fruit of effort. Gold, Olympic or physical, is always a distant dream requiring an effort to go deep and extract from the earth. On the one hand, you have the mountain as dream of air and ascent; on the other hand, gold, a dream of earth and the depths. It is always beneficial, Bachelard says, to offer images to an impoverished heart. The imagination dominates the life of the emotions. What Yannick Noah has created in the French Davis Cup team is a real Copernican revolution linking happiness and performance. Contrary to a long and ongoing tradition that characterizes happiness as the outcome of performance, he has adopted the opposite approach, which consists of starting from happiness and well-being to facilitate the performance. Performance is no longer an aim, it is an indirect consequence of happiness. You reach your goal without aiming for it. The dream is no longer simply a horizon, it’s a state that you look for in order to play “as in a dream.”
Not everyone, you tell me, can be a champion tennis player, freediver, tightrope walker, or pianist. And that’s where I wish to bring this book to its close, sitting comfortably in an armchair with Gaston Bachelard, the philosopher of reverie and happy imagination. For anyone, as he explains, can be a champion in their imagination. There is nothing stopping you. No competition, no adversaries, no obstacles.
In other words, you don’t have to dive a hundred meters down to be happy, it’s enough just to dive into the imaginary. Someone who imagines well will live well, and is better preparing themselves for an act of will. Careful, though—imagination is not a compensatory or escapist dream, it’s an energizing reality. Images are true accelerators of the psyche; they set the mind on fire. When you live out images sincerely, you feel them, you experience them. And you can do that lying on your bed, on a walk, in a train, in a plane, wherever you like. Obviously if you want the imagination to prosper, it’s best if you have nothing to do. This workout for the imagination, which consists of imagining an effort in a lyrical manner, allows you, says Bachelard with some humor, to “tone your whole being without risking the muscular betrayal that comes from the usual gymnastic exercises.” Of course, imaginary effort is anything but muscular. You won’t thoroughly energize your being by pushing yourself physically. Ordinary gymnastics remain superficial. An athlete will not attain peak condition just by training more but by finding inspiring images. Hélène Grimaud rediscovered the joy of music not by forcing herself to play the piano but via the route of the “animal dream.” “You don’t become a weightless soul from one day to the next,” warns Bachelard. “Pleasure is effortless and easy, but you must learn to be happy.” You know the road, though. It is neither steep nor difficult. There it is, out ahead of us, or rather inside us. You simply have to imagine it. Alain Passard saved his three stars and his life as a chef not by forcing himself to cook meat, but by taking a step back, giving up his activity, and refreshing his imaginary world through contact with the earth. We believe, like Bachelard, that “the lines of the imagination are the real life lines, those that are the hardest to break. Imagination and the Will are two aspects of the same deep-seated force. The man who can imagine can exercise the will.”
I remember when I was a child dreaming about the Tour de France before I knew how to ride a bike. I had a bike with training wheels. I used to watch Bernard Hinault on television, pedaling away. And then I would imitate him outside our house. If I got the angle right, and looked only at my shadow, I couldn’t see the training wheels. Soon, by dint of imagination, I found the courage to take them off. I fell off a few times to start with, but the pleasure was greater than the pain. I was no longer trembling with fear; I was beaming with joy. This was it! I could ride a bike! A moment before, I couldn’t. The next moment I could. Because, in a certain way, I already knew how to; I had already done it in a dream. Far from taking me away from my goal, reverie allowed me to reach it. Eureka! Anybody submerged in the imagination experiences a surge called hope. Bachelard says:
For a task that is fairly clear and of a certain duration, you should probably think before acting, but you must also dream a great deal before even beginning to think. In this way our most productive decisions are related to nocturnal dreams. At night, we return to the land of rest with confidence, and we act out our confidence in our sleep. If you sleep badly you cannot have self-confidence. We might think of sleep as an interruption of our consciousness, but in fact it binds us to ourselves. A normal dream, a true dream, is thus often the prelude and not the sequel to our active life.
It’s not just night but also dreaming that brings counsel. Good dreams lead to good decisions.
Now you know what you have to do.