Playing with openings

1.  Whatever the child does with the right part of his body, he must subsequently do with his left. And vice versa. A snap of the fingers on the right means a snap on the left. A clicking of the left molars begets a clacking of the right. If in the secret of his right shoe he draws with his right big toe an outline of a sailboat, he must then do the same with his left big toe in the secret of his left shoe. He finds that his left big toe, like his left side in general, is less articulate than his right. But testing the differences between his left and right sides interests the child. Can he with one side, and with increasingly complex movements, mirror the other? He believes that if he can—if he observes motor symmetry—then he is in touch with something important.


2.  The child has other beliefs associated with physical movement. He believes that certain profound things might happen if he moves in a certain way. If he commits a precise combination of gestures, then nature may molt, its laws inverting, for everyone. He might portray a bipedal, pelvis-thrusting lizard, and then the earth has no gravity. He might make a pretzel of himself in an attempt to stretch an obscure back muscle that’s never had the pleasure, and then the invisible dimensions of the world will seep into appearance as on a fresh polaroid. He might lunge while rolling his head counter clockwise making a rodent face, triggering a dawn of global sexual honesty. He would have likened these speculative events to flailing his arm in panic to get a scary insect off, accidentally performing the member’s hand signal of an enlightened secret society, the door to the headquarters of which he did not know he was in front of, causing the doorman who he did not know was a doorman to step aside and say, “Welcome back, sir.”  He had seen a trope in adventure movies, where access to an ancient world of chthonic splendour hidden behind impervious stone doors is gained only through a hapless protagonist leaning in resignation against some object in the antechamber, one that turns out to be the lever that causes a chain reaction ending with the parting of the doors.


3.  Other than these analogies, the child wouldn’t have been able to put it to words, but what his beliefs about movement and sequence indicated was a growing awareness of the mysterious power of composition. A sequence, a constellation of distinct gestures of varying masses and shapes separated by particular intervals, invoking a rare and palpable spirit or a frighteningly deep sensation. The composition might be calculated, it might be instinctual, it might be aleatory—probably it is a mixture, although I think too much calculation can ruin it. As we have seen in the child, it could be kinaesthetic, but it could also be sonic, verbal, pictorial, or spatial.

It’s just parts arranged in such a way that an opening is made. Celestial forms arrayed in such a specific dynamic orbital tension around a fireball, that on one of the forms appear flowers and fish. Gasses rise from the Delphic crack, into the lungs of the Pythia, letting her see sooth. The apse of a cathedral—the spheric ooze of god. The right assignment of places at a dinner table—a night of its own volition. And it seems to me that the different figures in a painting with a good composition used to be one, a point, but they were pulled apart into such a precise balance of tensions that they remain apart, forming a gate through which a forgotten realness can waft—and if any of the figures in the composition were removed or shifted, all of the figures would collapse back into a point, closing the gate.


4.  Tennis can only take place on a tennis court—a flat, hard expanse of ground marked with a quadrilaterally symmetrical composition of 7 lines of precise length, bisected by a vertical plane made of netting, about waist height and pulled down a bit at its midpoint so that its top chord forms a shallow vee. Only within this composition can true tennis occur. I say “true” and not “real”, because real tennis is a different sport, an ancestor of tennis with its own distinct court that is only bilaterally symmetrical, involving a partially pitched wall—behind both ends and along just one side of the court—which is not out of bounds but is actually used in the game. Presumably, it was not always called “real tennis”, but just “tennis”, until it was overshadowed by its eponymous offspring. Either that or it connotes its doublet “royal” (both being connected to “roi”, “regnal”, “regal”, and “realm”), as it was historically a sport of royalty. It is indeed called “royal tennis” in some places, and there are only a few courts in the whole world. Then again, if this is the correct etymology, if the “real” is closer to the french “réal” (royal), then, according to a tendency for royalty to superfluously qualify their things as “royal”, perhaps it was always called “real tennis”.

My Queen, shall we play real tennis?

My King, there is no other kind—you can just call it tennis.

So far it’s the only kind. But just wait—eventually the subjects will start copying us like they always do.

And what’s wrong with that?

Nothing, nothing… the subjects are great. I just think we should make the distinction ahead of time.


5.  In any event, the simple composition of the modern tennis court, of 7 planimetric lines and one vertical plane of mesh, can be understood as an opening in the world for something distinct to come through. If two people (for simplicity we’ll not talk about doubles here) step into the court with strung racquets and a single furry rubber ball about the size of a fist, then a singular and vibrant exchange between them can occur there. They hit the ball back and forth over the net, each of them trying to do so in such a way that the ball doesn’t come back and land in their side of the court. But the composition of the court makes this exchange happen in a certain way. And if the composition were changed, the mode of engagement would also be changed, possibly inhibited. Take, for instance, the most obvious aspect of the composition: the rectangular shape of the boundary lines. This shape promotes hitting the ball diagonally—“cross-court”—because the court is longer when measured diagonally, giving you more depth to hit into, reducing the chances of hitting the ball long and losing the point. The vee of the net, giving it a lower middle, compounds the appeal of cross-court shots. These two compositional features make cross-court rallies prevalent and “neutral” in tennis. And this is why hitting the ball “down the line”—which, being over the higher part of the net and into a shorter part of the court, makes it comparatively risky—is so impactful if well timed and executed. It can have the striking effect of a rupture in a pattern. More beautiful still is when a player responds to a sudden down-the-line shot with another down-the-line shot. The player who hit the first down-the-line shot will probably move to the other corner, expecting their opponent, who is on the run and off-balance, to try to return the ball cross-court. But, instead, the opponent, too, goes down the line, into an area of the court even more difficult to hit than usual, given the circumstances, but which is, because of that diffuctly, reasonably being left open. And you pour the ball into the opening. When this is pulled off, it is breathtaking. Federer was amazing at it.

If the vee of the tennis net were inverted, these patterns and their life-giving ruptures would change. Even more so if also the corners of the court were bevelled or filleted, shortening the cross-court dimensions. I don’t know how that game would play out, whether it would be inherently awkward or have a beauty of its own. But the incredible, simple beauty of tennis is contingent on (among other conditions) the standard composition of the court on which it occurs.


6.  Again: the players hit the ball back and forth over the net, each of them trying to do so in such a way that the ball doesn’t come back and land in their side of the court. There is a way to construe this objective that amounts to a psychospatial strategy, one to which you’ll sometimes hear coaches and commentators allude: make your opponent feel like their side of the court is bigger than yours. Shrink—close—the opening that is your side of the court through anticipation and speed, and expand the opening that is your opponent’s side of the court through imbuing your shots with angle, curvature, power, and variety of depth and height. Make the court a trapezoid. In the opening in the world formed by the composition of the tennis court, my opponent and I have a dual, and our dual consists in trying to manipulate openings. In long, high-level tennis rallies, viewers feel the court convulsing, expanding and contracting, gasping and exhaling, opening and closing. It’s as if space itself was laughing, and we were delighting in vertigo at the edge of its laughing mouth. And maybe that’s why when we’re paying attention to such an exchange, we also find ourselves laughing. Why should we be laughing?  What’s funny about great tennis? Maybe funniness is about playing with openings.