The Skid Boast

Teammates—

Thank god Josh took this in the direction of sports; now I have an excuse to drop all the volleyball and badminton and marathon analogies that drive my friends so crazy.

The act of writing (and art generally) does seem to have so much in common with athletics: you teach someone history or algebra but you coach them in writing (The hard science types will protest, and say the same is true of the improv of badass math). You learn the basics of basketball technique, memorize them, but then have to repeat them over and over until you forget them when you’re actually making the finger roll. The newer parts of your brain (learning things abstractly, grasping concepts via words), eventually give in to the old parts of your brain (reflexes, senses, habituation).

The muscle awareness overcomes the analyzing, judgment-making awareness. You’re absorbed, you’re in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state, you can do no wrong, your ego drops away, the violin is playing you, etc. It is the super-bestest, and if you can get there often, you get very very good at whatever it is you’re doing.

Playing squash in college, and was very bad at getting into the flow state, especially when I was playing big matches. I had the same disco-rice mind that Josh had on the racing blocks, and what made it worse: I thought that you could get into the flow by trying to strangle the chatty, doubty, wordy mind. Get out of my head, internal monologue!

It really quickly devolved into this: “Oh my god, if I’m THINKING about whether or not I can get into the flow state, I am by definition NOT in the flow state, and, Jesus, my opponent over there with the Walkman on, it probably never even occurs to him that there is any other state than the flow state, and he’s probably some Ivan Drago machine/noble savage who has no reflective consciousness at all, and oh I am so cursed with consciousness, and you taught me language and my only profit is to curse…and now the match is over and I hate myself.” I basically pried the squash-court map off of my brain with the crowbar of thinking.

So with writing, I think the flow state is extra hard to get into, because I’m trying to get past the chatty verbal brain into the…um, un-chatty verbal brain? It’s a real bitch when you’re trying to get the brain's new part to behave like the old part: according to reflex, intuition, habituated certainty, and so on. That’s exactly what the frontal lobe is designed not to do. I’m trying to make something inspired with the same part of my brain that produces the words that are distracting me.

I think writers like to bitch and moan just because, but I really do think it’s harder than painting and music because we have to move into words instead of away from them.

But the payoff is so huge. When I read something that has really performed human experience with words, I think the edge between the animal and the intellectual gets blurred, and I get a shocking, clarified feeling for life. It’s an awareness of all the things that happen to me all day long that I can usually only half-sense.

But the work is really hard. It seems like we’re starting to talk a fair amount about passion vs. patience, and the passion part helps when you just have to say something and so fuck that verbal resistance.

But the rare instances of patience help me so much, too. After my competitive squash days, I started realizing how much the scared part of your brain loves being strangled. You try to shut it up and it gets louder and louder. But just keep hitting balls, letting the voice sit over there and do its thing, eventually it gets quieter. And with writing, the more I sit at my desk, the less time I spend worrying about whether or not I can do this, the quieter that voice gets, too, even though worry has its way with me most of the time. Writing is the opposite of waiting—ok, so Roberto said this whole post in three words.

Another thing that came as a shock in squash was: thinking helped! If I let my analysis mind concentrate on the weaknesses of the other guy’s game, it got occupied and couldn’t worry about whether or not I was in the zone. OK, I’m getting weary with this analogy, so I’ll just say I think that has a lot to do with editing.

How are you all doing getting past words to get to words?

All right, off to do some star drills.

(P.S. If I could figure out how to make post titles into links, you would have seen this video. After watching it you should be able to do it perfectly.)