In the second part of her essay on the “flow” state and its impact on creative work, Cole Cohen finds self-forgetting a requirement for every writer—and reader. Missed part one? Find it here.

In the first Ghostbusters movie (a childhood favorite of mine) the Ghostbusters are called upon by a cellist, Dana, to destroy Gozer the Gozerian, a Sumerian shape shifting god of destruction and chaos who has taken up residence in her Manhattan apartment building. Toward the end of the film, Gozer swears to take on the form of whatever image pops up in the Ghostbusters heads and in that form destroy the city. Ray, the one “true believer” in the paranormal who is played by Dan Aykroyd, thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a beloved corporate mascot from his childhood who, in Ray’s words, is “something that could never, ever possibly destroy us.” A giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man emerges and the Ghostbusters must use their proton packs to explode Roy’s anthropomorphized corporate colossus into a harmless marshmallow cream that rains down upon the city. It’s difficult for me not to draw a parallel between Ghostbusters and our own current political climate. Some of us suppressed the unthinkable, that Trump would win, while others imagined Trump as a beloved figure of nostalgia willed into power. How could he possibly harm us? A 2016 a remake of the Ghostbusters starring an all-female cast of jumpsuit wearing parapsychologists proved too much for the cultural imagination; it bombed at the box office.

Obsession is what happens when focus becomes singular.

In order to get to Gozer, the shape-shifting destructive force, one must first pass Zuul the gatekeeping demon guardian servant who protects it. Music is my proton pack, it houses the beam that I unleash to blast the membrane that protects the blank page from my thoughts. I often listen to the same song or album on repeat while I’m writing. I wear headphones even if I’m alone because they form the boundaries of the sonic space that I work in. When I’m writing sound is space; it’s where I go. It’s not uncommon for people with differently wired brains to compulsively inhale the same media over and over or to obsess over a singular interest. Children with Asperger Syndrome used to be called “little professors” for their ability to become consumed by a “special interest.” Disney characters, deep fat fryers, the targets of this passion are not as important as the energy with which one seeks it out. This is where “flow” state and hyperfocus dovetail into obsession, a similarly gratifying force of destruction. Obsession is what happens when focus becomes singular rather than spacious, when there’s no room left to share an interest. I think of singular obsession as where my writing begins and compassion as the destination.

In his 1863 “An Essay Concerning the Bourgeois” from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Dostoevsky compared the mechanics of socialism, sacrificing oneself fully to the common good while suppressing any thoughts of self-interest, to trying not to think of a polar bear, recalling Tolstoy’s childhood game:

For example, I come and sacrifice myself completely, once and for all: well, it is necessary that I sacrifice myself completely, once and for all, without any thought for gain, without in the least thinking that I am sacrificing my whole self to society and, for this, society will offer its whole self to me. The sacrifice must be made in such a way as to offer all and even wish that you receive nothing in return, that no one will in any way be obligated to you. How is this to be done? After all it is like trying not to think of a polar bear.

The relationship between reader and writer requires for the reader both a forgetting of the self enough to become involved in the story

The conclusion that Dostoevsky reaches is that there must be a selflessness innate to both the individual and the community. No one person can think of individual self-interest instead each must participate in an organic amnesia of all desire beyond the greater good. For this to work, he proposes, it’s essential that the community reflect back the individual’s self-forgetting. If you recall the receipts then you just lost the game.

Letting go of individual needs requires a self-forgetting that’s similar to forgetting your judging self in writing; this is not to say that making art is an inherently selfless act. The need to express—to share the experience of being human with another in the hope of being seen and understood—begins with the writer momentarily slipping loose of personhood to become who they are on the page. The writer needs to sneak past the gatekeeper of her own thoughts to confront the god of destruction, to allow the destabilizing self-haunting of making to take possession. The relationship between reader and writer requires for the reader both a forgetting of the self enough to become involved in the story and also the ability to be called back into your personhood by recognition of yourself in the essay. It isn’t that different from Dostoyevsky’s socialist vision; the writer says, “Here, take me” and the reader says “No, I couldn’t possibly, take me.” In this arrangement we settle into the shared trance of reading and being read. Ideally, the boundaries between writer and reader blur until the book is shut and we have to return to daily life, losing the game of shared consciousness. Hopefully the reader rejoins the world with what Tolstoy called our “innocent joy and boundless desire for love” replenished, a little more excited to share ideas and experiences with the world. The goal of the game, of course, is not to win but to not lose alone. ♦

(Image credit: Photo of Dana Sederowsky’s performance The Writer, 2017, courtesy of Dunkers kulturhus via Flickr.)

Writing an essay is a mind game. Can you play without forgetting that you’re a participant? Writer Cole Cohen muses on some strategies for self-forgetting.

Everyone in the world who knows about the mind game The Game is playing it. The objective of The Game is to not think about The Game. As soon as you’ve thought about The Game, you’ve lost. Once you know about The Game, you cannot opt out of playing. You can’t really win The Game; you are only ever in a process of not yet losing it. All losses of The Game must be announced by an admission, “I just the lost The Game.” You can’t really confess to losing The Game without reminding the person you are confessing to of the existence of The Game, causing them to also lose it.

Every morning I pour a cup of black coffee, sit in front of my laptop and shove my headphones over my head. I play a little game with myself: I can’t take my first sip of coffee until I’m typing and once I take my first sip I have to keep typing throughout the time it takes me to finish the cup. According to the tenets of this game, I am allowed to stop typing after the first cup of coffee if I want to. Often the first cup of the coffee and the first side of an album on repeat are all I that I need to dissolve into the slipstream of caffeine and music. If I stop to recognize that I am corralling words into formation to make sentences to cluster into paragraphs to organize my thoughts into a blanketing narrative with a beginning, middle, and end it’s all over. I just lost my game. You can’t play The Game or my own writing mind game without forgetting that you are a participant. There are only two modes: forgetting and losing.

No one is sure of the origins of The Game but my favorite story about its conception is the one that takes place in the mid-1990s involving two British engineers stuck on a London train platform overnight after missing the last train. To try to make the best of their circumstances, they made a game of trying not to think of the situation; whoever first remembered that they were both stranded on a train platform until sunrise lost the game.

How can I manipulate someone else’s perception with only words?

Writing an essay is a mind game. What am I thinking? How do I untwist questions I have from each other and lay them out into narrative form? Why does anyone else care what I’m thinking? How can I manipulate someone else’s perception with only words? I have found that I can’t structure my thoughts clearly and express them if I think about these questions while trying to get words on the page. It’s overwhelming. So I start with what I’m thinking. In order to find out what I’m thinking I have to work from a gentle remove. My first cup of coffee in the morning and the music through my headphones are a buffer between me and my thoughts about my thoughts. Riding the high of the first hit of caffeine helps me to forget my form and shape shift into text.

Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly characterized the state of “flow” as a highly focused positive mental state in which one is absorbed in the task at hand beyond all sense of space and time. I first heard of this driven mental territory as a child diagnosed with ADD, one of the symptoms of which in children is a tendency to “hyperfocus” on their interests at the expense of their obligations such as homework or chores. It took many years and lots of psychological testing to determine that I actually don’t have ADD but instead a hole in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for spatial attention. I have a lot the same characteristics as someone with ADD; I still have a childishly difficult time engaging in tasks that I consider boring and once I get ahold of an interesting concept I pursue it intensely until I don’t care about it anymore. In the state of flow or hyperfocus I can relax because it allows to me live like a brain in a jar, free of the embodied confusion of the spatial world. Hyperfocus is also a trance that relieves me from judging the quality of my work. I don’t lose my game for writing badly, just for not writing. Play is a rehearsal for failure, it’s a fantastic opportunity to take a tumble and get back up. Artists have an active relationship with failure; in my feverish dream state I give myself permission to write garbage for my editor self, the adult in charge of boring things like making sense, to work out later.

Play is a rehearsal for failure, it’s a fantastic opportunity to take a tumble and get back up.

Making art is chaotic and destructive, it starts with making a huge mess and then later asking how the hell do I get myself out of this? Like The Game, if you think about how to get out of the trap while you’re setting it for yourself then you’re already in it. The Game is an example of ironic process theory; the psychological state where the attempt to suppress certain thoughts brings them more frequently to the forefront of your mind. In his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Leo Tolstoy recalls playing a childhood game with his brother where one stands in the corner and tries not to think of a white bear. In Childhood, Tolstoy wrote, “Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues— innocent joy and the boundless desire for love— were the only motives in life?” One of my earliest memories of play is of when I first learned to walk and run. Chasing groups of pigeons in the park until they took flight gave me absolute unbridled glee. To me, though probably not to the pigeons, this was a game that I was playing with them. In this game I was effortlessly present in making mayhem without considering the consequences. On my best days working on a first draft, I’m mowing down blank space on the page with that same manic joy I felt terrorizing pigeons as a child.

Read part 2.

(Image credit: Courtesy Denis Bocquet via Flickr.)