Tyler van Opstal- Flow and Autobiography

 

Flow and Autobiography

If flow is unspeakable except when it has finished then it implies that when we are not experiencing flow, we are capable of understanding and describing our thoughts and consciousness in the moment that they are happening. When our actions and awareness are not merged as in flow, we are able to use our actions to dictate our awareness. Such dictation is impossible in flow- to dictate a stream of consciousness requires that the hand or mouth be divorced from the awareness of what is around it, so that the mind can insert itself between awareness and action to translate the former into words and language (Redick, 240).

When that filter has been breached and awareness merges with action, as Dr. Redick describes in his experience with flow, there is no language because our awareness does not require language. Words are an invention we create to share our perceptions and point others to the symbols we have discovered but are not necessary for us to perceive and understand symbols that we have come across without direction.

Yet because humans do wish to share what they perceive and no man can step in the same river twice, it is important to understand how we can share an experience for which all the words have been made up long after the symbol’s creation at the beginning of the universe. To do so the experiences of flow create their own myths, their own sets of signs that are directed at the symbol they discovered. Many of these newly formatted (but now truly new, because all myths are very old) tales are only delivered in verbal form and are blessed with the slow and steady drift of language that informs all spoken stories. Some stories though which are possessed by those who feel any number of prides, arrogances, or well-meaning benevolences, are done the grave disservice of being put in paper to remain there leaden and vulnerable to the monstrous exegesis that haunts all writings of sacred experience (Lewis, “Unreal Estates”).

Yet to return to the concept of these non-flow experiences- though they can be dictated with some level of accuracy while occurring, they suffer even more greatly in the retelling than the experiences of flow. Dr. Redick refers to hidden preconceptions that alter the experience of flow when an experiencer attempts to recall and share the discovered symbol, but these hidden preconceptions are often innocent, and the intended goal is to faithfully share something sacred that cannot fully be shared. When the same preconceptions touch upon us in our attempts to recollect profane experiences, our inner desire to seek something sacred can render our retellings unfaithful.

“Spiritual Rambling” cites Csikzentmihalyi to explain that flow occurs mostly during “painful, risky, difficult activities… that involve an element of novelty and discovery” (245). These activities are the hallmarks of heroic journeys, on which all of our myths (and as noted before, retellings of flow are myths) are structured and to which many people aspire to achieve in their own lives. But heroic journeys are sacred, and the profane happenings that populate the lives of almost all people are settled in the category of events outside of the journey. They are had by people who have not yet heard the call, or who have heard and rejected it, or even those who once took up the call but then abandoned their journey. The latter, along with the category that finishes the journey but without the apotheosis that makes one master of two worlds, is the most likely to push their hidden preconceptions of sacredness onto profane memories and in such a way unfaithfully present within their myths things that are not mythological at all.

This is generally done by form of autobiography. Written by a journeyer when they have left the journey (not necessarily completed it) these books often move far beyond telling the tale of the adventure (which is the myth) and include the writers’ attempt to include in the myth the parts of their lives that were not part of the journey. This is not a malicious desire and comes more from a misunderstanding by the journeyer as to what comprised the journey than an attempt to weaken the overall tale. But weaken the tale it does- Dr. Redick’s retelling of his experience on the trail is limited enough by the need to rely on imperfect human language and memory. It would be hampered far greater if he prefaced it by describing the selection of candy at the last store he visited.

There is of course an academic argument for including the most minute and profane details in any recollection, especially autobiographical ones that seek to tell the story of a life and not a journey- but at the point that the primary goal becomes academic, we are no longer listening to or giving a story. To quote Chesterton, “The legend [story] is generally made up by the majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book [academia] is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad (Orthodoxy, 84-85).”  This is not to say that biography or even autobiography cannot become story- but that requires that the writer, rather than forcing the profane experiences that did not include flow to become sacred, reject the profane life and replace it with the sacred story.

An example of this can be Roald Dahl’s dual books of autobiography, Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986). In a later ‘academic’ biography of Dahl by Donald Sturrock (Storyteller, 2010), Sturrock describes many of the recollections in Boy and Going Solo as flights of pure fancy or compelling recreations of stories heard from others (112,117). In this Sturrock reveals what readers of Boy and Going Solo already know, that Dahl was a master storyteller and that when only profane experiences were available he would, rather than attempting to force them in all their profane truthfulness to sit alongside flow and myth (and thus damage the story), simply use story instead.

This use is championed by those who understand stories and villainized by those who see facts and academic integrity as tantamount. When one lauded biographer and novelist gladly proclaims “In novels one is forced to tell the truth, for example, whereas in biography one can invent more freely (Peter Ackroyd, in New York Review of Books),” another awarded biographer and professor calls that notion a “school of virtual reality biography [with] a deadly potential… lamentable, and also self-defeating (Kenneth Silverman, “Biography and Pseudobiography).”

Yet for all the complaining about the lack of profane details surrounding the flow described in so-called psuedobiographies by academics such as Silverman and Sturrock, when a writer knows that the best accompaniment for flow is true story, as pure fancy as it may be, it creates tales that bewitch and enrapture the mind far more than the academic mixture of sacred and profane can. Going Solo is a much more interesting read about Dahl’s time at war than Storyteller and despite (or even because of) its historical inaccuracies it likely presents a more perfect picture to the reader of who Dahl actually was. Sharing flow with others is difficult enough already, it is best that the sharers give it the mythic accompaniment it deserves.

 

General List of Referenced Works-

-        Redick, Kip. “Spiritual Rambling” in American Camino (2024). 233-282

-        Chesterton, G.K. “Ethics in Elfland” in Orthodoxy (1908). 81-118

-        Lewis, C.S. “Unreal Estates” in On Stories (1966). 223-239

-        Dahl, Roald. Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986).

-        Sturrock, Donald. Storyteller (2010).

-        Silverman, Kenneth. “Biography and Psuedobiography” in Common Place v3.2 (2003).

o   Ackroyd, Peter; as quoted in above