By Eric Le Roy
Basketball players call it ‘being in the zone’. Or ‘getting hot’. Athletes in other sports have the same encounters with this indefinable ‘magic’ when every fiber of coordination of the body and mind and vision seems to cooperate in such a way that, as soon as the ball leaves your hands, you know it’s going in; the basket is as big as an ocean; you can’t miss.
Sometimes, whole teams experience this, in which case it is called ‘momentum’. It means that, when things haven’t been going the way they should, something happens; something sparks. The momentum shifts, and the ‘comeback kids’ can do no wrong. The game pivots, and often a team that has been looking lost seems to find a collective identity and ‘catches fire’. The impossible becomes inevitable as the reinvigorated squad surges from behind to win. I have seen this many times, how intangible forces – as if guided by stranger levels beneath the surface of the visible – simply switch loyalties.
So what causes it? Is it the same thing that happens when a poet experiences a burst of celestial insanity, like a gale-force wind sweeping across his soul, scattering metaphors like heavenly detritus taking the shape of a human idea? Is it when a mathematician suddenly twirls his mental Rubik’s Cube in such a way that divine chaos is produced, the colors match as never before (and only half-imagained), an immaculate equation emerges, and the world changes before his eyes?
Is this what it means to be inspired? A lightning bolt across the mind?
Or is it the culmination of relentless effort and patience like desert sands? Is it the implacable resolve of the habitual player that causes the casino slot machine finally to spill its guts into a crashing pile of tokens? Is genius sometimes a matter of waiting, waiting, and waiting until the secret unfolds like a taciturn love object giving in at last and accepting a proposal from a persistent suitor? Is ‘creativity’ what happens when a boxer or a cheetah or a psychopath or a seagull suddenly spies an opportunity – after crouching, hovering, circling – and swoops?
Obviously, I am not sure which it is, or I wouldn’t have posed everything above in the form of a series of questions. But for me – and I have experienced these moments of transcendence (doesn’t matter if the result was ‘any good’ according to someone else) – the feeling of ‘flow’ seemed like a white water tide with me floating above it on a spear-shaped raft. All I had to do was control the raft and let the force work its will. In short, I was not leading it; it was leading me.
So, let’s say I am writing something, maybe a blog like this one. What happens is that I start, not with a ‘thesis’ and definitely not with an outline – but in obedience (I am not trying to be ‘mystical’ here) to what I call a guiding impulse. And here, I should explain that I write because something inside me urges me to. I read somewhere that anybody who ‘chooses’ to be a writer will probably never be one, and I agree – not because of snobbery or in trying to cast the artist as ‘the chosen one’ favored by the gods. I am saying that true artists make art because they can’t be happy doing anything else – and maybe they are not good at anything else either!
It is, as I gather with many entrepreneurs, professional fighters, pilgrims, holy men and women, and others of a kind, a calling. You have to do it, or you feel incomplete. In the same way that many people need a lover in the expectation and hope of love, an artist needs the adrenaline rush of entering the zone where creation can happen. But the ‘zone’ isn’t always there – as many basketball players have found out. It comes and goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.
Therefore, lacking the rational capability of figuring it out (if indeed that is what is called for), I simply drift along, more or less letting the thing write itself until….until…suddenly, like a running back in the open field (American football, sorry), you see which way to cut. It feels like ‘instinct’, but do we really know what ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’ are? (I had a friend tell me once that “intuition is just logic at nano speed.” That this definition has stuck in my mind for many years must mean that I believe it to be true.)
So I drift along, like a person looking for love in the city, and then the closest thing to what I am looking for appears. What’s great is that you know it when you see it, as in Murakami’s brilliant story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl”. And, miracle of miracles, all that you have been working for comes to you as easily as a nightingale landing on a fence post, singing a soliloquy, and flying away.
If I am writing fiction, I try to always maintain the appearance of a logical connection even as the real becomes the surreal, which it is doing in a novel I am working on at the moment. Many writers today seem to be producing what is called ‘magical realism’, and I confess it appeals to me too. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because of many factors, such as AI, which are changing our perception of reality and even what it means to be human. I do know that Kafka has been a big influence. If you want a sample of magical surrealism, try reading a story called “The Elevator” by William Sleator.
I let my mental energy that emanates from this bizarre progress dictate the path and even the destination (which remains insubstantial upon arrival), and very often I feel like a stranger on the sidelines watching an event take place. I am part of it because I am a witness, but that’s all: some other force or actor(s) is actually doing it.
Or we are in it together. The poet and the poem. The engineer and the bridge. The architect and the edifice. The pilgrim and the god. Imagine that. Imagine further the sublime ecstasy of the poet, engineer, architect, and pilgrim when the grand object of such spiritual longing and trembling effort simply opens and yields, allowing the seeker’s vision to become the vision of the poem, the bridge, the tower, and the deity, as well, so that there is no difference between the creative force and the creator and the created. The force itself unites them. Imagine.
Ok, so let’s come down to earth. Marriage between the dreamer and the dream is surpassing when it has been your own experience. But beyond that ecstatic fire of the moment, vibrantly lived in one’s own virtual reality stratosphere, does it mean anything? How can it affect the rest of the people in their day-to-day lives? People who are not us, not a mission to our own holy grail, but just exploring their own eventful and important lives?
First of all, I do think that this moment when nothing can go wrong is experienced on all levels. Why should it be limited to artists, vagrant holy men, and would-be builders of empires? Ordinary people (if that is not a contradiction in terms, because all people are extraordinary in one way or another) also have drama and revelation. They just don’t write stories or compose symphonies. The street sweeper, the window cleaner, and the poet are not galaxies apart – why should they be? Indeed, the poet often is inspired by something simultaneously eternal and ephemeral that he glimpses in the window cleaner. If you don’t believe me, ask one whose work you respect.
It is inviting to believe in the supernatural, even in the world of science and technology. In fact, it could be argued that some kind of last-ditch appeal to supernatural truths or at least escape hatches over, under, or through the blunting elements of thwarted existence on most levels is the next best thing to God, given that – oddly but fittingly, I believe, the God-Face of Christianity (Christ) is no longer believable to many whose counterparts a century or two ago would not have questioned the inviolable truth of it.
Religions still proliferate, and the world is full of followers, but – no disrespect – my own thorny path, after struggling for years on this question, has pretty much concluded, albeit reluctantly (old traditions are hard to let go of), that Jesus is more of a creation of the imagination than a verifiable biography. And isn’t that what ‘art’ is about? Endless interpretation and reinterpration of old dogmas? The real artist does not dismiss the truth of the dogma, but he trims the doctrines and laws and punishments away, and looks at the essence. And then he dares to put his own visions to the test – could he be right, he wonders? Or wrong? So the artist finds Jesus in her own way. The artist is always looking for the miracle in the stone.
So, Christ or no Christ, I think that many of us secretly or publicly wish there was such a godlike, humanlike, dolphin-like rescuer. But then blackness comes to the mind, and visions disintegrate. Depression. Despair. The artist knows this, and so does everyone else. We move to new cities, new sex partners, new loves, new poems, symphonies, bridges, and buildings. In doing so, with our feet firmly on the ground, we seek the visionary. We look at the world laid out before us, and some of us ask, “What if?” – not the ‘What is it?’ of ancient queries into the definitions of days and nights, but our own speculations that emerge in the aftermath of ‘knowledge’.
And it is this desperate need for meaning that fuels our intense curiosity on all levels. Yet, in my view, the artist and the wise man (sometimes the same, sometimes not) understand that it is the question more than any answer that counts, and it is through questioning that the ecstasy is found. Most people, when they get old and look back, remember the journey with more fondness than where they ended up. A destination is just a place; a journey, especially when you aren’t sure of the destination, or even that one exists, is where the wildness of faith comes in and drives the spirit. Faith in the goodness of the question, not the final tally of answers that are bound to seem anti-climactic and to disappoint.
Epiphany is when the sky parts and you see further skies, and further, and somehow the riddles of the cosmos fall into place like the easiest thing you ever tried to grasp. Ahhh! So simple, the endlessly unfolding questions, for you know that the questions are the answers. It all makes sense at last, that vision you find in the parting of the skies.
Then it is gone. You have finished writing the poem, story, or blog. So you come back to earth and edit the piece until you dare turn it loose into the public world, and who knows if anyone will read it? Anyway, that’s not why you did it.
So grab a basketball. Dribble out to midcourt, whirl, and shoot. Watch the ball rise on its trajectory, and – I guarantee you – if that ball is meant to go in the basket, you’ll know it the second it leaves your hand.
That’s what it means to be in the zone. It’s that brief moment of ultimate harmony when things make sense in such a simple way that it confounds you why it didn’t before.
It doesn’t last, of course. That’s why they call it a ‘privileged moment’. Even God, frustrated by his failed dominions, must envy you then, in your instant of SKY ROCKETING FREEDOM AND RELEASE, where you have insights as never before. Maybe you become ‘God’ in that moment.
They will leave you when you are on the street again. Then you and I will just be our normal, fumbling selves. Don’t fret. Maybe the visions will come back. Maybe not. Look at the poem, the sky, all unfinished business of your days, works, and hands. And keep looking. Take a bow and shoot an arrow across a lake. If it keeps going, understand that it knew better than you where it wanted to go.
