As a writer, flow states are miraculous holidays, torrents of creativity where words leave the mind all at once, fluidly and naturally. They manifest in a pure, immersive focus where the mind is engaged and creating as if on autopilot. It is absorption in the work, all senses sparkling. It can be a type of hyperfocus, but for a writer, it is the shiniest earring, the warmest meal, the blue hour that extends. 

Action and awareness entwine, and time is distorted inside the brain. The world is malleable when you’re swimming inside your own. However, something must set off this state. Flow conditions such as intrinsic drive and a non-passive activity will catapult one into the flow state. Taking a bath will not exactly set off brilliance. I discovered the joys of a flow state over a three hour phone call with my friend Sam, as he described to me why I couldn’t stop writing for over an hour and why it was some of my best work. 

This began in the bath of my violet-lit bedroom, where I was both reading M-Train by Patti Smith as well as this New York Times Magazine feature on Lorde from early 2017. These immersive writings galvanized a cascade that sent me down many pages. And I soon learned that it isn’t sheer luck to achieve that again. 

march 20th, 2020: roslyn, NY

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One can only read so many Patti Smith full-length books, and it is healthy to oscillate between authors. Patti Smith, ever-sharp in her silver-haired age, launched her Substack in April 2021, sharing snippets of writing as well as a serial story titled The Melting. It chronicles Smith’s journey in the Continental Drift Club, examined intricately in her book M-Train. Beginning in the 1980s by a Danish meterologist, it is an obscure earth-science-based society. It meets in secrecy, mostly comprised of mathematicians, theologists, and geologists, yet Smith was granted membership by accident after writing a series of letters to the Alfred Wegner Institute, searching for a living heir. She has attented real meetings of the Club, yet in The Melting, she fuses elements of the club with her She is underneath a secretary that sends her on obscure, existential, philosophical, dreamlike quests. Almost a continuation of the themes of Year of the Monkey, there is a diaphanous threshold between dreams and reality. The reader weaves in and out of fantasy, or perhaps we are in some enchanted world of hers. Eastern Europe houses a lot of The Melting’s episodes, as well as Smith’s childhood in Pennsylvania. Images from her various and plentiful travels around the world ornament the story, rendering the fairylike description of statues entirely material. It is a beautiful play on reality, her language a refracting [rainbow]. 

An author crafting a novella-length work in real time is rather unprecedented. The way in which Smith utilizes the internet as a way of sharing her work through different textures, all while keeping her quintessentially lyrical style. In a world with the curtain still drawn, Smith continues to do readings, intimately, from her very own, unadorned bedroom. At even the strangest hours, she reads poems from William Burroughs with her cat Cairo. She continually varies content, presenting a sea of gems accruing over a year. 

“The windows seemed composed of light”

She crafts her dream worlds in cafés, sometimes sharing the physical drafts on her Instagram. Adhering to a poetic format, each post of hers begins with “This is,” and includes line breaks, granting poems to her followers like a little candy almost every day of the week. Once she posted about a new book called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and I could not shake the words from her small poem out of my mind. She called the book “a thoroughly seductive book,” and so on my birthday I went to the Strand Bookstore and bought a copy. She posted another photo alongside the book of the most perfect cup of matcha green tea. I immediately felt immersed into her world, reading a book whilst dining alone at a Japanese restaurant at lunchtime. For some reason it still resides in my mind, almost a writer’s haven, like a daydream on call. 

“Everything had taken on the translucent colors of a fractured rainbow.”

The Melting 42

It is her internet presence, so embroidered into the most routine pressings of the screen, that propel me into those flow states. Many artists and writers cite Patti Smith as their utmost inspiration, and through some research about flow states, there is such thing as an autotelic personality. Patti Smith fits the enigmatic traits. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes autotelic personalities: 

“An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding. Because such persons experience flow in work, in family life, when interacting with people, when eating, even when alone with nothing to do, they depend less on external rewards that keep others motivated to go on with a life of routines. They are more autonomous and independent because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life.^[4]“

Patti Smith still leads a minimalist existence, wearing Electric Lady Studios tee-shirts like a uniform with her signature dungarees and black jacket. Her slick look requires no high budget of a celebrity, and she lives in a quaint bungalow most of the time in Rockaway. Her life is a perpetual current of creativity and coffee, not reliant upon material goods other than certain talismans and notebooks. 

Her writing illumines the autotelic qualities within me, and the serial story of The Melting furthers my capacity for a flow state to spark. One sentence from one of the early Melting stories set off an entire poem, a reveling in domesticity and one’s own space.