Defamiliarize

There’s this collection of Dr. Seuss books Nina loves, to the point of memorization, called My Big Book of Beginner Books About Me. Each story covers a different body part, which we often point to while reading: feet, eyes, ears, nose…. And the other day, amidst the tooth chapter, I asked Nina: “hey, how many teeth do you have?”

I then paused, quickly realizing that I don’t know how many teeth I have. Multiple decades of living with these things in my mouth, a round of braces, a round of Invisalign, many retainers, and yet, beyond being fairly confident that it’s an even number, I can’t tell you if these chompers total up to 20 or 30 or somewhere in between. At some point, I’ll conquer my embarrassment and ask the internet: “how many teeth should a 35 year old have?”

This was mainly just a funny realization, but it kept sitting with me. Something once assumed familiar, literally part of us, can all of a sudden appear completely foreign. It’s a bit like when you say a word too many times and it starts to jumble in the mouth, dissolve in the ears, lose its meaning.

It’s tolerable to not know something. But it’s unnerving to no longer know what you thought you once knew.

For most of my life, this is a feeling that I tried to avoid. Despite not wanting it to be on the menu, my anxious mind would regularly offer up super-sized servings of derealization — a sudden onset of life feeling foreign, not real. And then I’d do all I could to clamor back to some sense of control, consistency, coherence. You know, normal behavior, like staring in the mirror repeating my own name or that fun game where you try and guess if you’re already in a mental institution and this is has all just been a dream.

But as I’ve been graciously afforded the gifts of time, therapy, and healthcare, I’ve become more accepting of these sensations. I’ve found myself increasingly curious, interested, and drawn towards the experience, and even trying to intentionally bring it on by making the familiar unfamiliar.

There’s a (rather obvious) word for this: defamiliarize. It’s described as “an artistic and literary technique that presents common, everyday objects or situations in strange, unfamiliar, or new ways to break habitual perception and stimulate fresh, conscious, and deeper perception. Coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, it aims to make the familiar feel "strange" to prevent automatic, unthinking responses to life.”

In my brief research, the practice has a rich history with a positive association across art, sociology, anthropology, and I’m sure many other domains. I can’t recall where I first became aware of the concept, but it might have been Oliver Burkemen, who has explained the benefits of de-familiarization as a path to getting unstuck:

Often, the way to get unstuck isn’t to change whatever it is you’re looking at—but instead to change how you’re looking at it. We see the world, and our work, through countless lenses of assumption and habit—fixed ways of thinking, seeing and acting, of which we’re usually unconscious…”The real act of discovery,” wrote Marcel Proust, “consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” The trick is to cultivate what George Carlin called “vuja dé”: a strange sense of unfamiliarity in the familiar, thereby revealing opportunities or solutions you hadn’t previously noticed.

You could sum this all up to seeing the world anew. For children, they of course can’t help but constantly inhabit this perspective, as life is not yet familiar. And this is why they are so often portals for adults to discover life on new terms. The other day Nina instructed me to “go pee pee up in the sky”. Now, I don’t know how to respond to that. But it definitely got me thinking: like peeing on airplane? or like actually peeing in the sky? wait a minute, do birds pee in the sky? wait, do birds even pee or is it just some pee-poo mixture? And then, the next thing you know, I’m finding life to be wonderfully strange and unfamiliar.

It doesn’t take much to conjure up this child-like perception. Last week, while it was lightly raining, I was exiting the Embarcadero Bart stop — as I’ve done hundreds of times before — but this time I didn’t have my AirPods in, and my phone was inconveniently tucked away. In this absence, I felt compelled to just look up. The skyscrapers seemed so much taller than I ever remembered. This then, for some reason, made me more aware of the warm, metallic, familiar breeze of underground transit — which, daring to risk my reputation here, was an oddly comforting smell, like clothes out of a dryer. And I felt this semi-trance of heightened sensitivity carry me throughout my few block walk to work.

Sometimes all it takes to make the world anew, is to pick up that head of ours. I’m not always great at this, but I have a justifiable excuse: have you seen the size of this noggin?

Closing quote

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert A. Simon

Parting song

Dan Reeder is a songwriter I admire who’s got sort of a cult-following among the indie / folk scene. He and his daughter, Peggy Reeder, just put out a live album, full of such wonderful harmonies. I caught a clip of their performance on Stephen Colbert, and have since been listening to the record. Angels May is a favorite.