[ recap ]

Last week we looked at originality: Gutenberg's press, James Webb Young on ideas and Massimo Vignelli's pencil.

[ thoughts ]

In a new city you notice everything: the way doors open, how people queue, what coffee costs, which way to look before crossing. It's not automatic yet, so you notice all of it.

Then it fades.

Give it a few months and the new street is just the way to the station, the thing you walk through on the phone. I've had that feeling living in three continents, and it wears off the same way every time.

You stop noticing.

Viktor Shklovsky had a name and fix for this.

In 1917, the Russian critic begins his essay by admitting he could not remember whether he had just dusted his own couch. He had done it on autopilot, and a thing done unconsciously, he realised, may as well not have happened.

He called it habitualisation, and he was blunt:
"Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war."

Live on autopilot and life goes by without being felt.

Art, he argued, exists to undo that. Its whole job is to slow you down and make you see the thing again, to "make the stone stony."

He called the technique ostranenie, usually translated as defamiliarisation, or more plainly, making strange.

Take the familiar, and describe it strangely enough that the reader has to look at it properly for the first time in years.

He pointed at Tolstoy, who narrated a whole story through the eyes of a horse baffled by the human idea that a living thing can be someone's property.

Made strange, the ordinary becomes visible.

[ creativity ]

Defamiliarisation shows you what you couldn't see from inside.

In 1956, anthropologist Horace Miner, published a short paper in American Anthropologist describing a North American people called the Nacirema, a tribe with a morbid obsession with the body.

Every home had a shrine with a font of holy water, drawn from the community's Water Temple. They performed a daily mouth-rite, working a bundle of hog hairs and magical powders around inside their mouths. The very sick were carried to a temple called the latipso, stripped bare, and subjected to ceremonies by masked medicine men.

Their culture hero, Notgnihsaw, was famous for throwing money across a river and cutting down a sacred tree.

Nacirema is American spelled backwards. Latipso is hospital. Mouth-rite is brushing your teeth. Notgnihsaw is Washington.

Miner wrote the whole thing in the voice anthropologists used for distant tribes and pointed it at his own country, and by the final line every reader was looking at their bathroom cabinet as a shrine to a body they had been taught to find ugly.

Between 2018 and 2021, I lived and worked in Kenya, moving back and forth from the UK and I arrived with my British perspective.

Nairobi ran slower and more in the moment, and my first instinct was that this was an inefficiency to push through.

It kept not being one. Things got done.

There was as much hustle as London, but it was completely different. Relationships first, long greetings, tea before talks.

I built art and technology programmes for creatives in Kibera and Mathare, two of the biggest informal settlements in Africa, and a system that sent donations straight to the artists, tracked end to end, so donors could support without middlemen taking cuts.

It was hard work, and it got built on Nairobi time, not London time.

I had mistaken speed as competence, mistaking my own tempo for the thing that gets work done, when it was only a habit I had carried in, and the work happened fine without it, better sometimes, because the slow part was where the trust and the ideas actually formed.

[ making ]

Three ways to make yourself a stranger:

First: Go somewhere your routine doesn't typically cover. A part of the city you have no reason to be in, a room full of people whose work you don't understand, a service in a religion that isn't yours. Don't go to produce anything, just go to have your defaults fail, and notice what you see once they do.

Second: Take the thing you're closest to and write it up the way Miner wrote up his own country. Describe it flatly, as a stranger would, with none of your reasons attached. What does it do? What does it ask of the person using it? Strip your intentions out and put down only what is there.

Third: Go and read something in a field that isn't yours. Read how mycologists talk about networks, how chefs think about constraint, how a cartographer decides what to leave off the map, and look out for ideas that resonate with your own work. The best thing you'll take from another discipline is a way of seeing your own work that people inside your field never think to try.

[ sign off ]

Proust was after the same thing, writing about the painters and composers who could hand you their way of seeing. "The only true voyage," he wrote, "would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.