Creative Meditation: On Disorientation and Art
You have to lose your moorings to find your moorings.
We are wired to want to know where we are in the world. We want to know what time it is. We want to know what direction we’re headed. We want to feel steady on our feet.
But it’s hard to be steady on your feet when you’re on an adventure. And our writing, our creations, are all adventures.
As much as stability and clarity are desirable, states of disorientation provide a different kind of kaleidoscope to see life through. To see life at a tilt. To discover worlds that would ordinarily go unnoticed.
When you’re disoriented, you lose your moorings. You lose track of where you’re going, or even where you came from. Travel disorients. Love disorients. Illness disorients. Death disorients. You’re in a place or a state that is unfamiliar. You’re not in a stable, reasonable world. Nothing seems fixed, and perhaps not even safe.
And that can be the best thing for your creativity.
Viktor Shklovsky introduced the concept of defamiliarization in his seminal essay, “Art as Device.” Defamiliarization is the artistic technique of forcing the audience or your readers to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance their perception of the…
