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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 familiar. Defamiliarization serves as a means for individuals to experience the everyday with a new twist, whether it’s through artistic language that reveals the world anew or a new form for a story.
Disorientation is simply a state of transition. It is a search for reorientation. It is a bridge.
There are many different ways to explore disorientation, whether it’s by meditating or taking drugs or staying up all night or exercising for long periods. Such perceptions, illusions, hallucinations reorder experience and create the conditions for poiesis (from Ancient Greek: ποίησις), “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.”
In an infamous letter to his publisher-friend Paul Demeny, Arthur Rimbaud, boldly defined his vision of poetic creativity around a “derangement of all the senses”:
