There's a Russian word — ostranenie — that I keep coming back to. Viktor Shklovsky coined it in 1917. It means something like "making strange." The idea is that art's only real job is to knock you out of the automatic.
Shklovsky was frustrated. He thought we'd turned perception into a kind of filing system. You see a chair, your brain stamps it CHAIR and moves on. No actual looking required. He wrote: "habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." A list that escalates, uncomfortably. The point is that everything goes — even what matters most.
What art does, if it does its job, is jam the filing system. Make you look at the chair again. Not because the chair is secretly profound. Just because it's actually there and you haven't been seeing it.
"Art exists to make the stone stony."
That's the whole essay, really. Eight words. Everything else is elaboration.
The Same Problem, from Denmark
About seventy years later, a Danish writer named Tor Nørretranders got at the same thing from a different direction. He was thinking about information — what actually gets communicated when people talk to each other. His finding: almost nothing. Not because people communicate poorly, but because language is compression. Every word you say has already discarded enormous amounts of context, experience, nuance — all the stuff that made the word necessary in the first place. He called this discarded material exformation.
So when you say "home," you've already thrown away every room you've ever lived in, every smell, every argument, every specific quality of light through a specific window. What arrives at the other person is the word. They fill it with their own thrown-away rooms. You assume you're talking about the same thing.
Nørretranders also pointed out that the brain processes around 11 million bits of information per second, but consciousness handles maybe 40 of them. The gap is not a failure. It's how we function. But it does mean that what we "see" is a heavily edited reconstruction, not anything like direct perception.
Ostranenie and exformation aren't the same idea, but they're both about a gap. Shklovsky's gap is between the object and our experience of it. Nørretranders' gap is between experience and what we can transmit. Both gaps are enormous. Both are invisible to us most of the time.
Turns Out Everyone Has Noticed This
What I find strange and a little moving is that every culture that has thought carefully about perception seems to have found their way to this problem. The routes are totally different. The destination is the same.
In Zen, there's shoshin — beginner's mind. Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." The expert problem isn't incompetence. It's that the world has been so efficiently sorted that nothing unexpected can arrive anymore. The beginner, not yet knowing what something is supposed to be, actually meets it.
Japanese aesthetics also gives us ma — the gap, the interval, the pause. It's not emptiness as absence. It's emptiness as the condition that makes everything else audible. The silence in music. The space between people in conversation. It's asking you to attend to what isn't there, which turns out to be where the thing is.
In Indian philosophy, maya gets translated as illusion, but that's not quite right. It's more like: selective attention. The world is real. What's limited is the slice of it your conditioning allows you to see. The practice isn't to see through the world — it's to relax the filter a little.
The Sufi tradition has hijab — veils. Layer after layer of assumption, habit, expectation. The mystical project is lifting them, one by one, not to arrive somewhere else but to encounter here more fully.
The Aymara people of Bolivia and Peru experience time spatially — but with the axes reversed from what we'd expect. The past is in front of them (visible, known). The future is behind (you can't see what's behind you). "Nayra" means both "eye" and "front" and "past." I keep trying to feel what this would actually be like in my body. I can't get there. Which maybe is the point.
I could keep listing — there's a lot more. The point isn't to catalogue. The point is that all of these traditions found, from their own completely different starting places, that ordinary perception is a kind of sleep. And that waking up — even briefly — requires something. A discipline, a practice, a word for the thing you're trying to do.
Why It Matters That We Can't Stay Awake
Here's what I find interesting: none of these traditions think you can just decide to stop habituating. The sleep is structural. The brain needs it to function. If you actually saw every chair as if for the first time, you'd be paralysed.
So the question isn't how to stay perpetually awake. It's more like: how do you make space for occasional waking? How do you keep the gap from closing entirely?
Shklovsky thought art did this. The Zen tradition thought a practice did it. Nørretranders thought just knowing about exformation changed something — made you a little more suspicious of your own certainties.
I think small things do it. An unusual angle. A long wait. Counting the branches of a crack. Holding your hand in a shaft of light. Things that don't give the brain enough to file quickly, so it has to actually look.
Which might be the whole project, here. Not enlightenment. Just: the filing system, occasionally jammed.