Shakespeare may have said it best, through the mouth of Hamlet to Horatio. I've been thinking of that quote often, lately. There is something about our inability to conceive all ends. It makes a door seem like more than a door. We've seen the door, how many times? We've walked through it, opened it, closed it. Depending on time spent, we might have taken it from its hinges to repair it. Then, one night or evening, you walk past the same doorway. As you do, there's that all too familiar feeling on the back of your neck. Perhaps you confront the feeling. You continue to stand to stare. Nothing happens, but the feeling still occurred. Even if it abates, or relieves quickly, it was still there. Still, the appearance of that opened door confounds the mind.
"O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!"
from A.1s.5 of Hamlet by William Shakespeare
So how does one write that door? Perhaps that's something that cannot be done consciously. One must simply wait for symbols and attributes to coalesce until finally there is representation. In that case, the questions become how does one find the door, is it necessary to find at all, or is the pursuit of such a door merely a hallmark of glib psychoanalytic obfuscations?
There does seem to be at least some merit to (perhaps not the door) this idea of strangeness, what the formalists called defamiliarization. Any student who's attended an entry-level creative writing course has probably heard this term. Make things "strange" they'll be told. Make the familiar, unfamiliar. Some of this is simply the circumvention of expectations dressed up and presented in pedantic academic clothing. Like most things that have been dressed up, however, there is something internally significant that outlasts its own abuse.
"At every step, be it in the realm of aesthetics or ethics, one encounters the opposition that the strangeness of man raises against the wisest of theories."
from A Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz
A similar "feeling" can occur when you read an exceptional piece of literature or poetry, when you watch an aesthetically profound film, or have the privilege to spend some time with a truly remarkable painting, an occasion which, I fear, is becoming increasingly rare. The sense is different with each medium, but how it completes seems to converge at the same point. There is that same sense of the bizarre, removed from fear, starting at the back of the neck. You think to yourself, what the hell was that? One moment you were staring at a sheet of canvas that had been spattered with colors and design. The next you're struck dumb by profundity. And it's not even profundity with words. You may not be able to speak it, but you cannot deny the way it puts you at a slant.
What makes this moment so difficult is how slippery it can be obtained. Even a writer with objectively immense capabilities might set themselves to work with this expressed intention and still only manage to produce something marginally quaint, what one might call "cute" or "interesting." The logic of defamiliarization then may be false. It is, in a sense, working backward without completing a loop. Because one can see that a thing has been made unfamiliar, then logic would suggest that it can be reverse-engineered. Like most that assume to perceive all ends, this works in theory but almost certainly fails in practice. You only have to look as far as those who've been told exactly what they need to do and still fail to do it. It's not enough to call something by another name.
"Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,"
from 'Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking' by Walt Whitman
What to do, then. If you want to create art that can capture what is strange, how can one go about it? The answer may be to not try at all, that these moments are inherent in the observance of a thing and not in its creation. One gives themselves over to faith. That is probably the most difficultly taken point in our western culture today. In an era post manifest destiny, post exceptionalism, post self-love, to say there is nothing you can do, grates against the sensibilities of multiple generations. Stop watching the plants grow, stop plucking at their stems. So much today is the product of excessive grooming. Look for strangeness in the arrival of things, not in their acquisition.