IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 21
Making the Stone Stony
How to see the ordinary thing again
There is a stone by the path. You have walked past it several hundred times. It is grey, it is about the size of a fist, it is smooth on the side the water gets at, and it is slightly yellow where the lichen is not. If somebody asked you to describe it you would say a stone, and you would be right, and you would also have described a category rather than a thing. You have seen it. You have not looked at it. Those are different acts and they feel almost the same from the inside.
The ordinary does not fade because it is boring. It fades because you have done the work once. The first time you saw that stone you saw a shape, a colour, a texture, a weight if you had picked it up. The second time you saw a stone. The third time you saw a stone. Somewhere between the second and the tenth, the perception switched off and the recognition took over, and recognition is much cheaper and gives you much less.
The world is not full of boring things. It is full of things you have finished looking at. The skill this essay is about is finishing them again.
Here is an exercise that takes two minutes and works on almost anything. Pick a familiar object, a door handle, a spoon, the front of your own kettle. Look at it without naming it. Not without thinking, and not slowly. Just do not use the word.
You will find that in about four seconds your attention reorganises itself around the thing rather than the category. The handle stops being a handle and becomes a particular shape with a particular wear pattern. The spoon becomes a long flat object with a raised edge on one side, which you have never noticed, and which is there because your hand expects it there. The kettle becomes a vessel with a spout, a lid that sits at an angle, and a patch on the base where the colour is different.
That last effect is the interesting one. Without the name, the object's purpose becomes visible as a feature rather than as a given. The raised edge on the spoon is not part of the definition of a spoon. It is a solution to a problem, and it is only visible once you have stopped seeing the object as a spoon. Now you have seen the object, which is different from knowing what it is for, and the difference is exactly what makes the thing worth drawing.
Why it happens
There is a good reason the ordinary disappears, and it is not a failure. Your brain spends a great deal of its capacity on things that are new, difficult, or dangerous, and there is a limited budget. Recognition is a shortcut: a category is a compressed answer to a hundred questions, and using it saves enormous amounts of work. The trouble is that a shortcut has a fixed cost and a variable benefit, and once it is learned the cost is not repaid. The stone by the path costs you almost nothing to recognise, and it gives you almost nothing to recognise it by.
Five ways to bring it back
Each of these breaks the shortcut in a different way, and they are listed roughly in order of how much trouble they cause you.
Drop the name. The simplest and the most effective. Describe the object in words that do not name the category, and the perception will follow the description. This works because you cannot use the category and the description at the same time, and the description is slower and more attentive, so you get the slow version.
Change the scale. Look at the thing very close, or from very far, or through a different medium. A coin at arm's length is a coin. A coin filling your whole field of view is a landscape of ridges and a shoulder of relief and a field of tiny scratches. Nothing about the coin changed and everything about what you can see did.
Change the time. Look at the same ordinary thing at a different hour, in a different light, in a different weather, in a different mood. The office door at nine in the morning and at six in the evening are two different objects, and the difference is entirely in the light, and you have never noticed the light because the object was in the way.
Describe it precisely. Not "a stone" but "a grey stone, flatter on the top than the bottom, with a chipped edge where it was split, and a yellow line of lichen on the north side". You will find you have to look to do it, and looking is the point.
Draw it. This is the strongest of the five and the slowest, and there is a reason it works better than the others. Drawing forces you to make decisions about what to leave out, and every decision is an act of attention. It also destroys the shortcut by another route: you cannot draw the category, you can only draw a particular thing, and a particular thing will not fit the category's outline. This is why drawing from life is the oldest known way to look hard at ordinary things.
What if you tried all five on the same object, in order? The first two take a minute each. The third takes a day, because you have to wait for the right light, and waiting is half the method. The fourth takes as long as it takes to write something you cannot check. The fifth takes half an hour and leaves you with a drawing that is worse than you can draw and better than you can see.
Now change the condition. What if the object was new, so that none of this was needed? A new object gets your full attention for free, because the shortcut does not exist yet. That is why new things are interesting and why old things are not, and it is worth noticing the useful consequence: the most direct way to see an ordinary object clearly is to find something new and put it next to it. A new shape changes how you see the old one, because the old one is no longer the only example you have.
"Making something strange is a trick for artists, and the object is still the same." The object is the same. The trick is about you, and about the fact that "stony" and "rock" and "pebble" are conclusions you reached long ago and have not revisited. The technique does not change the stone. It changes the question you are asking, and the question is where all the looking happens.
The other misconception: "being surprised by ordinary things is a sign of naivety." The opposite. The person who has stopped being surprised by the ordinary is the one whose attention has been spent and not recovered, and the person who can still be surprised by a door handle has an attention budget with room in it. Surprise is the feeling of the shortcut failing, and it is a good thing to feel on purpose.
What it is for
It is worth being clear that this is not a party trick and not a way to make ordinary objects into interesting objects. The stone is not more interesting than it was. You are more present with it than you were.
There are three places where that presence pays. In making, where the material has to be looked at properly before it can be worked with, and a maker who has stopped seeing the clay cannot make the thing they can see. In diagnosis, where the whole practice is looking at the thing in front of you rather than at the category. And in teaching, where a student who has been told that a chair is a chair has been given a tool for not looking at chairs, and the job is to take the tool away and show them what is there instead.
And in ordinary life, which is the reason the essay exists. The world is made of things you have finished looking at, and a person who has finished looking at all of them is living in a world of categories, which is a world with the interesting parts filed away under a word.
It is also worth saying what this is not for, because the temptation is to use it as a way of feeling more alive, and that is a reasonable thing to want and a poor use of the technique. The technique is for the things you have to do well at, and for the things that would otherwise be invisible. It is a working method, not a mood.
Limits
There is a limit to this and it is a real one. Most of what you look at, you should not look at properly. The world contains a great many things and there is no version of a life in which all of them get the full attention, and a person who tried it would be staring at a chair for a week. The technique is for a small number of chosen things and the rest of the day is for using them.
Second limit: novelty is the point and the point expires. A new object will habituate too, in weeks or months, and the drawing of it that once felt like discovery becomes a thing you have made. The habit of bringing things back is not a single act. It is a practice, and it is a practice because the effect always wears off.
Third limit: the same person who can see a door handle clearly is perfectly capable of walking past a person who is in trouble. A category applied to a face is harder to dislodge than a category applied to a kettle. The technique works best on things, and it works worst exactly where it would be most valuable.
Stuck
You are stuck when the techniques have become a technique. Drawing the stone is now a thing you do because you read about drawing the stone, and the drawing has become a form, and the looking has gone out of it. The tell is that the result is competent and the interesting thing you noticed on the first day is not in it.
The way out is to make it less like a method. Stop trying to defamiliarise and start trying to describe. Write, in plain words and with no category words, what is actually in front of you, and see whether the words come easily. They will not, and the not-coming-easily is the whole effect, and it happens whether or not you have read anything about it.
Sources
- The idea that making a thing strange can restore perception is usually attributed to the Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, writing about the technique of art in the early twentieth century. The attribution and the broad idea are well established; no specific date, title, or quotation is given here, and the word defamiliarisation is used in the general sense rather than as a quotation from any text.
- Habituation, the reduction of a response to a repeated stimulus, is a standard term in psychology and biology.
- All exercises here are ordinary and hypothetical.