Human beings tend towards making their own mental lives mundane.
Another way of putting this: our minds are designed to reduce our mental load by making us sophisticated consumers of reality. We get used to everything we do and see, and thus become less mindful, attending less to specificity and detail. This has benefits: it allows us to focus on functionality. This also has drawbacks: we drift through life half-asleep, half-numb to the rainbow of sensation, the weirdness of Being itself.
It's also a problem if you're an artist working in a sequential form who wants to make startling work. Because that's one thing you're after, after all: startling the reader/listener/viewer awake, jogging them from the self-imposed monotony of existence.
I thought a lot about this during what I guess you could say was my ‘apprenticeship’ as a writer. (It wasn't very well-structured, I just did a lot of reading, a lot of 'thinking', a lot of complaining, and a lot of smoking and walking around.) How can artists keep people involved?
There are lots of answers. But one tool in the toolkit, it occurred to me, was something you could call the Tiny Titillating Oddity. A slightly expectation-defying moment in a piece of art. What's important here is the ‘slightly.’ The TTO can't be so weird it's alienating. But it's got to be weird enough to get the nervous system a little fired up.
Here are some examples of the verbal form of this.
The first that comes to mind is "Life, friends, is boring." It's the opening line of John Berryman's Dream Song 14, and it works spectacularly because it's a relatable platitude delivered askew. Notice that starting a poem with "life is boring" wouldn't do much—that little insertion of the word "friends" adds a little quirk to the rhythm, and an unexpected warmth to a grim statement.
Another sentence I love, from little-known historical figure John F. Kennedy: “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Here, the oddity is "do the other things," and “the others,” too. Typically, if you were making a list of actions including "go to the moon," you'd follow it up with a restatement of the other heroic feats involved. But by slangily eliding them as you would with the final steps of a recipe for glazed ham, you add a compelling strangeness to the diction.
Sylvia Plath was spectacular at this; she was great at inserting weird flights of verbal fancy in otherwise crisp and crystal-clear prose. From the opening pages of The Bell Jar: "Doreen came from a society girls' college down South and had bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about indestructible, and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer." Here, the TTO is "just about indestructible." It extends the marble simile unexpectedly, making it both about materiality and character, and it lands more heavily because 'indestructible' is the most sonically cumbersome word in the sentence.
It’s obviously not just a verbal thing. There are countless examples of this across different media. Elliott Smith was a TTO pro: in Alameda, check out the unexpected brief swerve into E♭ on “nobody broke your heart.” In the remake of Suspiria—I didn’t like it, but it had some great artistic choices—the occasional shot is taken weirdly far from the characters, suggesting the perspective of an eldritch voyeur.
I could nerd out about this all day. But, instead, I’ll close by encouraging you to play around with this idea in your work, whatever it is.
..eldritch, huh.. well, I happened to start my day today with some thoughts that run in parallel to the first part of your post.. about us being taught that we should be after efficiency and productivity and for this we should be planning, creating routines and practicing self-discipline..and when we plan our days and superimpose our plans on our reality, how much of it can still be revealing itself to us?.. but indeed, if you have goals, it seems like a measure of this kind of blindness is but necessary..