Raymond Williams described the pre-emergent structure of feeling:

…at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations – new semantic figures – are discovered in material practice; often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways (Williams, 1977: 134).

She feels fine except for the slight headache. But a few nights after falling on the ice rink, she does not recognise the reflective house numbers attached to her own mailbox. It is all simply wrong. She doesn’t have to double check her own address, certainly. She’s lived here for years. It is strange. Explanations flood her mind. Maybe it’s because of this or that. Vertigo hits as she realises that in fact there is no explanation, these four numbers must comprise the same order as they ever did, the marker of her point in the legible city; and though now she knows the address must be right, because there it is on her mailbox after all, still it looks irreducibly strange.

Jamais vu, less frequently invoked than déjà vu, is the shift from the familiar into the strange. It frequently emerges after a disturbance to the brain but not necessarily; sometimes it simply descends. As she stared at the reflective plasticene mailbox numbers, the strangeness spread like an ink spill into a more totalising disorientation. Everything now seemed saturated in a palpable unfamiliarity: the street, the world, the sky, her denaturalised place in it all. But how quickly vertigo resolves itself into a new, different orientation: the decentering of her own point of view. She could feel her own insignificance, in all its fear and exhilaration.

With its feeling of estrangement and eeriness, jamais vu is like the uncanny. But the classic, Freudian, uncanny takes the shape of the repressed, forbidden familiar something you can’t bear to recall. With jamais vu, though, nothing has been repressed, there is no danger of remembering, nothing threatens to return. There is no inkling of haunting. The alien thing is not a symbol gesturing at the remainder of a something else. Everything is exactly, icily what it is; only its relation to you has shifted. You are no longer included. The vertigo comes with a sense that your unquestioned place in things, your memories, fantasies and projections, have been cut out of the picture.

You can court the decentering.

Wallace Stevens opens to a sort of post-Romantic sublime in his poem The Snow Man: ‘One must have a mind of winter … not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind/In the sound of a few leaves’ (Stevens, 1982: 9-10) … to shed the familiar fallacy, to abandon the personification we project onto the non- human. The mind of winter reveals the secret of what he calls ‘the…bare place’ (ibid.: 10). And the self is pared away:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is (ibid.).

‘Beholds’ – such a grand verb, so saturated with awe, that a reader feels ‘the nothing that is’ not as disappointment but as a glory in disenchantment, the poet’s striving towards witnessing a bare real, his craving to encounter a world outside the self. (And yet who, other than the poet who ‘is nothing himself’, remains there to behold it?).

Later, jamais vu began to descend all around her with increasing frequency. It became an emergent social feeling. People fought it. But in the ordinary days and weeks and months ticking by, a sense of strangeness drifted in, surging and waning.

In her town, neighbours noticed the otherness of animals. ‘Why are the birds so loud now?’ they asked. Whenever you went out to get the mail or take in the trash bin, waving wearily to the neighbour across the street while maintaining social distance, glorious birdcalls and warbles drenched the air. A bird scientist at the university came on local radio and said: no, in fact the birds are quieter now. Since we are staying home, there is less human noise pollution, so the birds don’t have to shout. They are less stressed without our competing traffic sounds.  It’s just that now you can hear them.

Pure white skunks appeared. An enormous possum was seen strolling around, the size of a pig, hanging out in yards, lumbering up people’s steps as if selling insurance. Bats thickened the sky at dusk. Foxes paused to glance back over their shoulder and give long, seductive looks to dogs. Cicadas returned after seventeen years underground: tiny holes in the dirt and then all at once the insects covered everything. They walked methodically and flew in lazy inefficient loops. An enormous pileated woodpecker descended from the treetops where we could hear its thunderous hammering and walked down the sidewalk, picking off the easy cicadas instead.

Mostly, now, people talk about the deer. Deer had been multiplying for decades, eating hostas, but now, people say, they do not fear us. A neighbour says a fawn entered her garage like it owned the place. As people walk their dogs at dusk, the deer do not run, but stand still, launching their brown gazes into hedges, into the remaining bits of woods, sending out the silent call to assemble. You see them coming in from all directions for their twilight meetings, gathering in groups of ten and twelve.

Something is changing. A disorientation is palpable. Some people decide to walk their dogs while trumpeting on airhorns, to remind the deer who is in charge here. The deer remain, fiercely tranquil, standing their ground.

Image 1: David Leake

An explicit sense of being just another creature on the earth starts to emerge. What was always here feels strange. We all feel it: the familiar world of many species, now even more thoroughly entangled but pulsing with otherness, with its own life. Something is emerging, not an uncanny haunting but a shock of decentering. Some people cultivate it, seek it out. Others cannot bear the vulnerability of estrangement.

One night I’m walking the dog with my daughter. A lovely doe approaches us from a yard. We stand there and watch it, then we will it into eye contact. The doe stands up on her hind legs and steps towards us, upright, its front hooves bent at the wrists in front of her body, like a skinny grizzly bear. It shrieks at us with each lurching methodical step.

What did my daughter and I do next? I don’t know.

This is what we talk about when we remember it. Did that happen? It could not have happened, right?

Raymond Williams wrote: ‘Yet it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error’ (Williams, 1977: 129).

But why do we both remember the same thing? The deer walking towards us on its hind legs, shrieking?

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