Hitchcock’s story of the MacGuffin, as one may recall, tells the tale of two train passengers speculating about a suspicious package in the luggage rack. One of them looks up to the parcel, then turns to the other and wonders,
‘What is that?’ to which his travel companion responds,
‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin – an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’
‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ says the other.
‘Well, then that’s not a MacGuffin…!’
It is mid-September and I happen to be on my way to the Scottish Highlands for a short vacation, to a region that, my guidebook assures me, harbors the oldest rock formations in the world. I’m certain this is the kind of half-truth MacGuffin that draws tourists (draws me) into spending a holiday in a raincoat, admiring the landscape while rain soaks your socks up to the point that you will get a faint impression of what it must have been like for our ancestors – the amphibians. At night, you sip your whiskey to forget it all. But that’s not the point, or perhaps it is, because Scotland has it all. (We have Scotch! We have rocks! We have Scotch on the rocks!) The fact, of course, is that Scotland does and does not contain the oldest rocks in the world. The oldest rock in the world is the world itself, you fool – and the best thing about it is that you can admire it from any godforsaken corner of the world, or all-in-resort of your liking. Happy holidays!
And so I have (not so subtly) shifted your focus away from the MacGuffin, straight to the (well-deserved) detour of my vacation – which is what the MacGuffin is really about, for the pragmatic reason that stories need beginnings, even though these are always hard to locate (Scottisch lions) let alone agreed up (MacGuffins). Here’s another trick that I find interesting in regard to distracting you from what this story is going to be about: nec gemino bellum Troianum orditor ab ovo: semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res. Or, in contemporary speech: nor does he (Homer) begin the Trojan War from the egg, but always he hurries to the action into the middle of things. (Horace, Ars Poetica, ca. 13 BC).
(Mid August)
Caught in the middle of my actions, I’m trying to figure out how to turn 5 kilos of brown-bagged crumbs of Oaxaco – barro, dry soil – into something I can bend, mold and shape into a dinosaur creature. I am an amateur. I am a writer: my hands produce words, not form. There is always form of course, if only because my thoughts take shape in my brain – but I have never played with thoughts so literally. I also feel quite literally caught in this clandestine action of mine: the aforementioned part of my ‘work’ takes place not in a studio (I’m a writer, remember) but in the privacy of my home, at my kitchen table to be precise, where I can be assured to remain unseen and unexposed, left alone with my own embarrassments.
Once I have mastered the skill of turning dry soil into a workable substance, dinosaurs begin to manifest themselves. The first one is a victory to me: I created a creature (a hybrid of herrerasaurus and tuojiangosaurus, I’d say)! The other dinosaurs bear the traces of my repeated and failed attempts to achieve that same triumphant feeling again. Perhaps it is because I was a child since I last made something out of clay; perhaps it is because I am trying to reproduce a number of clay figurines that are already so disarmingly cheerful, but my dinosaurs look harmless, seemingly laughing at the joke I produced with my own hands.
And even though skulls always appear to be smiling at us, no matter the species, my clay creatures seem far remote from the dinosaur skeletons and models in natural history museums – the models we rely upon when fantasizing about a world inhabited by prehistoric animals.
This practical (tactical) ceramic joke is an experiment in amateurism as much as it is an exercise for my writing, the latter of which always succeeds in sabotaging my thoughts, molding it as it were, into the autopilot direction of language, structure, plot. That doesn’t mean I ever feel prepared for the writing that is about to come. Whenever I hit the proverbial wall of writer’s block (at the beginning of practically each new day) it’s as if I can feel this molding take place in my brain – to no avail. Too much traffic clutters the flow of words. As a matter of fact, words cannot express how frustrating it can be for a writer not to find the proper words. That, of course, is a tautology, or, roundabout: another great way of simply not getting there, unless you wish to swallow your own tail! Transporting thoughts from A (the mind) to B (an empty Word.doc on your computer screen, or a blank piece of paper if you are of the romantic kind) is not always as simply as it seems. In my clay exercise, B becomes the variable y, and y = basically anything that can happen if you change your formula of life and work.
y = the MacGuffin that drives the motor that drives the plot, and therefore it clearly doesn’t matter whether I’m a sculptor or an amateur, or whether dinosaurs do or do not exist.
‘What is that?’ to which his travel companion responds,
‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin – an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’
‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ says the other.
‘Well, then that’s not a MacGuffin…!’
It is mid-September and I happen to be on my way to the Scottish Highlands for a short vacation, to a region that, my guidebook assures me, harbors the oldest rock formations in the world. I’m certain this is the kind of half-truth MacGuffin that draws tourists (draws me) into spending a holiday in a raincoat, admiring the landscape while rain soaks your socks up to the point that you will get a faint impression of what it must have been like for our ancestors – the amphibians. At night, you sip your whiskey to forget it all. But that’s not the point, or perhaps it is, because Scotland has it all. (We have Scotch! We have rocks! We have Scotch on the rocks!) The fact, of course, is that Scotland does and does not contain the oldest rocks in the world. The oldest rock in the world is the world itself, you fool – and the best thing about it is that you can admire it from any godforsaken corner of the world, or all-in-resort of your liking. Happy holidays!
And so I have (not so subtly) shifted your focus away from the MacGuffin, straight to the (well-deserved) detour of my vacation – which is what the MacGuffin is really about, for the pragmatic reason that stories need beginnings, even though these are always hard to locate (Scottisch lions) let alone agreed up (MacGuffins). Here’s another trick that I find interesting in regard to distracting you from what this story is going to be about: nec gemino bellum Troianum orditor ab ovo: semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res. Or, in contemporary speech: nor does he (Homer) begin the Trojan War from the egg, but always he hurries to the action into the middle of things. (Horace, Ars Poetica, ca. 13 BC).
(Mid August)
Caught in the middle of my actions, I’m trying to figure out how to turn 5 kilos of brown-bagged crumbs of Oaxaco – barro, dry soil – into something I can bend, mold and shape into a dinosaur creature. I am an amateur. I am a writer: my hands produce words, not form. There is always form of course, if only because my thoughts take shape in my brain – but I have never played with thoughts so literally. I also feel quite literally caught in this clandestine action of mine: the aforementioned part of my ‘work’ takes place not in a studio (I’m a writer, remember) but in the privacy of my home, at my kitchen table to be precise, where I can be assured to remain unseen and unexposed, left alone with my own embarrassments.
Once I have mastered the skill of turning dry soil into a workable substance, dinosaurs begin to manifest themselves. The first one is a victory to me: I created a creature (a hybrid of herrerasaurus and tuojiangosaurus, I’d say)! The other dinosaurs bear the traces of my repeated and failed attempts to achieve that same triumphant feeling again. Perhaps it is because I was a child since I last made something out of clay; perhaps it is because I am trying to reproduce a number of clay figurines that are already so disarmingly cheerful, but my dinosaurs look harmless, seemingly laughing at the joke I produced with my own hands.
And even though skulls always appear to be smiling at us, no matter the species, my clay creatures seem far remote from the dinosaur skeletons and models in natural history museums – the models we rely upon when fantasizing about a world inhabited by prehistoric animals.
This practical (tactical) ceramic joke is an experiment in amateurism as much as it is an exercise for my writing, the latter of which always succeeds in sabotaging my thoughts, molding it as it were, into the autopilot direction of language, structure, plot. That doesn’t mean I ever feel prepared for the writing that is about to come. Whenever I hit the proverbial wall of writer’s block (at the beginning of practically each new day) it’s as if I can feel this molding take place in my brain – to no avail. Too much traffic clutters the flow of words. As a matter of fact, words cannot express how frustrating it can be for a writer not to find the proper words. That, of course, is a tautology, or, roundabout: another great way of simply not getting there, unless you wish to swallow your own tail! Transporting thoughts from A (the mind) to B (an empty Word.doc on your computer screen, or a blank piece of paper if you are of the romantic kind) is not always as simply as it seems. In my clay exercise, B becomes the variable y, and y = basically anything that can happen if you change your formula of life and work.
y = the MacGuffin that drives the motor that drives the plot, and therefore it clearly doesn’t matter whether I’m a sculptor or an amateur, or whether dinosaurs do or do not exist.
✸
