#17 - MG - When she woke up the dinosaur was still there

While I was fabricating clay dinosaurs during daytime, I conducted another experiment at night. I convinced myself that, if dinosaurs were my primary concern when I was awake, I should certainly achieve to see them in my dreams as well. I was very excited about the prospect of my nocturnal encounters with these long-lost species, but each morning I woke up in disappointment, as I had not retrieved the slightest bit of prehistory from my subconscious. To this day, I never saw a single dinosaur in my dreams, which made me wonder: if my subconscious does not have the faintest interest in this prehistoric species, is it because it does not have a clue what I’m thinking about, when I think dinosaurs during my waking hours? Does it ignore this mind blabber, for the simple reason that dinosaurs are only part of our conscious existence? Etc? Etc? Any possible encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot and is thus immediately subjected to the laws of fiction. Dreams are only fictional in the sense that they are reality in disguise (or in full exposure?).

I did dream other things. One night, I found myself without a head. I realized I didn’t screw it onto my neck in the morning. It was an awful routine to begin the day, it wasn’t painful or anything, just very uncomfortable and inhumane. Mechanic; machine-like. I couldn’t see what it looked like – the screw inside my neck – but when I explained my dream to a friend and demonstrated the motions of connecting body and head, it was clear to him that I had been photographing that day: my actions resembled those of a lens being fixed to a camera body.

✸

#12 - MG - 2 x Reverse = A Round Way Trip

①

In this month's issue of The Believer, self-proclaimed master palindromist Barry Duncan talks about the craft of making two ends meet. A fragment:

"...There was a point at which, Duncan half-jokes, he actually thought he might need to be hospitalized. 'I was thinking about reversibility all the time. And then it just became very natural for me.' And now? 'I'm just all the time doing it,' he says. 'I write hundreds [of palindromes] a day, probably.' Reverse is his default gear now, as made clear by his advice to would-be palindromists, who, Duncan says, should begin by reversing everything: 'Every word you see, every word you hear, every word you read, every word you write. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that, all day, and all night, that's what I'm doing.'" Read the full article.

②

And then something else. Paleontologist Jack Horner wants a pet dinosaur. He says he's going to achieve this by reverse-evolving a chicken. More on Wired.com.

eyb eyb & cock a doodle doo

✸

#11 - MG

#10 - MG - Barnum Brown, Storyteller

"... Dawn glows along the shore of a lagoon near the sea three millions of years ago in Montana. The landscape is of low relief; sycamores and ginkgo trees mingle with figs, palms and bananas. There are few twittering birds in the tree-tops and no herds of grazing animals to greet the early sun. A huge herbivorous dinosaur Trachodon, coming on shore for some favorite food, has been seized and partly eaten by a giant Tyrannosaurus. Whilst this monster is ravenously consuming the carcass another Tyrannosaurus draws near determined to dispute the prey. The stooping animal hesitates, partly rises and prepares to spring on its opponent. With colossal bodies poised on massive hind legs and steadied by long tails, ponderous heads armed with sharp dagger-like teeth three to five inches long, front limbs exceedingly small but set for a powerful clutch, they are the very embodiment of dynamic animal force."

Barnum Brown, "Tyrannosaurus, the Largest Flesh-Eating Animal That Ever Lived" in: The American Museum Journal. 1915

#9 - MG - In the beginning, the T. rex. was a T. rex.

The T. rex holotype at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The first complete T.rex skeleton was excavated by fossil hunter Barnum Brown. It was first mounted at the Museum of Natural History in New York and, since the 1940s, has been on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. T. rex has long been presented standing vertically; recent studies show the dinosaur actually kept its body horizontal.

✸

#8 - MG - Small Rocks Meet Big Rock

#7 - MG - In the beginning were the dinosaurs

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.

✸

#6 - MG - Museo Waldemar Julsrud

#5 - MG - A Peso A Piece

Algunas figuras de la collección Waldemar Julsrud.
Museo Waldemar Julsrud, Acámbaro, Guanajuato.

Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant and amateur archaeologist. In 1944, he excavated some pre-hispanic artefacts at the foot of a mountain in Acámbaro. Unable to dig for more, he offered a peso a piece for every object that was found here and brought back to him intact. This resulted in a vast collection of more than 30.000 ceramic objects, some of which - due to the 'economy' of this archaeological enterprise - inevitably turned out to be awkward anachronisms, like a digital watch on a knight's wrist. A substantial part of Julsrud's collection comprises dinosaurs (two-feet; three-feet; four-feet; three-clawed; two-clawed; mostly friendly in appearance), sparking the imagination of Waldemar Julsrud who concluded that here, in Mexico, people and dinosaurs had once coexisted. For Julsrud, the anachronism turned into a plot.

With Monterroso's short story still in mind, which part is most astonishing: that the dinosaur is still there, or that the human is already there?

✸

#4 - MG

When she woke up the dinosaur was still there.

In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.

There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.

Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?

✸

#3 - MG - Formal Sequences

"Every work of art can be regarded both as a historical event and as a hard-won solution to some problem. It is irrelevant now whether the event was original or conventional, accidental or willed, awkward or skillful. The important clue is that any solution points to the existence of some problem to which there have been other solutions, and that other solutions to this same problem will most likely be invented to follow the one now in view. As the solutions accumulate, the problem alters. The chain of solutions nevertheless discloses the problem."

(in: George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things)

✸

#2 - MG

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
Augusto Monterroso

✸

#1 - MG - In Medias Res

nec gemino bellum Troianum orditor ab ovo: semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res [nor does he 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)

✸