Keep your eye on the doghnut, not on the hole

Lately my themes have been about improvisation and how it was linked to failure. Which strangely enough made me think about my final thesis show and failed expectations. Now I told you about how I failed miserably before. People at school knew about this embarrassing "performance" and when I said I wanted to insert clay into a tortilla machine and make clay tortillas, teachers and colleagues probably must have thought I was crazy but in hindsight I think they raised their expectations to success along mine but mostly to failure I believe. Why wouldn't they? It sounded crazy, absolutely demented, an impossible path.

Still, I went to Mexico. I went to get fine clay from a man who was a well respected professor of my former college and as soon as he heard the idea, he said: "Who thought about this project?" Politely I said, "I did, sir", "Well" he said, "this project is full of shit." I left his office a little bit ashamed of my lack of knowledge and took a deep breath.

I bought the clay.

I contacted the Celorio Tortilla Machine people and they allowed me to come to their amazing and intricate complex in the industrial zone of the city. Pumping iron, lines of people making clanking noises, 3-d cutters, the spirit of the industrial revolution was present and just for that simple glimpse of collective effort I was already grateful for. 

I carefully explained my project and to my surprise they let me run some tests on those beautiful machines. After half an hour, clay by itself didn't work, it got stuck on the plates. It seemed my project would end right there. All my expectations of failure arose. See, when your expectations are high, disappointment is greater almost devastating. I felt what I felt on my so-called performance and about going back to tell everyone what they already expected, that it couldn't be done. All this time I was looking at the clay, thinking of that painful moment and then I asked Erasmo, head of the inventions department at Celorio: "What if we add corn dough to the clay?"

It worked. Clay and corn tortillas were coming out the machine and we all tearfully smiled in silence.

Now for my final project I still needed a regular vendor of tortillas to make thousands of them for my final installation. This was the hardest part of the process I believe. Mainly because it involved asking someone I never met before, who had no idea who I was, to basically trust me. Now, there are ways of doing this, for example I would never expect of someone to react in a friendly manner if I would for example, stood in the middle of the street, would not smile, would not make an effort to open an invitation for collaboration into what could seem lunacy. This would only set them to think it was a test, a trick or a mousetrap basically because people have been scarred or have learned from previous experiences where they have been lured before and more or less being fucked over.

So I confronted him directly, like in all my relationships, I try not to leave room for misinterpretations. It's one of the traits people that actually know me here and those back home really appreciate. I never set the bar high or ask them to go through hoops of fire for me unless they really know what they're getting into and that goes from carrying a bathtub on a pick-up truck (that in some cases has broken their back window), getting a drum kit wet or even to the simplest demand of asking someone if they would be able to carry a certain conversation without being uneasy.

I told him his machine could get damaged by a small gravel from the clay, or how the spinning part that brings the dough into the cutting of the tortillas could get eroded by the friction of the clay with these parts. In short, I told him what he needed, to take a chance with me on this project. I sat down with him, made him feel that we were on this together, I took the time and the effort to make him realize that if anything happened to his machine we would fix it. That it was almost ours.

He agreed. 

The process was long and demanding. Six thousand tortillas had to be set out to dry and then bubble wrapped to be shipped for final installation. On my final crit, one of the dearest teachers from school and thesis advisor pointed out that I was a monomaniac and that was meant as a compliment. That I was capable of creating and idea and making everyone believe in it.

Although my analyst disagreed because it was a commitment to an idea to it's fullest expression, I was amongst other things, really trying to avoid the disappointment of unmet expectations. I was trying to validate my idea or point it to others when in all honesty, the process I went through should have been validation enough.

I know now disappointment of certain expectations sometimes comes as a relief. It frees you from what others expect from you, it allows everyone to seek their own happiness, to run freely on this broad land and respect what was valuable from a wonderful journey that finally ended.

"There's an expression: 'Keep an eye on the doughnut, not on the hole'. If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that's all you can control. You can't control any of what's out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best you can do".

David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish