I Have No McGuffin

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “McGuffin.” It’s the thing that sets the characters in a drama in motion. It’s the diamond that the thieves plan their heist in order to get. It’s the Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones risks everything to find. It can be a lost dog or the Holy Grail. It’s whatever the characters want that makes them pull together (or pull apart) and launches them off on their adventures.

The problem is – I have no McGuffin. I’m not sure that I ever had one. Well yes, come to think of it, I did have one once. When I was younger, my McGuffin was love. I went out and met the day in hopes that I would find love. I knew that there must be some golden thread out there somewhere, trailing along, spooled off from someone else’s seeking. In fact I thought there might be many such threads, all leading back to a matrix of love, a matrix from which all sorts of good and wondrous people sprung. I pictured this secret society of enchantment out there somewhere, and I followed every possible lead. Whenever someone would smile at me, or seem kindly disposed, I took that to be a thread. I’d pick it up and follow it a long way, through dark woods, along mean city streets. I’d follow it to meetings of old car clubs and to political rallies. I’d follow it to poetry readings and rugby games.

But none of those threads ever led to love. They led to people who had completely different McGuffins from mine. They led to people who wanted sex or money, action, excitement, or titillation. They led to people who just wanted to sell me insurance. They led to people who wanted me to cater to their partialities, or to merely tend them through some oncoming down time. They never led to anyone whole and effulgent and luminous with the capacity for love. Our McGuffins never matched.

So, after a long time, I stopped following threads. I stopped even looking for them. I found myself without any McGuffin at all. And that’s all right, I guess. Except life does seem a little listless without any McGuffin to get me up in the morning. It’s like perennial early retirement for someone with no hobbies. I hate to admit this, because it makes me something of a hypocrite. I’m the one who had been spouting the Vedanta philosophy, maintaining that wanting is what makes you miserable – that the ideal is to live a life without desire or wanting.

Well, although I’d often recited this philosophy to myself as if I thoroughly believed it, as if I “owned” it - I actually only got a chance to spout it once. I was on an excursion train that takes tourists from Thunder Bay, Canada, up into the Algoma woods, a wonderland of fall foliage that September. It was a long ride there and back, and the people in my car soon formed a sort of closed companionship with some tacit bond, almost like the people on Christie’s Orient Express. We started to exchange dangerous confidences. The husband of a couple seated across the aisle from me became especially expansive about the things that most intimately drove him.

This couple was apparently very well-to-do. The man crowed about the expensive, exotic trips they had taken, about his membership in the best golf club at the best country club, about his refusal to take any second-rate room in the nearly fully-booked town that weekend. He’d insisted on the Hotel’s best suite – or nothing at all, and he was proud that his adamancy had eventually gotten them accommodated in the luxurious Honeymoon Suite. He’d had to spread some money around to get this accommodation, but he was triumphant that his bankroll allowed him to hold sway that way, in one situation after another.

He said he found that was the only way to go in life – first-class Or really, maintaining an interest in life demanded that he seek a successions of first-classes. He said that once he’d gotten the best of something of one kind, he always liked to move on and aspire to getting the best of something else. Once he had the best car, he set out to get the best sailboat. Once he had the best possible house, he set out to furnish it with the best, the most expensive furnishings. And so on. He said that’s what kept him moving and alive. There was always something more he wanted, always something more for him to go after and get by one means or another. He believed that’s the way human beings in general are built. He said that in order to be happy, a person has to want something, has to be driven by a desire to acquire the next thing – and the next.

This was too much for me. I rarely join in group conversation, but I felt this man had left me too wide an opening to ignore. I jumped in with the fact that most of the major religions of the world take an opposite view. The Hindu and Buddhist philosophies advise that the way to be happy is to be without craving, without wanting of any kind. I pointed out that the starving man can’t really enjoy anything, especially the aspect of the cow in front of him. He’s single-mindedly driven by his desire to get that cow’s meat. So he’ll be blind to the intrinsic beauty of the cow, to the intrinsic beauty of all his surroundings and the joy that this beauty could bring him. His wanting will enslave him rather than liberate him into any happy state. His wanting will foreclose him from ever achieving the higher happiness of bliss. Yes, I think I might actually have gone so far as to invoke “bliss.”

In any case, my outburst stunned the wealthy man into silence. I’m not sure if he was quelled by the shear outrageousness of my viewpoint, or whether he was just startled into seeing a possible deficiency in what he’d previously regarded as his own self-evident philosophy. Either way, he made no come-back. However, a young East Indian woman, who had earlier been regaling us with her dating misadventures, leapt into the fray with affirmation. My comments had sparked her to take an interest in me. It was rare for anyone to take an interest in me, and the woman’s subsequent respectful attentions made our trip into and out of the deep woods of Algoma a kind of surreal experience.

After we disembarked past twilight onto the platform of Thunder Bay’s eccentric little middle-of-the-mall train depot, the woman persisted in wanting to get to know me further. We spent our remaining day in town tooling around, seeing the sights, but mostly reinforcing our mutual appreciation of Eastern philosophy. She said she had never before in her life met any North American who understood about not-wanting. I found that a little strange in light of Deepak Chopra’s persistent appearance on bestseller lists. But I was glad to accept her view of my uniqueness, to bask in her glow for a while.

She said those very ideas had been the cornerstone of her life. She told me how she herself often went back to India to help establish an ashram. Everyone there understood her attitude. But where on earth had I, an American, ever acquired such a philosophy?

I hardly knew what to say. I’ve often suspected my attitude is not the result of any enlightenment, but inborn, a product of a natural indolence, of an abiding reluctance to move or exercise myself in any way. But I didn’t want to say that. I told her, truthfully, that I had studied Vedanta at the Vivekananda Center in Chicago. We chatted merrily away, supporting and amplifying each other’s commitment to not-wanting as we chatted. But all the while, there was lurking the suspicion in me that I was flying under false colors, that maybe there were times, more and more now that all hope of love had flown, that I felt the need of need.

Now especially that the challenges and distractions of travel are over, now that I’m back in my comfort zone of Chicago – I can wallow in my un-wanting. I have all the necessities - plenty to read, plenty to read. But frankly, I don’t find that has enabled me to appreciate the cow more keenly. I haven’t achieved bliss or ecstasy. I want for nothing. But there’s kind of a nothingness about this state. Now, without my eagerness to look for those threads of communion, I have no engine of enterprise at all. I’m just here.

I find myself almost envying that man on the train, almost thinking he might have been at least a little right. He had the empowerment of purpose. His ambitions gave him the zest for life that I lack.

I have to admit it. I miss having something to miss. I miss my McGuffin.