Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.

It is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path.

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

There is the family of our birth and then there is a more noble world to which we really belong; the richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.

The prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. The prophet disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal.

There is no way to suppress change…not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living which allows constant, if gradual alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.

As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls, carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them when they must walk among us.

Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-themill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds.

It must be that sometimes our assertions about higher order and hidden design are fables we’ve made up to help us ignore our own contingency. Accidents tear

Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.

Whoever the gods of fortune are, they will drop things in your path, but if you search for those things you will not find them.

In creating cultural categories we give shape to this world, And whoever manages to change the categories this changes the shape.

That is a traveler’s delusion. The writing I do on trains never turns into much. Maybe Jack Kerouac sniffing Benzedrine could do first and final drafts at one crack, but I can’t. In the last book Italo Calvino wrote, he meditates on Hermes and Mercury, Europe’s old quick-witted gods… and Calvino confesses that he always looked to their speed with jealous longing of a more methodical craftsman. “I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.” Saturn is the slow worker… Saturn can finish a four-hundred-page book. But he tends to get depressed if that is all he does; he needs regular Mercurial insight to give him something delicious to work on.

Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.

The absence of a revealed truth produces a plurality of readings. Erasing the mundane and then leaving things alone opens the books.