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[In what follows I, the author, have re-purposed both the history of trickster and arguments about their role in modern culture from Lewis Hyde's book 'Trickster Makes This World' [2010].
The Road Runner, Episode 43 - Chariots of Fur
Chuck Jones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdKkI1vGsmE |
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/Form follows function |
/The trap is set. Wile E. Coyote lies in wait.
/Invisible paint disguises a freshly laid brick wall now blocking the path of an otherwise empty highway in a psychedelic desert landscape. Only a blood red boulder and anticipation are separating him from the sight of his next meal… “BEEP BEEP!” The Roadrunner enters the scene screen left, his distorted image rounds a corner, passes though the invisible wall as if one or both of them were actually as insubstantial as they appear and he shrinks into the horizon. Disgruntled and confused, Wile E. Coyote gives chase only to run head first into his own fabrication. The end. /Wile E. Coyote is a much simplified and unaccredited re-presentation of the Navaho trickster ‘Coyote’, creator of the earthly world, ingenious inventor of hunting and interpreter of signs across California, New Mexico, Idaho and Nevada. Within these mythologies Coyote has many faces, but each in its own way is driven by hunger and a foolish pursuit that often ends badly. Fortunately, Coyote has many lives and invariably returns. This is because Coyote is a cycle in which ignorance and knowledge reveal their necessary correlation; with each new death comes new innovation, and with each innovation a new mode of death. Coyote is the invention of the accident, which is just a funny way of saying that Coyote represents the world of human artifice. His story is our story; the story of human cultural and technological progress. /S.G. |
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/Fuck context |
/To talk of the trickster outside of such founding myths is to encounter a figure in perpetual motion; both shifty and shifting. Like Wile E. Coyote of Warner Bros. fame he/she=shi is a figure of the landscape rather than the road, in the world but not exactly of it. Shi is often bumping into fixed objects with local, embedded knowledge through ‘pure chance’. After trapping hir head in the skull of a moose Coyote stumbles blindly around, tripping over one thing and then the next until shi walks in to a tree.
/ “Who is this?” says Coyote, “I am Willow Tree” replies Willow Tree, “Ah! I must be near the river!” concludes Coyote. / /To think of the trickster as aimless or imbecilic fails to reveal the nuance of hir way. This is because the trickster is a special kind of traveler. The trickster is a boundary crosser. God of the crossroads we find hir wherever pre-established categories meet. Sacred/profane, male/female, clean/dirty, light/dark, true/false, strong/weak, the trickster is there. An adept manipulator of the liminal and interstitial, the trickster’s movements are better understood not as crossing the line but shifting and confusing it. / /Hir name might better be ‘The Context With No Context’. Many mythologies point to the trickster as the epicentre of the great rupture between the divine and fallen worlds, thus making the trickster the architect of the great distance between heaven and earth. / /To be stripped of instinct sounds like an insurmountable disability, but to have a way is to be in some sense fixed and predictable; a prisoner of one’s unconscious and unchangeable specialist (or species) knowledge. To have ‘no way’ is a precondition to having ‘all ways’, to being an ‘imitator of ways’ and through practice deriving a ‘repertoire of ways’; imitating the armadillo to wear armour, the heron’s beak to make a spear, the spider to make a net, a leopard to wear camouflage or poison ivy to create chemical weapons. Such creativity has its origin in resemblance and might lead us to conclude that the trickster is first and foremost an observer of things, a decoder and re-encoder of signs whose creative intelligence lies in the slippage between a things’ appearance and its essence. / / /S.G. |
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/Less is more |
/To talk of the trickster outside of such founding myths is to encounter a figure in perpetual motion; both shifty and shifting. Like Wile E. Coyote of Warner Bros. fame he/she=shi is a figure of the landscape rather than the road, in the world but not exactly of it. Shi is often bumping into fixed objects with local, embedded knowledge through ‘pure chance’. After trapping hir head in the skull of a moose Coyote stumbles blindly around, tripping over one thing and then the next until shi walks in to a tree.
/ /‘Token’ in the following chapter has been translated from the Greek word ‘sema’, a word that belongs to a semantic cluster of words which includes mind (‘noos’), and verbs that have to do with noticing, recognising, ciphering and deciphering. ‘Noos’ and ‘sema’ go together in the same way as subject and object: you can’t have one without the other. There can be no sign without the mental faculty to encode and decode it. / /From a certain critical perspective the Homeric narrative appears to pivot around these tokens. The Homeric Hymn that sings Hermes, the messenger of the gods, to life, tells the story of a bait-thief trickster who does not eat. Born in an earthly cave to the Nymph Maia, Hermes refuses to remain in the dark. Not waiting to feed from his mother’s breast, he walks from the cave in search of meat. He crosses paths with an unlucky turtle and crafts the first lyre from its shell, then steals and butchers his brother Apollo’s immortal cattle, invents fire, and roasts the sacred meat. Overcome with material desire he salivates uncontrollably but, at the last, he forgoes his hunger a final time. / /Hermes is cast as a prolific innovator, one who both creates and joins a number of firsts: music, theft, fire, language, building and (later in conversation with Apollo) duplicitous charm. Each of these beginnings is linked by the idea of intentional deferral- a new kind of action we call ritual sacrifice that forgoes earthly or material fulfillment in favour of divine communion: to eat with or of the Gods. Rather than eating the meat he consumes its smoky aroma, divides it by lot (one for each God and one for himself), before covering his body in fire ash and hanging each meat portion as a token high in the rafters of his hut. One portion of this first sacrifice he offers to himself in exchange for entry into Olympus from where he can receive his portion of the fruits of all future mortal sacrifice and prayer – no less than the ritual reapportionment of the Cosmos! / I/n hanging the meat Hermes creates the first ‘Post-it’ style note-to-self, or sign, of his deed; a reminder that ‘noos’ (mind) is awakened through the restraint of appetite. This gesture both marks and initiates a transition from carnate life (where meat gets eaten) to incarnate life (where it doesn’t). Hermes’ act of tokenism forces the meat to stand for something else. This first, originating sign is a product of its own uneaten state which it now represents - an intermediate and mediating sign that opens the possibility for other things, anything, to stand in for anything else.Aporia from poros. / /In ‘The Theory of Semiotics’ (1975), Umberto Eco defines a sign as: “Anything that can be taken as meaningfully substituting for somethings else”. Semiotics is therefore “the discipline studying everything which can be used to lie […] and by virtue of that capability is always such”. / /Eco stops here, but a surprising world soon appears if we accept and develop these definitions a little further. If everything in language is fundamentally a lie what is true is a subset of what is false, rather than its opposite. It is through the possibility of a false thing we can begin to speak of a true one, and only then does the object, true or false, become a sign. For instance a worm is of no interest to Eco, but a worm that might conceal a hook – that is a sign. A sign thus constitutes the deferral of meaning rather than its denial, an idea consistent with the actions of our trickster Hermes, who defers rather than denies physical hunger in favour of more godly sustenance. Deferral in this context amounts to a kind of portability, as if nothing can have meaning until it becomes transportable. Meaning and portability are positively correlated. / /The resolving distinction that separates the trickster from the Trump so to speak is hir interest in the kind of falsity that calls truth into question, as opposed to deceptions that reinforce it. The trickster’s lies are not simple counter factual statements. A lie that simply inverts the truth (or truth that inverts the lie) merely plays by a rule book that has already preceded it. The art of the trickster, perhaps the art of art in general, is to construct the lie that calls the truth into question. / /After all, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” / / /S.G. |
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/Architecture or revolution |
/“I will be the Sun God!” declared Coyote, and the people allowed him to try. He took up the sun lodge across the sky and watched everything they did. He yelled out to secret lovers, told on those who were in hiding and revealed the private habits of all the people. They were glad when the day was over. They lost no time in taking Coyote from the sun lodge.
Coyote Stories (1933) by Mourning Dove / /A ‘guilt culture’ is a form of social order that derives its authority from strong group connectedness. In a tribe, town or village, where everybody knows everyone, a local set of normative rules that establishes right from wrong will soon develop and be enforced through a distributed and ever vigilant eye. In such a psycho-social context it is one’s sense of shame and fear of public humiliation that modulates behaviour and thus maintains the established social order. As the story of Coyote and the sun lodge makes clear, the political stability of guilt cultures necessitates the invisible transgression of this code. The unstated function of any code of conduct is to establish (arbitrary) categories that are required for stability. As with the Olympian Gods, these categories are necessarily engaged in an eternal ‘war of ambivalence’ through which they maintain their life sustaining mutual exclusivity. The proper functioning of society requires commerce across and between these arbitrarily divided territories and, from time to time, the chopping and changing of their boundaries. / /While the trickster is a destabilising force, shi is not a purely destructive one. Rather than erasing boundaries the trickster insists on them. Hir creed is twofold: that there must be boundaries and that they must be permeable. So it is that we find hir undermining overly ridged distinctions that stifle our ability to think critically, to be creative and to adapt. / /But shi also engages in drawing new categories or re-establishing older ones that have been sacrificed for the efficiency of the status quo. Over time the patrolling eye of a guilt culture is both internalised by its members and attributed to a higher, transcendental force. Actors within these modified systems are governed by this internalised conscience and, as a result, their tricksters are also burdened with deep sense of doubt and self-loathing. In stark contrast to the highly-refined image of mythological tricksters such as Coyote, Hermes, Loki, or Legba this inner uncertainty suggests that mortal tricksters might be better understood not as iconoclastic or grandiose demiurges, but rather as people who are prepared to humble themselves and to speak profanely despite the potential consequences; the worst of which are self-administered. / /Even in our contemporary setting, the trickster’s activities will often locate hir squarely within the spaces of forbidden speech, the excluded and the other. Mythological narratives typically underwrite this dilemma by circumscribing trickster speech within a zone of silence as an exception to it, a kind of sacred lack of the sacred. Real-world tricksters are not as fortunate. They must remake territory, sanctifying what others have called profane. The essential ‘tricksterness’ quality of any trickster is always the endogenous product of the uneviable but fertile zone of neither/nor – beyond the walls of the city and outside of conventional society. This realisation of ‘outsider’ status, essential to hir agency lends critical value to even hir most gratuitous profanities. / /The literal meaning of the word profane is ‘that which is in front of the church’. This image of the church, and the sacred spaces which pre-ceed and pro-ceed it, suggests that an orderly world arises from the act of silencing. / /“You must not tell others what I am about to tell you”, or “Only here may you speak thus” etc. /Guilt or shame is a gift of the gods protecting those with finite wisdom from their own foolishness. The English word ‘shame’ is translated from to the Homeric Greek ‘aidos’. But ‘aidos’ is also the gift of speechlessness – it combines modesty, self-respect, regard for others, reverence and awe. A person with no sense of ‘aidos’ is someone who has lost their feeling for the power and significance of the spiritual world. Equally, it is guilt that protects the fragile psycho-social individual from the atomising effects of cosmic chaos. / /On many occasions this injunction towards silence is the very speech act by which a particular narrative is removed from the everyday and made sacred. Both the Hebrew word ‘k-d-sh’ and the Greek ‘temenos’, which loosely translates to holy-land, are derived from verbs that mean to separate, or more originally to ‘cut off’. / /If narratives marked by rules of silence are not only sacred but mythic, and myths are the levers by which society constructs and reaffirms its own reality, we can begin to see why honouring silence might be a good or necessary thing. / /This is why we do not invite Coyote into the sun lodge every day. For, if rules of silence maintain reality, then breaking that silence would risk destruction of the cosmos! / / /S.G. |
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/Pipeless dreams |
/“The sky was glorious blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought: “the world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far way in the blue sky on a golden throne and…” here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: “Don’t; go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming!” […] But I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky and God on his golden throne high above the world–and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder”.
/Carl Jung’s account of his own profession in ‘The Philosophy Tree’ diagnosed the Church and all society as being blocked by its own purity. He declared “after a centuries long exploration into the human consciousness it was psychoanalysis of [the fin-de-siècle] that made the final intervention and cleared the blockage […] by building a bridge across the abyss separating two psychological worlds”. / /Jung’s redemptive vision and life’s work revitalised the moribund church of individual and collective psychology. His life was Promethean and mercurial in spirit. Like the alchemists who set out to revive Christianity by smuggling pagan gods and the forgotten dirt of the ‘unknown knowns’ into the sanctuary under the aegis of Mercurius, Jung created something entirely new. Not only analytic psychology and the first unified theory of the unconscious, but a bridge between the church and its own excreta. / /If ordering is an innate quality of the human condition as it relates to itself and its environment, the question is: how should order relate to its dirty other? / /As discussed by Lewis Hyde: “to the extent that stability requires the removal of dirt no order should entertain its return, [but] if too much purity results in sterility, no order should locate its own dung heap too far from town”. /While order often turns to violence when it smells its own shit, any attempt to remove dirt absolutely will result either in the creation of new previously inconceivable forms of dirt, or become the metaphorical (or literal)shit-pile. / /How then do we reconcile the present globalised world in which dirt has been banished? Perhaps our many and complex problems are the result of this excommunication of the scatological faculty. The tautological consequence is that we have either reached the ‘end of history’ or that this has always been the case. Even a cursory dive into the shit-pile of history reveals the wide spread presence of something Hyde calls ‘ritual dirt-work’. / I/n the Feast of Fools, celebrated by the Catholic Church in Europe during the Middle Ages, the ritual dirt-work was carried out by the clergy. For one day only they would “perform lewd dances and sing indecent songs in the very midst of divine service” before “eating their greasy food from the corner of the altar and burning ‘incense’ made from human excrement while the priest celebrated mass”. The performance would often end with the clergymen “riding dung filled carts through town, eating sausages and tossing turds at the crowds”. Officially sanctioned and precisely contained, sanctified transgressions of the sacred provide a disposal mechanism for the psycho-social dirt that builds up during the intervening year, thus reinforcing the bodily inscriptions of silence that produce it. / /Today the Feast of Fools is demarcated within ‘Carnival’ which encompasses all Catholic festivals that end in Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday) before the commencement of Lent, a six-week period in which the followers of Christ share in his suffering. Despite the general proclivity toward rule-breaking that surrounds Mardi Gras, carnival-esque celebrations are deeply conservative. In rigidly structured hierarchical societies rituals such as the Feast of Fools provide the exception that proves the rule. In the end many modern opportunities for ritual dirt-work are more Huxleyan soma than the Hermetic sema (tokens); they amount to a reinforcement of boundaries rather than an increase in commerce across them. / /Real dirt-work requires real actors. People who, like Hermes’ tokens, simultaneously signify themselves and something other than themselves, expressing the dissonant side of our psycho-social jointing. Every now and then Fat Tuesday does spill over into Lean Wednesday, and into the universe beyond. It is harder to forget the image of an alternative reality when it is one periodically enacted by people who would otherwise inhabit it. / / /S.G. |
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/Shelter |
/To break the spell of neonatal protection and the cathartic role-play of officially sanctioned dirt-work, one must greet the Other.
/ /With this invitation or welcoming comes the possibility for radical newness; for play, knowledge, affection, solidarity and companionship in its many forms, but also inevitable agonism and even violence. Hospitality is the very essence of ritual dirt-work. / /As the subsequent unfolding of the ‘century of the self’ has demonstrated, the most difficult and rewarding form of generosity is often that which welcomes the Other within. It is this encounter that embraces difference and contradiction internally in the hope of avoiding greater violence beyond. / /For many the first architectural thought is to offer shelter. This ‘first thought’ “is not one gesture of hospitality among many, it is the very origin of hospitality”. Shelter for one is fundamentally shelter for all. This is the site of architecture’s claim to being the simultaneous creator and primordial product of social life. The second architectural thought is then “shelter for whom?” So, it is the fundamentally inclusive original condition of architecture that gives rise to its necessary exclusivity in a world of egos and limited resources. / /All structure begins with lines. Lines are signs. They have falsity as their precondition. The rhetoric of design is always one of inclusivity, but “designers and their designs are indefinitely suspended between authority and generosity”. Design inhabits a fictional world where only those who will harmoniously join with it are given license to exit. Every line says more about what it excludes than what it illustrates. Because language is built into the very way we understand our bodies, and the delineation of order and disorder upon the body the original structure, architecture, is understood as shelter. Architecture is an open and hospitable extension of the body, not a container that separates outside from inside. It is a transformative zone in which all who enter it, and the zone itself, are subject to change. As the ‘first host’ architecture is an invitation to change and be changed; the moment of flexibility produced by the mutual organisation of mind, body and space. the un-structural structure. The endogenous anomaly: The Trickster. / /Like Jung, we must not only accept our mercurial imagination, we must welcome it. Ritual dirt-work serves an analogous double role usually enabling a certain understanding of, [and reconciling with] the status quo, while providing an instruction manual for radical change. One does not entertain Coyote in the sun lodge all year round, but allowing hir to periodically pass motions from the seat will provide the necessary ‘terra-firmament’ that only a trickster can. / /To be properly enlightened means being confronted by the odd divine turd. / / /S.G. |
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