Meet the Trickster

 

Trickster, in your life, is that power that makes sure your path will never go straight and you will never lose your soul in your plans. Trickster challenges the established order, and in so doing renews it. He tricks in order to transform.

There is a close connection between the Gatekeeper and the Trickster. In mythology, they are often one and the same. Trickster is the mode the Gatekeeper — that power that opens doors in your life — adopts when you need to change and adapt and recover your sense of humor. If you are set in your ways and wedded to a linear agenda, the Trickster can be your devil. If you are open to the unexpected, and willing to turn on a dime (or something smaller), the Trickster can be a very good friend.

Trickster will find ways to correct unbalanced and overcontrolling or ego-driven agendas, just as spontaneous night dreams can explode waking fantasies and delusions. Our thoughts shape our realities, but sometimes they produce a boomerang effect. Trickster wears animal guise in folklore and mythology, appearing as the fox or the squirrel, as spider or coyote or raven.

To make friends with Trickster, we want to be ready to make a story out of whatever happens in life and to recognize the bigger, never-ending story that may be playing through our everyday dramas. If nothing goes wrong, it has been said, you do not have much of a story. Trickster knows all about that.

We are most likely to meet Trickster at liminal times and in liminal places, because his preferred realm is the borderlands between the tame and the wild. He invites us to live a little more on the wild side. He approves when we make a game or a story out of it when our plans get upset, our certainties scrambled.

Trickster insists on a sense of humor. Trickster is

A boundary-crosser

He shakes things up

He is a humorist who doesn't respect piety or correctness.

He gets you out of tight places

I’d rather be a Trickster than a martyr, as Elizabeth Gilbert declares in a paean to Trickster: “The trickster (represented forever in world mythology as the fox, the crow, the coyote, the monkey) sees through our delusions of seriousness and exposes the play underneath all our drama… The trickster understands that all this world is temporary, all of it is shifting, all of it is nonsense, all of it is fair game for delight. The trickster just keeps on playing. The trickster is slippery and sly, wry and wise, always looking for the secret door, the hidden stairway, the funhouse mirror, the sideways way of looking at things — and the trickster always endures.    I choose the path of the trickster, not the path of the martyr." [1]

 Trickster figures are liminal lords, barons of in-between. Trickster is the spirit of the doorway and the crossroads and the edge of town. The name Hermes once meant “he of the stone heap” and evoked the little cairns of stones, placed as offerings more than markers, along roads between settlements. Trickster is most active where borders are porous and perilous and offers wit and cunning to navigate these edgy spaces. Hitchhikers in the galaxy must walk close to the Trickster if they are going to make it.

Hermes is one of the great mythic Tricksters and Gatekeepers and World Bridgers. Through him, every house opens into the Otherworld. One of his names, sotheos, means The Socket, as in the socket of a hinge that enables the pin to turn and the door to open and close. So we can think of him as a Hinge guy – as in “hinge of fate” – or a Pivot. As he swings, so do our fortunes.

Trickster is lord of the road, of spirit roads as well as earthly ones. He can guide traveling souls between the worlds, and open passages when none seem to exist. He can escort the dead to the Underworld or raise them from their graves to walk among the living.

He may be a thief, but he is the kind of thief who steals fire from heaven for the benefit of humans.

Trickster breaks down the wall between time and eternity, between mortals and immortals. When he steals Idunn and the apples of immortality, as Loki, he gives mortals (Giants) a taste of eternity and immortals (Aesir) a taste of the ravages of time.

He doesn’t allow a static order.

Trickster is Lord of Loopholes. An old Norse kenning of the name Loki is “a loop in a thread” - a loophole. 

Among the many animal forms of the Trickster - Raven, Coyote, Spider, Monkey - I have special affection for Fox.

Sympathy with Fox

You live on the edges of my life
           at the margin between the tame land and the wild
           and your appearances are always edgy for me.

You know when to hide and when to hunt.
           Men chase you on horseback, with dogs,
           yet turn chicken when you turn up unannounced.

You are tricky. I doubt I’ll ever be at ease with you.
           But you are a determined messenger
           and a necessary link to old and sacred things

You call women I care for to reclaim lost soul
           and become foxy girls, immune to glass ceilings,
           setting their own boundaries, living unbounded life. [2]

I refer to Trickster as “he” because he is depicted as male in most mythologies, and often ithyphallic and lustful to boot – with the significant exception of Fox spirit, who may be Monsieur Renard or Mr. Fox in the West, but is more often Fox Woman, Kitsune (a name that means Come and Sleep) in Japan.

Lewis Hyde reminds us that “in spite of all their disruptive behavior, trickster are regularly honored as the creators of culture.” [3] When Hermes steals cattle from the gods, he presents humans with a domesticated supply of meat on the hoof.

Trickster keeps things lively, in an individual life or the life of a people. The intriguing paradox in the myth is that “the origins, liveliness and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.” 

Trickster breaks down hard-and-fast distinctions between good and bad, black and white, order and chaos. When you are blocked because you have put yourself in a box, in the surface of you mind, he comes to remind you that (as Paul Valéry wrote) “the bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads” and you have plenty of other options. 

References

1. Elizabeth Gilbert blog July 7, 2014 http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/its-better-to-be-a-trickster-than-a-martyr-i-recently-did-a-radio-interview-o/

2. "Brushes with the Red Fox" in Robert Moss, Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. (Albany NY: Excelsior, 2013)

3. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) 8,9.

Please read my book Sidewalk Oracles for guidance on how to navigate life in the play of Trickster.

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

 

Running to Catch a Poem: Remembering the Poet in the Story

 

Poems came to me

As if from far away.

I would feel them coming,

I would rush into the house,

Looking for paper and pencil.

It had to be quick,

For they passed through me

And were gone forever.

- Ruth Stone, "Fragrance" (in her collection What Love Comes To)

As a poet myself, I feel for Ruth Stone. Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderful book Big Magic, Stone's mode of chasing poems like runaway horses is now famous, but few have read the poet herself or even remember her name. It's well worth seeking out her work and noticing, along the way, how she rose above a dark river of grief and pain, especially after her second husband (also a poet) hanged himself from a door in the family home.

There are two delicious further revelations in Gilbert's account of how she heard it from Stone. When a poem got away from her, she felt it galloping away, "searching for another poet". Then sometimes she would manage to grab an escaping poem by the tail, and would feel herself pulling it back. "In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first - backward, but otherwise intact." (Big Magic p.65.)

Many of us dreamers know exactly how that works, as we pull back dreams by the tail as they run away. How many of the dreams that escape go searching for another dreamer?

Image of Ruth Stone running to catch a poem by Daryl Thetford

Making Big Magic: Re-reading Elizabeth Gilbert

What a deliciously good book is Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. Her insistence that ideas are out there looking for the right people to carry and create with them matches the ancient wisdom of Aborigines that the Big stories are hunting the people who will tell them. I love her account of how, when she put aside the idea for a Brazilian "jungle book", it jumped, with specific characters and plot themes, to another wonderful writer, the novelist Ann Patchett, who brought it through in State of Wonder.
    I especially like her recognition that genius is not something a person is, but a greater creative spirit who will infuse and inspire us when we are available. That is the whole theme of the last chapter of my own ConsciousDreaming, and to operate with this awareness is to enter the heart of creative action. We miss the real meaning of genius. The Romans never said that a person was a genius. They said that a person had a genius, a tutelary spirit that brought them greater creative gifts. The Latin word "genius" is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.
    Gilbert reminds us that for the Greeks the highest state of bliss is eudaimonia, being “good-daemoned”.
    Later she makes practical use of Einstein’s practice of “combinatory play”. To release your best in your primary field, play around in a lesser (for you) field where consequences are unimportant. On is way to a discovery, Einstein would pick up his violin and play a sonata or two.
    When it comes to negative thoughts, Gilbert recommends, act like a hostage negotiator. “Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down…The life you are negotiating to save, after all, is your own.”
     She borrows wonderful advice from W.C. Fields: “It ain’t what you’re called, it’s what you answer to.”
     She invites us to choose the trickster in each of us over the martyr.
     And then there is her story of the poet Ruth Stone, who wrote

Poems came to me
As if from far away.
I would feel them coming,
I would rush into the house,
Looking for paper and pencil.
It had to be quick,
For they passed through me
And were gone forever.

- Ruth Stone, "Fragrance",in her last collection What Love Comes To

As a poet myself, I feel for Ruth Stone, because thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, Stone's mode of chasing poems like runaway horses is now famous, but few have read the poet herself or even remember her name. It's well worth seeking out her work and noticing, along the way, how she rose above a dark river of grief and pain, especially after her second husband (also a poet) hanged himself from a door in the family home.
    There are delicious further revelations in Gilbert's account of how Stone caught her poems. When a poem got away from her, she felt it galloping away, "searching for another poet". Then sometimes she would manage to grab an escaping poem by the tail, and would feel herself pulling it back. "In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first - backward, but otherwise intact."
    Many of us dreamers know exactly how that works, as we pull back dreams by the tail as they run away. How many of the dreams that escape go searching for another dreamer?

Top image: Winged genius in the Louvre