Trickster Makes This World — Lewis Hyde

In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.

Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.

in spite of all their disruptive behavior, tricksters are regularly honored as the creators of culture.

trickster is amoral, not immoral.

Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself … . He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social … yet through his actions all values come into being.

god is an eternal state of mind.”

by “America” we mean the land of rootless wanderers and the free market, the land not of natives but of immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything at any time, the land of opportunity and therefore of opportunists, the land where individuals are allowed and even encouraged to act without regard to community, then trickster has not disappeared. “America” is his apotheosis; he’s pandemic.

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. When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this world seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form.

hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.

but then trickster came along, did something foolish, and now we must labor.

In this world, everything that feeds will someday be food for other mouths; that is the law of appetite, or—as we’d now say—of ecological interdependence.

In heaven there are beings who do not eat;

Trickster makes the world, gives it sunlight, fish, and berries, but he makes it “as it is,” a world of constant need, work, limitation, and death.

“What Buffalo Bull said is only good over in his country,” Coyote said to himself. “I am chief here. Buffalo Bull’s words mean nothing. He will never know.”

the trickster is given something valuable with a condition set on its use, time passes, and before too long trickster’s hunger leads him to violate the condition. As a consequence, the plenitude of things is inexorably diminished.

There seem to be only two options: limited food or limited appetite.

appetite

Umberto Eco’s idea that a sign is something that can be taken as substituting for something else,

“substitution” is the precondition of signification,

theft is the beginning of meaning.