"I'm no Prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.' - M. Foucalt

"Culture is something done to us. Art is something we do to culture." - Carl Andre.

Last night I finished "Trickster Makes the World," by Lewis Hyde. It is masterful. It explores the Trickster figure in myth, in life, art, culture. Tricksters are "boundary crossers," they are tricky, unreliable, curious, maddening, dirty, witty, intelligent. They explore the areas that are forbidden, they try to poke holes in the walls of the "sacred," they try to rewrite the boundaries, they challenge why things are the way they are...after their mischief, things usually aren't they way they used to be. They also remind us that "the way things are," the boundaries between sacred and profane, (in culture, in politics) are sometimes useful, but once they are proven no longer useful, they can be "moved!"

In myth we're talking about Hermes, Coyote, Raven, the Signifying Monkey, the Golden Monkey, etc. In our culture it's usually the artists who play this special role (examples from Hyde): Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg. Examples from Sunny Jimmy: Dylan, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, John & Yoko. Hyde's one political example: Frederick Douglass, a slave who could read and write, who was more articulate than "his master." Suddenly, the false boundaries between slave and master looked ridiculous, inhuman.

"America, I will put my queer shoulder to the wheel." - Ginsberg
"I force myself to contradict myself, so as to avoid conforming to my own taste." Duchamp
"The world is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!" - Ginsberg

Here's Hyde himself: "We are transients in the world, we read books, yes, but we also read the swaying pine boughs, the turtle swimming below the ice, the dream fragment brought back by the smell of eucalyptus leaves, the unused bits of code on strands of DNA, the wobble of the flying frisbee - and each has its radiance to offer, a sense that there are surely secrets yet to be revealed if only the gates would freely open...but, they will never swing freely; a distant light is all there is, and that only briefly seen."

Trickster sometimes helps us kick open that gate. We find that there aren't just a few eternal truths but instead a plenitude of truths. This is why we must have our wits about us, be aware, awake...if we look at the world with new eyes, will we see something... new.!?! "If mind is shapely, art will be shapely." - Ginsberg