The Original Trick

I'm reading a book about "tricksters," ("Trickster Makes the World" - Lewis Hyde) a character type that appears in mythology all over the world, that traces the self-invention of consciousness to the act of "lying." Basically (I'm simplifying a very subtle multi-layered discussion into a very crude, simple one) when we lie, we are creating other worlds, other realities. Characters like Hermes, and Mercury, and Coyote and the Signifying Monkey figure in this tale. So do artists, Picasso's famous line: art is the lie that tells the truth.

Our dreams, memories, art, arguments, ideals in some way are all lies. They are simulations of the world, not quite the world; our language, the words we use day to day, describe and obscure at the same time. Consciousness, being aware of the world, imagining other worlds, this is a unique human ability. We step back from the world into a languauge of symbol, abstraction, this is our "hall of mirrors," the mirrors reflect images of the world, and those images become our world. Trickster, tricks himself into forgetting the genesis of that original trick.