862 - Trickster

I knew that mini-library I've built would come in handy!

Trickster Makes The World is a book by Lewis Hyde (this edition Canongate, 2008), in which he documents and dissects Trickster myths from around the world. Trickster could be a coyote, or a rabbit, or raven, or the nearly-god Hermes, but one thing for sure, he (in the stories it's almost invariably a he) is very, very human!

Trickster is a boundary-crosser, who defines the boundaries that exist by the act of crossing them. He's basically out for what he can get, and grows nimble in the act of getting it, and of not, in the process, getting got by others. Coyote's after food, and escape. Hermes is after godhood, and immortality. Lewis makes the point that the transactions by which trickster progresses (or not) are the same acutely observed psychological tricks by which we make our own way in the world. Out of them is spun the culture that we pass on to the next generation. Being human is about accepting that we are tricksters, even when what we are trying to escape is our tricksterhood.

Immediately, for me, trickster resonates with my own journey. That's the one through religious fundamentalism as a young man, through a consequent fundamentalist rejection of fundamentalism, finally to a shamanic rebirth acknowledging both extremes, but happiest dancing nimbly on the boundary.

On that boundary, a new culture is created.

Here are the parallels: coyote (for example) seeks meat, and at the point of getting it, the point of getting snagged in the trap that lies beneath, leaps back, scratched. But now he's hurt and hungry. He's learnt not to trust his instincts, but not yet to catch the meat which will give him the strength to heal. So he tries another tack. He notes the fly, light enough to land without setting the trap off, and he observes he is getting thinner by the hour. Perhaps if he waits long enough, cunningly, he'll get so thin the food will be his for the taking. But as he thins, his strength ebbs, till, too light to pounce, too heavy to fly, he is caught out a second time. But here's where the world steps in. Brother mouse, or fly, or whoever, at coyote's point of weakness, is able and willing to lift the food from the trap and give it to him. Coyote learns a lesson about the kindness of the world at the same time as he learns his limitations.

And here's me, seeking adulthood, and at the point of achieving it (a career and, more than that, home in the Church), leaping back as I realise the cost is the loss of my a-religious childhood. I'm scratched, as deep as I know, and I've lost my sense of self. So I wait, getting thinner all the time, as the rest of my peers take what they need, and though I try to emulate them, creating the shell of a successful life out of the childhood I have been given, I can never quite generate the sense of adulthood I need. I'm too light. I'm too heavy. But here's where the world steps in. At my point of weakness, asleep one night, I am woken by... what? Love, that's all, given to me by... well, in the end, both by the world I found in church, and the world I knew outside. The meat and the not-meat together, filling that sense of identity up, with what was there all along.

So I'm a trickster, wise that I'll always be a trickster. I'll never be more (or less) than I am, nor do I want to be. But I can now take my part in creating whatever new culture I, my peers, and those that come after, can best use to survive a little longer. What I've learnt is that the natural world is drenched with love, but so is the cultural world. The two interact, tango together, and in the sphere of my own identity, at least, I can set myself dancing howsoever I please.

863 - The Medicalisation of Normality

A very pertinent radio doc this evening on The Medicalisation of Normality, which presents, concentrating on their medical dimensions, many of the issues I've touched on in my recent posts on stories, storytelling and the civil rights of identity.

It will be found on the BBC website here after the Thursday repeat, on Radio 4, at 1630.

I do urge you to listen, if you are able to spare the time for it!

864 - Free Seas Freeze?

First thoughts...

June 8th is World Ocean Day. North Tyneside is planning a coastwide weekend of events, and a whole bunch of artists and other creatives (but hey, we're all creatives, right?) have been approached by North Tyneside's Artistic Director, Keith Barrett, for ideas.

There are likely to be competitions, street performers, public outdoor artworks, maybe music and dance, up the coast from North Shields to Whitley Bay and beyond. It may be that many communities beyond North Tyneside will be taking part.

The idea I'm wanting to pitch I imagined, initially, as some form of flash mob activity. I pictured a crowd converging on a pre-arranged spot along the coast, for example on the beach below Rendezvous Cafe, and, for five minutes or so engaging in some kind of coordinated activity, before dispersing. The best example I found online was a Big Freeze at Grand Central Station, New York.

But I think the idea's evolved. World Ocean Day exists to raise our respect for the oceans, and our awareness of the need to protect world oceans from global warming, pollution and exploitation. What if, rather than a self-selecting group of a hundred or so flash mobbers (might still work this way, though?), North Tyneside promoted the participation of everyone at the coastal festival in a two-minute (say) Big Freeze - a Free Seas Freeze.

Creating a free seas frieze, a kind of time-limited 3D postcard along Tynemouth Long Sands, Cullercoats Bay, Whitley Bay and up to St Mary's Lighthouse. There could be some kind of time signal, a flare, cannon burst or fog-horn. Everyone who wanted to would stop still. And after two minutes we'd unfreeze.

That's my pitch, anyway. At present.

865 - Aardhox

In honour of the Whitley Bay Festival of the Great Ox (day late), here's a bit of genetic engineering.

The aardhox is a cross between an aardvark (that's the snouty, anteater bit), a horse (that's the general quadruped physicality of the thing), and an ox (that's the sentimental, got-to-tie-it-in-somehow bit)....

The beast can be found splashed on tarmac at the other end of the prom to the Five-Legged Space Rabbit.

866 - The Greatest Abstraction, Of Course, Is...

... Love....

867 - Wild Money

I'm riffing on Jay Griffith's books, Pip Pip (which I've just started) and Wild (which was a beautiful and formative read a year back). Also a post I wrote near the start of the blog, and the pressure I place myself under, from time to time, to justify what I do in monetary terms - which is a question to do, I think, with identity.

In Pip Pip Jay writes about cultural perceptions of Time. She juxtaposes the abstract measurement of time favoured by the West, all clockwork and binary, with the innate sense of time we carry within us. The sense that is wild, and therefore of a piece with the rest of Nature, that monitors where we are in time by our hunger patterns, the impact of light on skin, the buzz and birdsong of other lives around us. Abstraction, she argues, seems thin by comparison.

Much of what she argues is concerned with the politics of cultural driving forces, and therefore that other abstraction, money. She quotes the 'miserable' Benjamin Franklin, who made the link explicitly: "time is money". And what I'm wondering is (and probably in her book she gets to this, but I've not read it yet), is there, therefore, such a thing as wild money?

I like my idea about money being a work battery, abstracted from the sheer sweaty bulk of a sack of produce (or the time taken to harvest it) to the point where it can be contained as a row of imprints on a magnetic strip, a line on a bank account. I also like the insight that all it requires to sustain the meaningfulness of that line is a massive social contract, in the same way that batteries store energy, but only if you keep them in optimum condition.

Spelling it out further: just as it takes energy to store electric energy in battery form, it takes energy to store kinetic energy in monetary form, so that all one does, by maintaining a viable financial system, is shift the burden of work from the harvester to the gold-miners, accountants, IT people, forgery prevention units, till manufacturers, wallet-makers, educators, nutritionists (because it takes wits to remember all those pin numbers) and yes, defense establishment, who perpetuate the systems of symbols that a successful financial transaction rides on. And if, in the end, all we are talking about is the reallocation of energy expenditure from one area to another, isn't it fair to say that money, as much as anything else in nature, is ultimately subject to the laws of conservation of energy?

I think this prepares the ground. If we have a spectrum of increasing abstraction, with graft at one end and financial currency at the other, and if we also recognise that neither end is more or less energy efficient than the other, we can begin to argue that exchange can legitimately occur anywhere along that line. We can proceed to argue that anything that involves the reciprocation of effort for effort is worthy of the term 'money', and that the imposition of one form of currency on a people is an act of cultural imperialism. We can start to celebrate the varieties of moneys available to us, just as Jay celebrates the varieties of time. Indeed we can start to talk meaningful of 'worth' across peoples, and even species, holistically.

I don't think this is to say, necessarily, that modernism 'got it wrong' - just that there is no reason to proceed as if modernism is the only right there can ever be. Richard Kearney, postmodern philosopher and Irish peace-broker, among other things, is right on this: Postmodernism, which gets a bad press in some quarters, is surely about the recognition that modernism is only one of many many cultural, indeed personal, stories open to us. It is therefore truly wild. So it would seem entirely reasonable if, just as postmodernism has led to the rediscovery of diversity and paganism at the heart of our cultural and religious systems, so too we should be rediscovering our place within a cosmically wild economy.

868 - Pip Pip Quote

This, on the fourth page, probably sums up Jay Griffith's book (but thankfully there are 314 more joyously to read):

"The Karen always know the time. Living with them for six months it became clear to me that the only person with a watch and the only person who could never tell the time was, well, myself. To the Karen, the forest over the course of a day supplied a symphony of time, provided you knew the score. The morning held simplicity in its damp air, unlike the evening's denser wet when steam and smoke thickened the air. Backlit by sun a huge waxy banana leaf at noon became green-gold stained glass, cathedralizing time. Barely one of my hours later, it was just a matt, bottle-green leaf, useful verdure, a plate for rice, a food-wrapper. Birds sang differently at different hours and while the soloists of life are always with us, the whole orchestra of the forest altered, shifting with the sun's day, all the noisy relations between birds, animals and insects, making chords of time played in all the instrumental interactions. Western time seems a thin, thin reedy peep of a thing by comparison."