Trickster and the Inscape of Paradox

Without contraries, there is no progression
W. Blake

As I have argued, Trickster is the boundary tester of culture. He is the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the semiotic orbit who works as a placeholder for contradictions, contraries, oxymorons, paradoxes, and that whole host of tensive relations that come from the capacity of human beings to construct the Not. The term I would like to suggest for this tension in one from the poet Hopkins – “Inscape.” Of course, few people understand that term, but George P. Landow of The Victorian Web puts it this way:

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing,
though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it.

If one can ignore for a minute the religious aspects of this notion, and take it for the kind of clustering structure it is, Inscape, as the “unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things”, is clearly a description of an interpretant cluster composed of the Peircean semiotic Absolutes of Firstness and Secondness, of similarity and difference, or of potentiality and particularity. Hopkins’ dead tree is a mere slice of stuff, but to feel, think, express, and note the totality of the experience is a semiotic dance, one that is much like the trickster dance of two steps forward and one step back.

Doesy –Do, Swing your partner