Trickster Comes to Visit / Raven's Mud Project

Pious Prius

2011-03-23T13:24:00.000-05:00

I now have a Prius and am quite please with the 40 mpg. My vain was 24 at best and usually about 14 in town. I figured we will use 53% less gasoline than before. But in actuality, the experience is interesting -- learning to hear a new set of noises (or non-noises), learning to drive differently as to stopping, braking, and accelerating, trying to figure out how all the systems work. I got a fairly simple one without many bells or whistles, but it does tax my senior .

Raven's Mud Project

2008-05-01T18:18:00.001-05:00

Raven’s Mud Project

At Moore Works

The Raven’s Mud Project, based on the myth that Raven brought up mud for the Creator to shape into an earth fit for human beings, has several purposes aimed at improving the earth and extending the kinship of humanity

First, it seeks to reduce the amount of computer materials that end up in land fills and to contribute as much as possible to a self-sustaining economy.
Two, it seeks to broaden the community’s computing capacity, enabling as broad a range of access and uses as possible.
Three; it seeks to make available and usable non-proprietary software that will enable users to be as independent in their computing as is possible.
Four, it wishes to recycle and refurbish old computing equipment for charitable groups to use at their discretion and to enable their community goals.
Five, it chooses to do this by accepting donated computing equipment, which is then diagnosed, cleared of data, and refurbished. If possible, some version of Linux will be installed on the equipment and it will be donated to appropriate and local charities that have use for them. Equipment which is not usable will be dismantled and processed to local recyclers.

Thank you for helping to preserve the resources of the planet and helping your fellow human beings to have better access to the information age.

If you have recyclable equipment, please contact

C. W. Spinks, Senior Mud-Dauber

Raven’s Mud Project

Moore Works

PO Box 29612

San Antonio, Texas 78229

Email: cspinks@trinity.edu

Phone: 210-344-7472

Raven Do Fly Where He Wills

2007-02-17T10:42:00.000-06:00

When I started this blog, I was tricked by my own ambitions. I had no idea how hard it would be to post consistently – much less daily. I was pretty good for a couple of weeks, but then it got harder and harder. Over that time of blog blockage, I had continued with my Raven’s Mud Project (see postings here or the links on Trickster's Way in the left column) which seeks to recycle, refurbish, and distribute old computers with Linux and open source software installed. I have a friend and compatriot who has a computer consulting business who has aided, encouraged, and joined with me in this project. Always stretching my capacities, Dale Moore has helped me make this project a livable and enjoyable activity for a retired English teacher.

Quite nicely, all of this lead me back to my Blog, which has morphed from Trickster Comes for a Visit to some sharing with the Raven’s Mud project. This widens the blog to reflect my interests even more – trickster, recycling, open source computing, open source spirituality – trickster, recycling, open source computing, open source spirituality, and the others frailties to which I am heir.

So if the trickster reflection meant anything to you, come on back for more stuff on the widened interest. I don’t think I will ever be the kind of blogger who changes the world, but it will change me and my relation to the world – so that is a good thing. In trickster fashion, learn the limits of appetite, reduce your footprints on the planet, and find the joys of the skies.

Dauber

Primium non nocere

Raven's Mud Story

2007-02-16T18:24:00.000-06:00

When the Creator first made the world, it was only water and no land. The only creatures were those of the sky and the water, and one day Sealwoman asked her husband, Raven, to make some land so she could rest with her children, feed them and protect them without continually having to swim.

Raven went to Otter for help and asked him to hold a turtle shell on his belly while Raven dove down to gather up bits of mud to stack on the shell. Finally after at time, when the mound of mud of tall enough, Raven asked Otter to take it to the shallowest part of the waters and place it on the bottom. The mud barely stuck above the water, but Raven kept diving down and bring up bits of mud to add to the mound and eventually he made the land world where all things could grow.

The Creator saw what Raven had done and smiled. The Creator asked Raven to continue making the world; so Raven stole the sun and moon placed them in the heavens, he stole the stars and scattered them across the sky. He scooped out the rivers and piled up the hills and mountains. He flapped his wings and stirred the air to make rain and thunder, and the land world he made grew and prospered. He then brought up pieces of mud and shaped them into the various plants and animals that we know and finally he shaped Firstman and Firstwoman, and as the Creator’s vision had taught him, he gave them the earth to cherish, love, and maintain forever.

Daubers forever!

Trickster and the Inscape of Paradox

2005-01-21T08:48:00.000-06:00

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

Death and Trickster

2005-01-15T16:12:00.000-06:00

For Faye, Lyndon, and Gwin

Death is often attributed to Trickster. Either his prodigious appetite and never-ending hunger for more than he has, or her seeking of powers that she does not possess, Trickster unintentionally is the cause of death coming into the world. Trickster's bargain for his desires somehow is the reason we face a world of impermanence. For the living, it is of course a bad bargain because without his foolish trade or his foolish seeking after things he did not have, we human beings and other creatures would live forever, but after that point Trickster’s legacy of mortality takes one of two tracks – horror or laughter. Trickster can morph into a skin-crawler or a soul-stalker or she can morph into the silliness of our infinite desires – particularly the one that wants to maintain the continuity ourselves or our experiences forever.

But the other side of appetite is mortification and corruption. Desire is haunted by satiation, and life will morph into death; so more life can continue, and the mystery of that relation haunts a self-constructing species like us, who spin culture, language, myth, narrative, religion and science to explain why it is that we must die. There is, of course, no answer to that why – there may be tears, sorrows, rage, refusal, or resignation, but the death will come. Perhaps sacrifice, struggle, reincarnation or resurrection will hold death’s dark away for a while, but it will still stare back at us as the one of the cold facts of our lives. And less one dwell on the horror of that image, surely we can try to morph death’s grimace into Trickster’s mysterious grin. No, death and its pain are not funny, but laughter, like hugs, helps transform that pain eventually into the loving memories of those who are gone and to whom we will be joined – because we were never separated.

Trickster and Tragedy

2005-01-05T13:47:00.000-06:00

The scope of the Tsunami, the slaughter in Iraq and Dufar, or the death of children at the hands of those who are supposed to care for them are frightening things. They are events which cause us to question the justice of the universe or the very intentions of the godhead. “Acts of God and Nature” may satisfy insurance requirements, but the presence of suffering in our lives or the encounter with aggressive and persistent evil has long clustered around Trickster.

Although in some phases, Trickster is seen as a cultural hero, he also is often the source of death, error, and pain. There is a darkside to Trickster reminding us that all of our cultural pretensions are subject to the whims of something beyond us. The two faces of drama, comedy and tragedy, are the two sides of Trickster – too clever, too smart, too hungry, too needy for our own good, and too slow to recognize the limits of our selves and our cultures.

Now that is cold comfort to those in the midst of tragedy – pain is pain and grief is grief and some empathy may help, but to face the darkness of either a tsunami or death is something all flesh is heir to – thanks to Trickster, of course. Trickster’s darkside is the darkness of death, the pain of loss, the shock of suffering, and we will dwell with it until we can accept Trickster’s other gift -- laughter. Only time can give us the other side!

Trickster's War Club: Double Speaking

2005-01-03T14:49:00.000-06:00

Some sign is any sign

The Orwellian sense of Doublespeak is often used to castigate some user of signs for mis-use of language. As suggested on Wikipedia:

Doublespeak is language deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning, often resulting in a "communication bypass". Such language is associated with governmental, military, and corporate institutions. Doublespeak may be in the form of bald euphemisms ("downsizing" for "firing of many employees") or deliberately ambiguous phrases ("wet work" for "assassination"). Doublespeak is distinguished from other euphemisms through its deliberate usage by governmental, military, or corporate institutions.

But I want to look at doublespeak, in a more neutral sense, as a semiotic device of interpretant shifting. It is a meme strategy, like a mis-directing iconicity that pulls one’s attention elsewhere or a truth-proof lie because it will not scan logically (according to the established set of interpretants). Parallel to evolutionary camouflage, or misdirection for purposes of predation, courtship, or pair bonding, doublespeak is a strategy of semiotic competition.

Now in the Orwellian sense, these type devices are clearly marked at deliberate uses of some institution, and I want to think of doublespeak as an area where signs struggle to give themselves Dawkins’ three markers of memetic successfulness: longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. Without either the political moralism of Orwell or the scientific moralism of Dawkins, I want to suggest that Peirce’s triadic relations of interpretants (and signs and objects for that mater) can be used to discuss how new signs are generated. Doublespeak can be a device for torquing marginal sign from more centristic signs to move the cluster in other directions. Here I am thinking of the Blue America and the Red American and how signs become re-valued for new and different purposes by one group or another , or how –how a sign, an interpretant, can be used to shift a discourse ( to develop an new series of signs and interpretants) in a particular way for particular purposes.

Now generally when one talks in these terms, one is talking from, if not a disputatious viewpoint, at least at skeptical one. For example when PBS Frontline “the Persuaders” looked at advertising they were concerned with how advertising does or does not corrupt our culture. But such analysis can take on the political edge (pro or con) of the Republican strategist/guru Frank Lutz who substituted “death tax” for “estate tax” because “nobody knew what an estate tax was”. Of course, Orwell sees doublespeak as the corruption of political discourse, Dawkins sees the memes of faith and religion as “ruthless and selfish replicators” corrupting scientific discourse; or PBS sees advertising as corrupting civil discourse. )

What I want to suggest is that interpretant shifting need not be judged morally (although it certainly can be), but discussed as a mechanism by which semiotic competition –evolutionarily, culturally, or scientifically takes place. If one keeps the oxymoronic quality of trickster in mind and the range of potentiality in Peirce’s Firstness, then the fluidity of signs, the morphing of meanings, and the interpretant dance can be discussed more openly and more honestly than agenda carping.

Trickster's War Club: Smiotic Stone Soup

2005-01-02T14:19:00.000-06:00

Some sign is all signs

In an earlier (on 12/22/04) I discussed Eshu, the Yorba trickster with the two colored hat, and linked him to the quarrelsome division of the United States into the Blue and Red States, and although such trickster strife is problematic despite attempts to do color blendings of the Purple America, I want to continue to look at this phenomenon in terms of memes and semiosis. I am thinking here that one can easily extend the Dawkin’s notion of cluster memes to a cluster (or as Peirce’s called them a chain) of interpretants. The “ideas,” the “cognitions,” the “meanings,” or the “interpretations” that go along with the sign-object reference-relation is certainly the playground of memes and trickster. To torque a known pattern of interpretants into something new and different is to start a new chain of Interpretants that must struggle with a more established chain. This may be a disputatious exchange, a cooperative exchange, a dialogic exchange, a competitive exchange, or a extinctual one that will call attention to the priorities of a cultural cluster and will morph in the directions that all new (and established) signs have; that is, signs (and their meme or Interpretant clusters) have a life cycle of sorts, and signs are conceived, aborted, born, midwifed, fed, nourished, and brought to fruition, and eventually die. Signs are living entities, or to be more precise, living is a matter of signs.

Now the problem is how to categorize the process of sign change, development, and generation without defaulting to either disease model that pretends it know what is a “healthy” sign relation, or to a Darwinian rift that has built-in notions of progress and convenient prioritization of some specific interpreptant cluster, or even a socio-pyscho-cultural dance that identifies those signs which are “dysfunctional.” If I may be Wittgensteinian for a moment, it really is the case, in a discussion of sign change, that the “purpose of your classification is the use you put it to.” And I am not pretending here to some posed sense of scientific, philosophical, or rational neutrality, but to some thing like semiotic openness – an embracing of Peirce’s notion that one of the absolute boundaries of semiosis is Firstness -- the potentiality, the infinitude, the eternal progression/regression of sign generation.

Dawkins, as I have said, is a little too Russellian for me and wants to beat upon the corrupting memes of faith and religion (at least these rather than political or economic ideas are his boogies of choice) and declare the un-memetic nature of Science. Trickster Wash! If the meme, if the Interpretant cluster is an evolutionary process, then all clusters are subject to the fortunes of competition. Some, of course, are more long-lived that other, some are more accidental and temporary than others, and surely some semiotic morphology follows ontology. Thus is one uses meme clusters or interpreptant clusters to examine the methods of how sign change rather than sermonizing on which change is correct or appropriate, one can make a useful contribution to the Community of Inquirers, but do remember Trickster is always there to test, invert and point to the boundaries that the Community of Inquirers wants to see as eternal and unquestionable. Trickster is the source of conversation about, and he sings in our ears to remind us of our over cleverness and our appetites.

Check the plums, taste the soup -- Trickster is there to remind us.

Trickster's War Club: All Memesy are the Borogroves

2004-12-30T07:29:00.000-06:00

my sign IS your sign

I now want to talk about memes; you know, Richard Dawkins informational construct of replication introduced into popular culture in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. His introduction of the term (ironically enough) started a memetic wildfire of new thinking about cultural transmission, transformation, and evolution, and conceptualizing about informational viruses, idea replicators and the spread parasitic codes, and semiotic immune systems. In 1991, Dawkins even speculates on “Viruses of the Mind” and scatters a whole host of disease metaphors to make some points about the differences in faith and science.

Although Dawkins casts his very attractive (again ironically enough) notion in the form of genetic Darwinian evolution to play the skeptic’s card, this sense of good and bad signs is not a new idea. Plato’s Phaedrus speaks of good-, bad-, and non-lovers : “Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers.” Or any number of earlier medieval theologians discuss what is it the relationship of interpretation to revelation with great pyres of heresy cleansing or reformation in which the Father of Lies was to silenced or at least to have his processes of seduction be controlled. Even in our more modern times, the logical positivists tried to remove the stain of the non-referential form language use, and certainly the political spinners of the last elections have used this notion (edging on conspiracy theory) of sign contamination as fuel for all sorts of spins, ads, and campaigns.

But here I really wish to eschew the rather heavy moral tone that lies in these distinctions; they are, to my lights, too much like Spencerian readings of Darwinian evolutionary change. Always there creeps in the notion of progress (meaning, of course, that speaking perspective is the proper pinnacle of the evolutionary tree) rather than the more complex one of competition, change, and adaptation. Certainly semiosis has an effect, and some of those effects have to discussed, critiqued, and judged, but any rush to judgment is really very anti-change, and ultimately anti-life! I am not so concerned that there may be good or bad memes; I am not so interested in the fact that information exchange can be parasitic or symbiotic, and I am not so worried whether the process is one of seduction, conquest, or simply the exchange of replicators. What I am interested in, what I am concerned about, what I do worry about is how that process takes place and how one can developed tools, perspectives, or devices that will allow us to critically discuss how we use signs and to continue with the business of living.

Now I don’t pretend to scientific neutrality here. There is something very ethical and moral in all this discussion and activity. I think the ethical problem is something like the discussion of computer viruses – when you examine them you make the information, and the possibility, for creating them and using them that much more prevalent. Like with biological weaponry, this can be very dangerous, but learning how to deal with such things is a part of modern life. One needs some understanding of the semiotic immune system, some understanding of how signs are generated or transformed, how centristic signs can be torqued out to the margins or extremities of a semiotic field, or of how signs can be revalued for new and different purposes by one group another. The only way to do that is to be a un-invested as possible and then bring the discoveries to the Community of Inquirers, where they can be discussed and critiqued in a public fashion and something of their use to the direction of the Final Interpretant is possible with playing games of semiotic extinction.

So line up your T-cells, and put on your doublespeak hat,
Trickster is Walking

Trickster's War Club: Darkling Glasses

2004-12-29T11:47:00.000-06:00

my sign can beat up your sign

The last presidential election seems to have left the country in a quandary struggling with rainbow America coming down to being only two or three colors. Folks either seem to bluster or soul search about “values” and run scenarios of disaster apocalypse, fraud or mandate. Now I don’t wish to play political pundit. My own views would twist my comments, and punditry is probably one of the more useless endeavors that one could be called to. But I do what to look at incompleteness and semiotic approximation to caution against the atmosphere of absolutism that seems to be marking political discourse these days. What I want to do is use the instantiation of trickster as a semiotic device for the direct reconciliation of extremes. In the discourse of values, I want to look at how both reason and faith can work in completeness and incompleteness to push people to the edge, and I want to engage in a discussion of how we need to be semiotically humble (if one can avoid the dysfunction of Uriah Heep)in the face of our incompleteness. I want to move toward something of Godelian axiom in sign interpretation, something of a Heisenbergian principle of semiotic uncertainty, following rater faithfully Peirce’s notion of an ever receding final Interpretant. Whatever, I want to is celebrate fallibilism and look at that notion as something permeated with Trickster.

But here I must start backwards complaining about the semiotic absolutism that has come to mark so much of current discourse; that is the reason, the subtitle is “my sign can beat up your sign” The very opposite of my goal here is semiotic domination – sometimes by manipulation, sometimes by exploitation, sometimes by demagoguery, and sometimes for correct knowing (faith, reason, or spin). Surely, the members of this society clearly understand than signs are in flux – if Peirce taught us anything it is that signs change. They may move and evolve teleologically toward the Absolute Final Interpretant, but that is more of a theoretical necessity than an actual state of human mentality. Like the Oneness of God, the perfectly semiotic connection is more the fantasy of theo-philosophical thinking that it is experiential. What really is necessary is the Community of Inquirers who examine, discuss, criticize, and direct sign processes toward a hoped for, but unseen goal. That is the reason, for my main title: “for we now see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known.” (I Cor, 13:12)

Of course, one can see that I refer to glasses in the plural, and that too is a part of my concern here. Too often in semiotic discussions, I have heard folk trying insistently, without full admission or perhaps awareness, to establish a prioritized reading of signs. This agendized semiosis tends to quickly declare that there are good signs and bad signs, that there are proper and improper Interpretants, that they are enlightening and misleading metaphors, or functional and dysfunctional icons, or accurate or null references, and although later I intend to use Dawkins’ idea of memes, I really have always distrusted the need or the attempt to prioritize one set of sign readings over another even if I prefer one reading over another, but I think Peirce’s of fallibilism is too important to let go.

Sorry for all the terminology and links, but at some point one does need to broaden the reflections. Follow the links (and the links – and the links), and you will probably find Trickster’s Cheshire grin staring back at you.

I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see……..

Trickster's War Club: a reflection on semiotic domination

2004-12-28T11:59:00.000-06:00

As you may know, Trickster and war rituals don't mix very well. Trickster is always transgressing the space between the sacred and the profane, and violating the cultural codes by which we justify our war endeavors. So what I want to do is a series of reflections on the process of domination by signs. Some will be glad that I have gotten the holiday reflections out of my mind (I hope), but I am partially do this because I am scheduled to do a Presidential address to the American Semiotic Society next October, and I am going to use the Blog to organize my thoughts and drafts. So I will probably keep this same title for my entries for a while and try to distinguish them by the subtitle, or a number or something. Bear with me and my rather wired familiar!

Epiphanous Trickster

2004-12-27T09:26:00.000-06:00

The 12 days of Christmas count down to Epiphany – a season of lights observed on January 6, the "twelfth day of Christmas,” when the Magi came to honor the infant Jesus. The Greek meaning of the word is "showing forth" and it clearly has is liturgical use, but the non-litugical use is probably what most people mean when they say they have an “epiphany.” That is, of course, a distinct trickster experience. What Trickster does is to bring light to show forth – sometimes all we see is appetite, cleverness, or ways to twist the world to our wants, but sometimes what we see is the wonder of life, the traps of our own perceptions, and a self realization of our tricksterhood.

I know there are lots of folk who clutch at the notion of a trickster Jesus, but my holiday reflections have really stressed that on purpose. I think that fear is kin to the same false sentimentality that surrounds the “babyjesus” at this season – a kind of crèche mentality that sees things only through the haze of a nostalgic reconstruction of a past that never existed. In fact, it surprises me how much the popular cultural dance at Christmas is manipulation of people’s need to remember the past through the sheen of a nostalgic past and how much holiday despair is the results of such sentimental manipulation .

But what makes a trickster meditation of Christmas so interesting is how much these paradoxes, oxymorons, and contraries of the mythic narrative still shows through – kings and mangers, angels and shepherds, divinity and manure, slaughter and innocents, dark and light, us and them, birth and death – remind us that Light is always for the looking!

Look, here Trickster comes walking

Trickster and History's Babe

2004-12-26T16:19:00.000-06:00

This first Sunday after Christmas was a particularly moving service at my church. We had the baptism of two sets of twins, and although the scripture reading was about the Slaughter of Innocents and the Flight to Egypt, the minister’s sermon was built around slections from Lullabies from the Axis of Evil – a response to President Bush’s naming of the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address which is a collection of lullabies from around the world in the belief:

Lullabies lead us to the deepest and most fundamental way of communication between human beings. It is where all sharing of ideas and feelings starts. Between mother and child, between father and child. It is a universal culture. And it is amazing to see how many aesthetic similarities, musically and lyrically there are in lullabies from country to country all over the world. The text-issues are often the same, so are the musical structures. Differences in scales, language, metaphors and religion cannot cover the fact that in the lullabies, the cultures of the earth meet each other. Or rather: from this common starting-point they grow into diversity
.............................. http://www.hrmusic.com/artists/axis.html

The sermon was a reminder to all of us to see Jesus’ face in the face of children – particularly those we would label as enemies, or less than worthy. It was a call to oneness of our most fundamental form of communication – that between mother and child, and some of the tracts was played from that CD with interspaced comments by the minister. At the above link, you can read about the project CD, listen to some of the lullabies and even buy the CD if you wish. Try it I think you will find it moving as well.

Now one might ask all of this relates, but it does especially when the child, as some of them do at baptism, cries, and the minister pointed that Jesus probably cried as baby and Mary probably sang lullabies to him. In short, this sermon did one of the characteristic reversals of Christianity and Trickster – the very helpless, hungry, needy babe is really the marker of our most human and divine existence – both -- I repeat Both because all of the various oxymorons of the season (that I have talked about here whether they be history, legendary, or even frivolous) are the birthright of our species. The unity of the primal experience with the diversity of cultural and linguistic instantiation is the trickster reminder that all of us are born to the joy and tragedy of our humanhood.

So let us remember that even when Pan is born, the cry is a nativity cry:

The Babe, The Babe is Born

A Very Mary Christmas: from my Daughter

2004-12-24T21:39:00.000-06:00

Reading about Trickster and the holidays certainly put me in a creative mood, although please forgive my ignorance and inarticulateness on the subject. Trickster compels me to write though. As my tummy is digesting some wonderful tamales made for the staff here at my place of employment, I find Trickster romping up and down the hallways filling us with an interesting mix of cheer and guilt. We here assuage our guilt of our constant demands on our cleaning staff by collecting a donation to give to each of them come holiday time. We give our ten, twenty, even 60 dollars (our dean was feeling especially guilty this year evidently) in an attempt to make up for all of the nasty things we ask them to do, all of the menial tasks, all of the horrible attitudes and comments made behind backs. We really know how to keep the lower-class in their place. However, we feel that our money somehow washes clean our slates for the next year, only to repeat over and over again our actions and words. Like an immersion baptism or confessions to a Padre at church, we feel those pieces of green paper bear much more meaning than they do. We seem to place ourselves up with Santa and God, gracing each toilet cleaner and floor mopper our holiday spirit every year. How lucky they must feel. Trickster seems to make it so easy for us to go about our normal lives 11 ½ months out of the year, then brings the guilt, the realization of our actions crashing on our heads.

Trickster, in her ever ambivalent way, does the opposite for those wonderful tamale makers. Every day they are put to the test, fight to smile at a sneer, bite their tongue at prejudice and other horrors we bring them, and continue cleaning up after us as quiet as mice, unnoticed much like Santa and his clobbering reindeer on the rooftop. Yet these few moments during the holidays, Trickster grants them a reprieve. Not because of the cash given to them by us gluttons, but in a much more simple and humble way. They seem, although this is awfully presumptuous of me, to forget. They are instead filled with apparent happiness, a kind, gracious, giving, wonderful feeling we only have in sugarplum dreams. They put to rest all of the unsightliness of the year and fully embrace this holiday as their own. And so they come bearing flaky, greasy, crumble-on-the-fork goodness, and tres leches to boot in a show of appreciation. Appreciation!!!! All we can do is muster out our “gracias” while stuffing our faces, with Trickster dancing across our lips.

One can only hope my presumptions are right, that Trickster grants them relief. Or that she enters those lowly, humble cleaner-uppers and they become the embodiment of Trickster, forcing us to remember how naughty we are, to bring twinges of guilt to us in holiday cheer. Either way, Trickster gives them the upper hand, and gleefully so. And so as you plop your change in the Salvation Army bell-ringers bucket (you will have to go to customer service at Target, much easier to avoid), we are forced in our “generosity” to remember the lowly, knocking door to door with no room at the inn. I bet Mary made tamales for those Wise Men.

Trickster is in the Lines

2004-12-24T10:43:00.000-06:00

I am one of those blessed with optical migraines rather than the head splitting variety, and they are an interesting experience. What happens is that I see a line of lights in my visual field that usually start as something like an angular arc of lightening (of beautiful neon colors, usually white, yellow, blue, and sometimes red). They start in the middle of my visual field and migrate, getting larger, to the outside of the visual field where they eventually dissipate. These show up when my eyes are open, and I usually notice them because it looks like there is a very irregular, glowing crack in my glasses. They are not painful, but they are distracting and I usually find I need to lie down for 15 or 20 minutes to let them follow their normal progression.

They are very beautiful, and although I wish I could render them more accurately and more dynamically, this static image

suggests something of their nature although they move and morph as they migrate to my peripheral vision. I call them my Eskimo Friend, because they remind me of Inuit geometrical art, which, as you may guess, is full of trickster figures. Often the shape of my lines will suggest either a raven's mouth or a wolf's head -- nice Amerindian images that I, no doubt, find to give some order to the chaos of the ocular migraines. I don't know whether it is the angularity of the lines, or the images really suggest such things, but the lightening show is a wondrous vision. Here is Inuit rendering of trickster/raven:

that clearly shapes and projects a recognizable visual image. My light shows are not nearly so organized or formed into so identifiable shapes, but the insistent symmetry and the contrast between such vivid colors suggests lots of the Northwestern indigenous art that I have seen. Take this example is an Timshian house (constructed in the Grand Hall display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa:

Although my ocular migraines are not at all architectural, but the use of line, color, and symmetry in Inuit art strikes me as very familiar. If I were an artist, I would like very much to assemble glass works (probably layers of different colored class cut to show bevels of back neon light glowing thru) etched with the various forms of Eskimo lightening that I see during the experience. Somehow I would change the light so the images would pulse and the colors would morph through some version of the spectrum.

Well, such plans will have to wait, but you might guess I will still connect all of this with Trickster (what else on a blog like this). The gift of my lights, the emphasis upon edge, color, and symmetry, and of course the echoes I see in Inuit art are a fortuitous synchronicity that deepens my life. There is something life affirming in the visions -- perhaps only because they mean I don't have the more painful migraines, but what it suggests to me is taking life's journey as it comes -- wandering in trickster fashion and learning as I live. The Haida use the trickster as a shaman, and he/she guides us in our life's travels:

I want to be on that boat (which by the way is installed in a bronze version at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. But I am also reminded of The Savage Innocents (a movie directed by Nicholas Ray in 1959) with Anthony Quinn as Inuk, an Inuit hunter who kills a missionary and runs from the police. In that movie, two women do a ritual, where they face either other and chant and breathe in tandem to exchange breath-spirit-songs. They do this in an ever increasing rhythm, that as I remember , drives (plus the desire of Inuk to be a good host and offer one of his wives) the missionary to the inappropriate and rude behavior for which Inuk kills him, and thus the conflict of the movie. Of course, I don't know whether (back in the early 60's) I was just impressed with the romantic wildness the of film, or thrilled by a snowy version of western revenge quest, or instructed by the the naive and arrogant missionary overwhelmed by the culture he goes to save, or simply astounded how the characters spoke without the use of personal pronouns. Still, I did know, even back then, I was glimpsing something of the range of human behavior that my rather blue-collar-West-Texan background did not include. I didn't know then how much I was projecting into the "Noble Savage" mythos (like some Europeans have always done), but the more I walk with Trickster and the more I have the visits of my Eskimo friend, the more I am able to simply appreciate the spiritual and aesthetic view that exists in Inuit art.

Go and do likewise..........

Digital Photos and Trickster

2004-12-23T19:08:00.000-06:00

My last experimental post of the "little" tomb at Newgrange and the sunset in Colorado's Black Canyon put me in a conjoining mind. Since I don't think most mental things happen by accident; I am curious as to why I chose to put those two together, regardless of how I might technologically frame them. First, they both are photographs from my (and my wife's) initial travels trips after retirement when we began to work out the bugs of our mutual retirement travel plans. Second, I chose them both to play with images related to this trickster blog because they were generated digitally and they seized my attention when looking for non-copyrighted material. Third, both images are driven by the diurnal events of sunrise and sunset (anyone who wishes can break in to song from Fiddler on the Roof if they so desire) -- this is, the liminal qualities of sunrise and sunset, solstice or equinox; or even variant methods of posting data are what marks a trickster understanding of our percepts and epistemic process. If Trickster walks the margins, then those times, places, or set of events that are so clearly boundaried are places were Trickster can be found. It is our process of signing, our process of knowing, or our process of digitally dividing up the analog stuff that is the hallmark of human culture -- where we know the rules and signs are both arbitrary and immensely important.

It is the very fabric of time, time's arrow, and the janus sign that helps us to recognize the temporality of our distinctions (cultural, philosophical, religious, or scientific), and the sidereal drama, framed by the limits of our calendric understanding, are continual reminders that most of what we consider permanent is, as a matter of fact, much more arbitrary. Trickster, as generative force, cultural hero, buffoon, appetite, or conqueror of monsters, is a scripting of the human capacity to shape the world and a reminder that the shaping of that world is only one of many means of shaping it. I suppose that such realization brings either horror, delight, or boredom, but one the margins are shown to be moving, Trickster has helped make this world a much more bearable place.

.........take it the limits

Will the Real Tomb Stand Up

2004-12-23T01:15:00.000-06:00

This is a pictue of a small (and probably artificial) chamber tomb just to the East of Newgrange itself, and I wanted to see if I could post an image by email:

I am sure I will remove it later, but it is a nice picture......so here is another from Colorado's Black Canyon:

Eshu Walking through Blue States and Red States

2004-12-22T18:00:00.000-06:00

You might gather I am more of the liberal persuasion than the conservative one; so I was part of that rather large minority that did not vote for George Bush. However, I don’t really intend this blog to be about the politics of the election – well not directly anyway. Still, when pundits, pollsters, anchors, and general folks talk about Red America and Blue America, I am reminded of Eshu, the African trickster, who wears a hat of two colors (one different on each side) so that depending on which perspective one has of him, one thinks his hat is either black or white. This discrepancy, this contrary variance, in how Eshu appears is, of course, the source of great conflict as one person or another swears that Eshu is wearing a hat of a particular color because that is the color they see. This contrarines is so much true that Eshu is the source of discord and arguments between friends among the Yorba. [See Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World (New York: Straus, 1998), pp. 238-240.]

Actually since the 2000 election, that little meme of blue/red America has been circulating in the national consciousness. Like a mantra of division, it has been used to explain all things political, religious, economic and social, and we all seem to have become meme replicators of that bicolor/bi-coded template. We find increasingly easy to use this meme to explain all sorts of things about our current public life. It works like a rational imitation of a conspiracy theory – just figure out how someone is a “blue” or red” person, and you can predict all sorts of things about them – what they eat (or don’t eat), what they drive (or don’t drive), what (they shoot or don’t shoot), what they pray (or don’t pray), how they worship (or don’t worship), how they rear (or don’t rear their children), what movies they see, what television they watch, and on and on, but what everybody wants to find is how a color will determine how these folks vote.

The problem with this meme is that is clearly Eshu driven. Not only is it divisive (because of appearances), but it closely tied to a ownership, property, and domination. In short, the emphasis on “things” rather “ideas,” on media images rather than actual people, or on polls rather than discussion is mostly a media advertising spin game – one that detracts from the more significant issues (that may really divide the country) from actually being discussed in a public forum that recognizes that not only are issues complex, but that things and people are always more than they may appear.

Princeton Prof. Robert Vanderbei’s Purple America Map shows a whole different view of this bicolor, bi-coded division.

When one views the country county by county even when coded with the two colors, the country looks purple. One has a sense of how varied things really are, and how silly Eshu’s game of showing us only blue or red really; so let us think more complexly and approach the supposed conflict in “values” as just an argumentative meme used to bring on empty quarrels to deflect one's attention from more significant issues.

……………………………Look again, Trickster is in the Nation

Winter Solstice

2004-12-21T15:08:00.000-06:00

Ah, one of my favorite days – the nadir of year and the return of the sun. This is, of course, one of the four great demarcations of the solar calendar and the old ways – winter solstice, summer solstice, vernal equinox, and autumnal equinox, the compass points of human understanding of the seasons and the axial tilt. Being in South Texas, the winter solstice is not very impressive, but of course the more northern the latitude the more impressive the event seems to be. This summer I made a pilgrimage to Newgrange in Ireland and like most tourists marveled at the age and dedication such a structure demonstrates, and any person interested in archeology knows how many cultures have noted the passages of the sun and stars by their architecture, but I don’t want to go after the astronomical aspects of this day as much as I want to look at its essential marginality and ambivalence.

This is a trickster blog, after all, and I have already said much about Trickster’s ambivalences, but as the Lord of the Roads, the Lord of the Hinges, Keeper of the Margins, Flaunter of the Limits, Trickster seems to dwell especially at the solstices and the equinoxes. Our manias and excesses at this time of year are bolsters against the fear of darkness, death, and cold, and we have, as we should, a deep hunger for light, life, and warmth. The solstices and the equinoxes are clear reminders of the liminality of our time sense and the larger perspective of the changing and never fully understood universe.

I know I am ignoring here the funnier aspects of Trickster time, but the many of the games we play at this time of year are fractals of humor and stress, of anxieties and hope, and of appetites and limits that reiterate some amazing landscape of our own imaginative selves. The lampshade drunk at a New Year’s celebration is probably not too far from any of us (not even the most puritan); so let us put another log on the fire, or damp the solar fires, let us stand on the cusp of time and enjoy the laughter of our existence!

.............................Sappy Solstice

Trickster and Santa

2004-12-21T15:05:00.000-06:00

originally done on 12/20/2004

Since I am stuck in a holiday mood, I want to continue reflections on Trickster and Christmas – particularly Santa. That jolly old elf has many names: Sinterklass, Santa Claus, Pere Noel, FatherChristmas, Kris Kringle, Saint Nicholas, etc, (see http://www.christmas.com/pe/1381 ) but, of course, the saintly old guy also has a shadow called Black Pete or Ole Saint Nick, suggestive of anything but the whiteness of winter’s purity or snow, and percolating some very nasty things to the surface of our celebrations. I think Santa Claus is probably one of the great cultural containers for all sorts of notions of deceit – at least of the conspiracy of adults against the innocence of children. From the moment of truth when one no longer believes in Santa Claus, but maintains the fantasy or deliberately challenges it for sake of others, the improbability of Santa Claus looms larger and larger, and the games to assuage doubt get more and more complex. We keep a herd of Santa helpers who dress in red to resonate the eager desires of children or to make/sell memory photographs for their parents' gnostalogical constructs; we keep hundreds of rituals designed to prolong the belief of children and to demarcate a growing clarity of line between "reality" and "fantasy": Santa’s milk paritally drunk and cookies nibbled, Santa letter actually mailed at the post office, NORAD tracking of Santa’s sleigh, Christmas eve noises for unsleeping children, or even footprints in the chimney ashes to make a “real” sign. We dance in a plethora of commercial and feel-good images that circulate around the Santa Claus cluster with jolliness, joy, unselfishness, and a once-a-year-that-could-be-every-day goodness, charity, and peace.

It is of course this notion of belief and non-belief, the demarcation between real and fantasy, the visions of de-lightful dreams and darksome realities, and the clear and present danger of wonder passing into despair that are the drivers behind the Trickster notions of Christmas. Some of this is surely a result of the long metaphysical war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death that has existed for our species in most of the religious notation that we have created (or discovered), and surely it is appropriate that the concentration of this mediation happen at the winter solstice – when our non-linguistic animal get to speak once during the year.

At Winter's night, we know the dark has come, and we hope the light will come back, and as long as the proper sacrifices, prayers, or rites are performed (usually involving fire, light or blood), the winter does pass, and the sun does return to its other course. The seasons change and time flows on; and life huddles once more to life. So we chant down the ages,” Star light star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight” because we know full well there are wishes we cannot have, and some of those unfulfilled wishes lie at the very heart of our existence – death, time’s arrow, change, hunger, chance, appetite, chaos, want, desire – the implacable and perineal nature of our selfhood.

Now if that were all there were to this season, it would be too dark altogether – more like the thin times of All Saint’s eve (an ambivalent time that has it own Trickster associations). So, since I have hit the Bah Humbug note, let’s turn to the light side – that is, the very reason for the season. The Sun does return, the Light returns once more. The Christmas Star, the coming of light, the epiphany, the three magi, the three wise men, and the jolly laughter of Santa Claus inform our future and bring hope to humankind. Despite the nostalgia of the "ghost of Christmas Past", the luxury and excesses of the "ghost of Christmas Present" (an mind bending oxymoron there), and the undetermined, but hopeful or the unspecified, but frightening possibilities of the "ghost of Christmas future", a note really does rings out here to the human heart (Charles Dickens’ one constant), and crisp carols, sparkling bells, and twinkling lights call us to be a better self than we have been, to listen to the lighter side of our natures, and some times we do that – probably with a Cheshire Trickster grin, but what the hell, grin, grimace, smile, it’s the toothy sign of a primate face excited, fearful, angry, hopeful, and a little playful. It’s the bite that really isn’t a bite, at winking eye and finger upside the nose, it is Trickster Noel……………..

...............what's under your fake beard

Trickster and Christmas

2004-12-21T15:03:00.000-06:00

originally done on 12/19/2004

Normally folk don't think of Trickster and Christmas in the same category, but if you really look at all the ambivalences that surround the season -- coals and candy, gifts and switches, babes and greed, joy and depression, light and dark, etc, Christmas is really a very nice Trickster holiday. Whether one is fooling Herod or sneaking cookies, heading off to Egypt or dashing around the skies in a sleigh, whether one is checking lists twice or terrifying some Scrooge with ghosts, whether one has visions of sugar plums or the restlessness of the deprived, the season is a marvelous time for Trickster: a great time

of puckish deception, elfish humor, and eternal childhood
of secret gifts, guessing presents, and open desires
of dark thoughts and winter’s cold but the hope of light and rekindling of the fires
of a King born in a Stable, the highest God and lowest classes, and grace on a gibbet
of a bringer of Life through Death, forgiveness by sacrifice, and mercy by execution.

This list of oxymoronic pairs could go on forever. Somewhere the seasons bring hope and despair, gain and lost, warm memories and cold futures. No wonder Dickens’ tale of “A Christmas Carol” spawned a cottage industry of ghosts, goblins, and angels that run through the minds of our memories harking back and harking forward always reminding us of our limited time. The season of rebirth is the season of death, and Trickster comes down the chimney with the jolly old elf as sure as all those gifts get conditioned by behavior and judgment. Still the ambivalence of Trickster is a promise of hope and light. It is the creation of the world, and so his season gives the gift of laughter and the grace of wonder with just a tiny little warning reminder that “you'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, for Trickster is coming tonight"!
May this season bring us all wonder, peace, and joy of ambivalent light in learning the limits of things and the great web that ties us all together. Enjoy the mud...............

...................bless us everyone
................Merry Contrarimas

Misadventures of a Mud-Dauber

2004-12-21T13:05:00.000-06:00

A trickster blog

This will be an attempt to do a trickster blog, and it is an outgrowth of the online journal, Trickster's Way . For a good introduction to trickster, see Peter Michaels' site: A Fool's Paradise or Alan Abel's site: The Trickster or just Google trickster or tricksters, or check my notes below.

billspinks

Senior Dauber

Who is Trickster and how did this site come to be named what it is:
What’s in a Name (down and dirty, of course)

Trickster, depending on your source, is either an Amerindian mythic figure (coyote, raven, etc), an archetypal figure of psychological or narrative import (fox, tinkers, cons, etc), a version of an undeveloped cultural hero who allows one to laugh at oneself and can chart the shoals of cultural prohibition and possibility, a universal figure that embodies the liminality of human existence, a mediator between the gods and humans who is the very nature of knowing and predicting, a trumped-up category of non-distinctive cultural confusion, or, as I have argued elsewhere, a pattern of semiotic renewal and creativity that plays out the wondrous patterns of our ambivalent intelligence. It is certain that the trickster figure is complex, and the literature about trickster is voluminous, but here I will play (a trickster penchant) with the notions of ambivalence, laugher, marginality, and transformation to engage in reflection on life and the world. I hope it proves of use to you.

A word about the name of this blog. That story is something of a trickster narrative itself. You see, as part of my retirement from teaching I have been trying to learn how to repair and build computers, and that has lead me to the notion of recycling computers and working with open-source systems like Linux to extend the access of folks to the information age. Well, one of my donators wanted a receipt, and all of the sudden, I needed a name. So I thought of the Northwest Indian story of Raven (as the one who, when the Creator has made a world of total water, dives down and brings up mud to start the land on which human beings will live) and came up with the Raven’s Mud Project. Of course, as I worked on notes for the computers I was diagnosing, refurbishing, or deconstructing, I needed a log, and so I became the Senior Mud Dauber, and the idea of for the blog just took over my head, and I said, "Silly me, Trickster has come to Visit." Hope that helps clarify what must be a rather strange collection of ideas and patterns.

.............................Happy Tricks to You!