Sometimes Stalwart: Sometimes Not So Much

Dear Readers in Humanity and
Colleagues Across the Curriculum.
 
Sometimes Stalwart
Sometimes Not So Much.
 
When Ann Turkle fired me from teaching
required composition because I neglected
to emphasize revision and hadn’t talked
out loud in class for 6 years (demoralizing
the rest of the program), she also lent me
a copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Trickster Makes
This World which  gave me a way of thinking
about my self and what I do for good and for
ill. and helped justify my love.  
 
Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every
group has its edge, its sense of in and out,
and trickster is always there, at the gates
of the city and the gates of life, making
sure there is commerce.

    Hermes at the crossroads, and the devil too.
    Y -  three ways (tri via) trivial: street savvy.
 
We constantly distinguish—right and wrong,
sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male
and female, young and old, living and dead—
and in every case trickster will cross the line
and confuse the distinction.  Trickster is the
creative idiot, therefore the wise fool, the
gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser the
speaker of sacred profanities. 

    A bully--teasing and taunting on both sides
       of frontiers just begging to be known ;
              an in-betweener, yin-yanger
                       Poning Joy.

Trickster is the mythic embodiment of
ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness
and duplicity,  contradiction and
paradox.

     SAC's worst night mare & holy terror
            best friend &  secret lover.
 
Trickster belongs to polytheism, or…
at least a relationship to other powers,
to people and institutions and traditions
that can manage the odd double attitude
of both insisting that their boundaries be
respected and recognizing that in the long
run their liveliness depends on having
those boundaries regularly disturbed.


   Colleagues my Colleagues: if you’ve even
   read this far, don’t that last notion tear at
   your heart strings?  What kind of insitituion
   can institutionalize this “double attitude?”
 
          (Gary calls it the 2 Economies)
 
A student asked in class today, “if there weren’t
a place for the trickster, would  you have a job
here, you think?”
 
There’s never a place for “the trickster.” t’d be
like the three little pigs inviting  BB Wolf in for dinner.

Never the less and not with standing for the good
of the whole if not holy.,huffing and puffing . . ..
someone's got to be doing it.