Not About Erasers and Chalk--but about Sacred Cows

   Not about Erasers and Chalk

       (but always for the sake of argument
                  across the curriculum )

       With re Sacred Cows and Jokes &

                 Putting Stuff In Play:

    This  (below)is the kind of stuff (below) that
     it’s good  to teach students about but at the
     same time     warn them against. Although I
     warned my     class a couple years ago:
   Do Not Try THIS    in Them Other Classes,
     one boy practiced  what I was preaching and
   “shut-down” the  next class he was in & the
     prof professing walked out, a man who
                     never returned.
    Was this success or failure on my part? Both
    I think   Measurable and Immeasurable Costly
                    and priceless..

I WANT TO ARGUE A PARADOX,  that the

(trickster) myth asserts:  that the origins, liveliness,

and  durability of cultures require that there be space

for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt

the very things that cultures are based on. (9)

What tricksters quiet regularly do is  create lively

talk where there has been silence, or where speech

has been prohibited.

Trickster speaks freshly where language has  been

blocked, gone dead, or lost it’s charm. Here again

Plato’s intuition—that deceit and inventive speech

are linked—holds, for usually language goes dead

because cultural practice has hedged it in, and some

shameless double-dealer is needed to get outside the

rules and set tongues wagging again. (76)

Mocking  but not changing the order of things, ritual

dirt-work operates as kind of a safety valve, allowing

internal conflicts and nagging anomalies to be expressed

without serious consequence. (187)

Some ego structures stand in the way of creative plenitude
and need to be suspended or punctured (crucified) if the
work is to proceed.  The artist who is not always guarding
his words has more materials available  that the one who
must feed a troop of custom officials.

There is an art-making that begins with pore-seeking
(lifting the shame covers, finding the loophole, refusing
to guard the secrets), that uncovers a plenitude of
material hidden from conventional eyes (ready-mades
are everywhere), and that points toward a kind of mind
able to work with that revealed complexity, one called,
in these last cases, the hinge-mind: the translator mind.  (311)

From  Lewis Hyde’s  The Trickster Makes This World