Creative Maladjustment VI: Double-Edged Trickster Traits

Before I got into this whole Creative Maladjustment racket, I hadn’t really thought too much about tricksters. And when I dipped back into the old storybooks I was kind of appalled at first. I mean, they’re not the noblest people on the planet, are they? They’re always stealing somebody else’s share of the food, or throwing their friends into wells, or seducing other people’s wives. This can certainly be entertaining, and even instructive: as Native American storyteller Roger Fernandes says, “Coyote sometimes teaches us what to do by showing us what not to do.” And Howard Norman points out, “by rallying against [the trickster,] a community discovers its own resilience and protective skills.” True enough -- but it’s not exactly intuitive to embrace these guys as role models for social justice.

But then you keep reading. And in the next story the trickster defeats the giant with a brilliant jujitsu move, or steals fire from Mt. Olympus, or brings back the sun from the other side of the sky. In many cultures tricksters play a central role in the creation myth. So they’re complicated, contradictory creatures -- maybe that's why I like them. They certainly seem to fit well with the idea of creative maladjustment.

Let’s consider a common trickster tactic: Bluffing. Faking. Lying. Whatever you want to call it, tricksters do it all the time. Sometimes the bluff is a desperate, quick-thinking attempt to buy a little time: “You don’t want to eat scrawny old me, Brer Fox – I know where there’s a dozen much fatter rabbits – just let me go for one second and I’ll show you…” Sometimes it’s part of a carefully laid trap. Sometimes the lie is so blatantly ridiculous, the message of the story becomes: Don’t be so freakin’ gullible! “Close your eyes, fat little ducks, and I’ll sing you a song,” says Coyote – and then clubs them on the head one by one.

But it’s also true (and useful to note) that if you tell people to do something, often as not they’ll do it, and if you say something is true, most people will believe it. Puss ‘n’ Boots simply declares that his master is the Marquis of Carabas, even though he’s really the penniless third son of a miller. But the fact that everyone believes he’s the Marquis of Carabas turns out to be half the battle – once he’s achieved that, it’s just a short step to driving out the ogre, claiming the castle, and marrying the princess.

Other trickster traits cut both ways too. Take that restless, relentless hunger, which often crosses the line into greed. Every story seems to start, “Coyote (or Anansi, or whoever) was walking down the road, and he was hungry,” and you can be sure that nobody with a big pot of stew will be left in peace. If the trickster’s sneaky plan goes awry – and it often does – leaving him humiliated and hungrier than ever, he’s back immediately with a vengeful new scheme. Anybody who’s watched more than ten minutes of Roadrunner cartoons knows that this kind of doggedness doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere useful – or anywhere at all, really. But for a character as vulnerable as the trickster – as any of us are when we’re trying to accomplish something hard that we care about – that kind of relentless resilience is absolutely necessary for survival.

Here’s another double-edged habit: tricksters break the rules. Every time. If you warn Veeho (the Cheyenne trickster) that he can only use a particularly marvelous bit of magic four times, he’s sure to go for a fifth -- with disastrous results, mostly. But there is something compelling about this refusal to accept the limits that have been laid out for us, the sometimes arrogant conviction that maybe that rule doesn’t apply to us, the suspicion (so often true) that it's just someone else’s greedy attempt to hang on to the good stuff. If he didn’t blow past every rule in the book, could Raven ever steal the Light? He’ll never know what’s possible if he doesn’t try.

These trickster traits -- and many others -- cut across social mores and conventional morality. Don’t forget: the trickster’s polytheistic roots predate the split between Good and Evil that Western civilization values so highly. And while bluffing, relentless resilience, and rulebreaking are all fine tools for practitioners of creative maladjustment, I think this questioning of the Good/Evil duality is even more important.

Here’s an example that I think captures this principle: AFSC’s “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, which started out in Chicago back in 2004. The group collected 504 pairs of combat boots, one for each American service member who had been killed in Iraq. They arranged the boots in rows, like a ghost platoon lined up at attention. In the middle of the array, they piled a small mountain of civilian shoes to represent the unknown – but huge – number of Iraqis who had died in the war at that point.

Simple. Haunting. Beautiful. But what pushes this beyond heavy-handed political street theater is that it’s just as much a war memorial as a war protest. Each pair of boots represents a particular fallen serviceman, and is labeled with his or her name and age. Visitors attach photos, letters, flowers, flags, and other mementos to the boots of people they knew. You walk around among the rows of boots and feel both the intensity of each individual loss, and the enormity of the cost of the war on a global scale. People with wildly divergent perspectives and opinions (veterans, grieving mothers, lefty pacifists) can share this experience and find common ground. And they do.

See, Creative Maladjustment isn’t about putting on our armor and riding full tilt at the Enemy. It’s about reaching out past the horrors in front of us, connecting to a deeper truth, opening up a new perspective, creating a new world we can all live in together. In order to do that we have to escape Us v. Them, and invite many different "sides" into our thinking. I like this characterization of the trickster, again from Howard Norman: “His presence demands, cries out for, compassion and generosity toward existence itself.”

The challenge, I think, is to maintain that openness and compassion while hanging on to your truth, your vision. "Eyes Wide Open" does this... and Martin Luther King, Jr. did too...

PS: In August the Creative Maladjustment Manifesto hit the wall, alas.
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