Br’er Rabbit, an Americanized African trickster, from an 1881 book cover by Frederick S. Church. Public domain

Trickster tales are told around the world and may be among our earliest stories; in some traditions, tricksters create the world and bring fire to humans.  Sometimes benefactors and sometimes criminals, tricksters are contrarians, rule breakers, restless beings who disrupt and disturb, who keep creation moving, dealing out life and death in turn.

Groucho Marx, Loki, all of Shakespeare’s fools, and many animals, from Coyote, to Spider, to Br’er Rabbit are tricksters.  We named our first rescue dog Kit, short for Kitsune, which is Japanese for “Fox,” another famous trickster.  The reason should be obvious in this picture:

Kit

We have to lock the windows when driving with Kit because she knows how to hit the window button with her paw to roll it down so she can hang her head out, bark at other dogs, and catch the breeze. If Kit had thumbs, we’d be in serious trouble!

Establishments have little use for tricksters, and it’s easy to see why.  We may like them in the movies, but no one wants the Three Stooges to work on their plumbing. Schools are ruthless in their suppression of tricksters.  And yet, in times when the norms break down and the culture looses its rudder, trickster energy may be what we need.  Free of cultural norms and concern for what is polite or even legal, tricksters focus on what will work in the here and now.

After interviews with twin tower survivors, researchers discovered that people waited an average of ten minutes before deciding to exit the buildings.  ”Do you think we should leave?”  ”Will we have to use vacation time if we go?”  ”What about the report I have to finish?”  Once they decided to exit, survivors spent several more precious minutes logging out of their systems and locking their desks and file cabinets.

Researchers concluded from this and other studies, that the human brain is often dangerously slow in reacting to radically different events or disasters.  These are the times when we need trickster energy.  Unbound by convention, the trickster jumps on a desk and yells, “The sky is falling – get the f**k out!”

Allan Chinen, M.D., a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, wrote about tricksters from the Jungian perspective.  In 2012, I discussed his Once Upon a Midlife, an analysis of folklore aimed at that stage of life.  In 1993, Chinen published Beyond the Hero:  Classic Stories of Men in Search of Soul.

Chinen argues that despite popular concepts and movies like Man of Steel, The Hero is not the core masculine archetype – the Shaman/Trickster is an older, wiser, and more primal energy.

Like most Jungian’s I have read, Chinen regards tricksters as primarily masculine archetypes.  I’m not sure how opinion stands in currently folklore studies; much work has been done with women’s tales in the last 20 years.  It is Gretel, after all, who uses trickery to kill the witch and save her brother.  Only by wiles can Bluebeard be defeated or brothers saved from various enchantments.

I suspect the difference is that full-time tricksters like Coyote are usually male.  You see it in children at play too, and sadly, it is overwhelmingly boys who get dosed with ritalin when they’re not docile enough for the modern classroom.  As Jung and Hillman both observed, what a culture defines as pathology may say more about the culture than the people it labels as defective.

Guardians of the status quo are wary of tricksters and with good reason.  They are almost always subversive – the Stooges only throw pies in the homes of the 1%, and Charlie Chaplin was no friend of the captains of industry.

Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.” CC-by-SA-2.0

To personify self-preservation; to point out the shadow of a dominant culture; to keep the flame of hope and spirit alive; to demonstrate the power to wit to those who are disenfranchised.  Scholars now believe the Br’er Rabbit tales performed such functions for slaves as the Coyote stories did for Native Americans on the reservations.  In all likelihood, these are the gifts tricksters have given for untold millennia.

Next time I’ll look at a classic trickster story that Allan Chinen told, with an eye to it’s relevance for the 21st century.

Today’s edition of Marketplace clued me in on the answer to question three via an interview with Hollywood insider Lynda Obst, producer of The Fisher King and Sleepless in Seattle.  Obst realized something had changed when her son said, “Mom, trying to get movies made because they’re good is so 2003.”  The interview concerned her new book, Sleepless in Hollywood:  Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business.  

Obst says the “old abnormal” was when she could get movies made because they were good.  DVD sales financed half of studio profits and allowed production of the “smaller” movies she loves, like romantic comedies.  Then domestic DVD sales tanked at the same time as foreign viewership rose, particularly in China and Russia, where there’s an endless demand for our blockbusters and special effects.  You can make “small movies” anywhere in the world, she says, but so far, you can only make blockbusters here.

Which may explain why I’ve been to so few movies this year – when the trailers assault my senses with digitized special effects, I tend to give them a miss, with the exception of movies like Star Trek, because…well, it’s Star Trek.

Sleepless in Hollywood is now in my book queue, in part because Obst’s final chapter is called, “Does the future have a future?” and I want to know her answer to the question.

And a final note on 2013 movies to date – they’ve finally pushed us into the 21st century, with a subscription to Netflix, so there is at least one happy outcome.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Those lyrics came to mind today around noon, when the dogs started barking. I found a UPS package on the doorstep, lightweight, about 10x8x8, from a local address I didn’t recognize.

“Expecting a package from a place called ‘Copperfield?’” I called to Mary, who was in the other room.

“No,” she yelled back. “Be careful opening it.”

“Honey, if it’s a bomb, being careful won’t help.”

“No,” she said. “I mean that poison.”

“OK,” I called. “I’ll start with the packing slip. That’s probably where they put the ricin.”

It turned out to be the can of black touch-up paint I’d ordered for our wood-burning stove. As you might have guessed, I wasn’t really scared of being blown up, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And why not? “They” consider my phone calls worth logging, and my internet hits, and my credit card use. Those of you with newer high-definition TV’s should realize there is a built-in feature that allows a 3d party to peer into your living room. That’s old news, as in posted at least a year ago, to a collective yawn.

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

That’s the heart of our problem: what’s happening ain’t exactly or even a little clear, except maybe, “step out of line, the man come and take you away.”

One of the few people in Washington I admire, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont, posted a survey on his website. Here are the four questions:

1. Do you favor or oppose the National Security Agency’s program to monitor online communications in order to protect the nation from terrorist threats?
2. Is it appropriate for the federal government to collect millions of phone records from American citizens, if doing so could potentially disrupt a terror plot?
3. Do you think the president should or should not have the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor the electronic communications of American citizens without getting warrants?
4. Do you favor or oppose changing the PATRIOT Act, which allows the government to collect the phone records of American citizens without a warrant?

I haven’t taken the survey yet, because I’m still “Unsure” on two of the questions. I find that upsetting, given that Sanders also posted the text of Amendment IV to the Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Decades ago, H.L. Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Right now, I think we are all numb. More precisely, I think this is what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” When a creature perceives that it’s powerless to prevent harmful events, it becomes listless and depressed. Or disgusted with politics. One of these days I expect that listlessness and disgust to erupt as outrage. When and if it does, I don’t think it’s going to be pretty or the stuff of songs – there is too much we have collectively stuffed, and for too long a time.

Reblogged from Lily Wight:

According to the census bureau, less than 1/3 of the people in western states live where they were born.  My wife comes from Rochester, NY.  I was born in Poughkeepsie.  We met in San Francisco.  That seems to be the norm out here.  I had lived in five cities and gone to six schools by the time I finished high school, so I can answer,”Where are you from?” in a lot of ways.

Childhood memories are layered in ways that reminds me of geographical strata.  Each place, school, and time had its own feeling tone.  Recalling those times sometimes seems like gazing at ancient pictographs on differing layers of rock.

Near Tucson, Jan. 2008

A visit to Mary’s family in Rochester last week was like visiting earlier layers.  The sense of place in western New York is much like where I grew up.  The feel of the air, the look of the sky, the wind through the trees, the trees themselves, are now foreign but deeply known at the same time.  Maybe the answer to my question is,”I am from all the places I’ve ever lived.”

Old factory towns like Rochester have a strong sense of communal past.  There is more “home” in some towns than in others.  In the local paper, I came upon the smiling face of a handsome young man in the obituary section.  Charles “Dutch” Lydon died on June 1st at the age of 89.  He won five bronze stars in combat in the Pacific in WWII, was an “avid” bowler and golfer, and “a proud Kodak employee for 30 years.”  He is survived by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Tom Brokaw must have been thinking of people like Dutch when he coined the name, “greatest generation.”

I don’t think my parents generation was great just because they were superior beings.  I believe the times demanded and fostered their greatness.  Men like Dutch Lydon knew where they were from, knew what that meant, and believed in it.  Now there is no more Kodak to be proud of.  Silent factory chimneys stand like tombstones for that way of life.

Not that smoke and soot were good for you, or that Kodak didn’t screw up in the end and screw its workers.  Not that things were so good if you weren’t a white hetrosexual male.  Not that my generation didn’t rebel against all that.  It’s just that from our current perspective, we can see things of value we lost when this way of life came to an end.

A sense of belonging and community, for one thing.  Friends and family you can count on were cited as key factors in a recent survey that named the ten happiest countries in the world.  Do I even need to say that the United States failed to make the cut?

Sense of community is an impression, an imagining, a gut feeling, but it makes a profound difference.  Walking along the Lake Ontario shore, we stopped to admire a fine old brick building, a public bathhouse, with half a dozen tennis courts sheltered from the wind in an enclosed courtyard.  The bandstand in the park was under renovation, as was the carousel with its hand-painted animals.  This is a city that doesn’t just pay lip service to words like “community.”  A cop on patrol passed us with a smile and a “Good morning,” because, though the park was filled with people, he had nothing more pressing to do.

Many in my generation grew up on Easy Rider and On the Road, filled with wanderlust and a longing for the horizon.  Others married their high school sweethearts, anxious to settle down.  People I know played it both ways, with differing results.  There aren’t any rules of thumb.  From the time of the pioneers, California has attracted people looking to reinvent themselves.  This is where Norma Jean Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe.  Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.

It has taken me longer than usual to write this post.  I kept putting off hitting the “Publish” button in hopes of reaching some kind of conclusion.  Doesn’t seem likely at this point.  Just a number of questions without any clear cut answers.

What does it mean to have a hometown, or maybe the question is really, how does a “town” become “home?”  What does it mean to have a home, to “feel at home?”  What does it mean to be from someplace?  ”You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe famously said.  Nobody asks the flip-side question, which is whether we ever really leave?

I’d love to hear any thoughts you have along these lines.