This is a scene I often pass during morning dog walks, behind a church that borders on a park. For at least a month, a lone rooster has joined a half-dozen feral cats who gather at this spot to enjoy the bounty of kibbles and bowls of milk that parishioners drop off. The rooster seems to fit in like one of the gang. Which makes you wonder…
Why can’t we all just get along?
Many of you will have heard the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” We do, beyond any question. With a longstanding interest in folklore, I often find myself wondering which, if any, of the old tales can speak to us now and illumine our situation? I always come back to the trickster stories.
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.
“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.” So begins one of the great literary adventures of my life, The Wind in the Willows, published in 1908 by Kenneth Grahame.
I’ve written about The Wind in the Willows before: http://wp.me/pYql4-19a. My parents read it aloud when I was little, and since then, it has been part of my life. Now the annotated edition, which I got this month, reveals details about the text and the author that I never knew before.
The opening paragraph details the Mole’s spring cleaning. Soon he has dust in his throat and eyes and splotches of whitewash on his fur. Then the text says something rather strange: “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
I’ve been known to put off spring cleaning for months, but from laziness not “divine discontent.” As a younger reader, this phrase escaped me. Only now do I realize how Mole’s spirit of longing belonged to the author. I always imagined Kenneth Grahame as a country gentleman, strolling quietly by the river. Notes in the annotated edition make clear that while this came later, for much of his life, Grahame lived with a frustrated dream of living like that.
Kenneth Grahame by John Singer Sargent, 1912. Public domain.
He knew and loved the country life, but economic necessity tied him to London. He abandoned his dream of going to Oxford and took a post at the Bank of England. He married late in life, and both he and his wife had health problems. Their only son, Alastair, was born with a congenital vision defect. One day in November, 1903, a respectably dressed man came into Grahame’s office, pulled out a revolver, and began shooting. The man didn’t hit anyone and was later sent to an asylum, but Grahame was shaken. Already a private man, he kept even more to himself, his home, and vacations near the sea.
Grahame was already a popular author of several books of essays, but he stopped writing entirely between the years of 1903 and 1908. Because of his wife’s health problems, Kenneth was Alastair’s primary care giver. In the evenings, he made up stories about a mole, a toad, and various other animals, who lived beside a river. A governess would later recall hearing Alastair ask questions and make suggestions; the two of them worked the stories together.
Alastair Grahame, 1907
Father and son spent the summer of 1907 apart. Kenneth sent Alastair a series of 15 letters which continued the tales and became the seeds of chapters for the book he would write the following year. The letters are included in the annotated edition. Also in this edition is an introduction by Brian Jacques, contemporary author of the Redwall series of animal stories. Jacques lets us know what he thinks of the editors and agents who hesitated in printing The Wind in the Willows. He has nothing good to say about people so short of imagination that they could not imagine a toad disguised as a washerwoman.
Arthur Rackham, 1940
An enthusiastic recommendation from President Theodore Roosevelt helped Grahame’s publishing efforts and the book has been in print ever since.
Some have suggested that Wind in the Willows is two books in one. The madcap adventures of toad seem geared to please children – they were Alastair’s favorites – while other sections explore deeper emotions like homesickness, fear, wanderlust, and of course the theme of divine discontent. This takes center stage in chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” in which the animals, searching for a lost baby otter, encounter the ancient god Pan.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Frontispiece to a 1913 edition by Paul Bransom. Public domain.
Grahame first wrote about Pan in 1891 in an essay that appeared in his first book, The Pagan Papers 1893. His longing for unspoiled nature on the eve of the 20th century was widespread in Victorian and Edwardian society.
As Mole and Rat approached the god, they were seized with the kind of awe and fear that scriptures around the world describe when people encounter angels. When the vision ended, the animals “stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost.”
Then a little breeze “blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the afterlives of the little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.”
Life brought less solace for Grahame. His son, Alastair, who inspired the stories, was a budding artist and creator of his own literary magazine, but he was plagued with emotional problems. He enrolled at Eton but had to leave for this reason. He went up to Oxford in 1918, but didn’t do well with exams. On top of this, numbers of WWI veterans were returning to college, bringing the focus and maturity they had learned in the trenches.
In May, 1920, Alastair Grahame asked for a glass of wine after dinner, then walked to Port Meadow, outside Oxford, where a number of railroad lines merged. During the night, he was hit by a train and died. His father wrote that his vision problems might have led to disorientation. The autopsy report suggested he lay on the tracks and waited for a train.
The Grahames were devastated. They spent the next four years in Italy. When they returned to England, they moved to a town beside the Thames where they lived for the rest of their lives. Kenneth was able to spend his days by the river, as he had always dreamed of doing, but the joy he once had making stories for his son must have been absent.
Arthur Rackham, 1940
Some biographers have suggested that Grahame, good at everything he tried, must have been disappointed with his son. Annie Gauger, editor of the Annotated edition says no. She includes letters and other material to demonstrate that The Wind in the Willows was a joint creation of father and son. Since the stories were first told out loud, I have to agree – from experience I know that oral storytelling is a complex dance between teller and audience. Out of their limitations, their longings, and divine discontent, Kenneth and Alastair Grahame gave readers over the last hundred years a world of peace and friendship, far from “the wide world” trials, where if you listen, you can sometimes make out the music of the gods of nature on the wind.
Gotta love this, even if some of the filmmakers have way too much time on their hands…
Much better than the Jingle Cats, don’t you think?
What you’ve heard about this movie is true: it’s the tale of a boy who winds up in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. It’s also true that most critics have praised The Life of Pi. I’m with them; this is a magical film.
Pi Patel livess an idyllic childhood in Pondicherry, India. His father owns a zoo, and Pi develops a love for the animals as well as a spirituality that embraces the Hindu gods, Jesus, and Allah.
As he tries to practice all three faiths, his father, convinced of the supremacy of reason, warns that “If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all.” Pi’s father also demonstrates graphically that tigers are not your friend, a lesson that shakes Pi’s trust in nature. The real blow falls after economic hardship forces Pi’s family to relinquish the zoo. They sail for Canada with all the animals on a freighter, but a storm sinks the vessel, and Pi is the only human to survive.
What god do you pray to and what do say when your way of life and your family are suddenly gone, and you’re alone in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger named Richard Parker? Initially, there is little time for prayer in the struggle to survive. Soon it’s just Richard Parker and Pi. There are cans of water and boxes of biscuits for 30 aboard the lifeboat, as well as a book on survival and a pencil that Pi uses to journal in the margins.
An optimist, Pi’s spirituality returns with expressions of gratitude and surrender as the ocean moves through her various phases, with deadly storms, cornucopias of fish and rain, and scenes of unearthly beauty.
Einstein once said the only important question is whether or not the universe is a friendly place. The adult Pi, who narrates the tale, believes it is. Was his ocean a friendly place or not? Both and neither, his story seems to say; it’s far more vast than that.
The western fantasy of objective truth leads us to believe there are true stories and false ones. The eastern view, shared at least in part by novelists and movie makers, is that our stories create our realities.
What does your heart say? What does it lead you to believe? That’s the question the grown-up Pi seems to asks us with his story and a half smile on his face. It’s the same enigma the ocean and Robert Parker put to him.
I was looking for just the right word for “think over” and pulled out Webster’s Dictionary to check precise meanings. Here are some of the definitions I found:
So here I stand, with muzzle in the air, loitering and pondering 2012 as it turns into the home stretch.
Even without a calendar, the signs are everywhere. It’s almost dark at 8:00pm, and the mornings are chilly. Halloween decorations are on display at the supermarket, and the volume of Christmas catalogs has notched up from a drip to a steady trickle. Before you know it, they’ll be playing “Little Saint Nick” in the stores (kill me now!).
Things have been good in 2012 on the personal front – much to be grateful for. Good health, food, shelter, and the resources to do our thing(s). No catastrophic events like fires or floods in this area. Even our little dog, Holly, who seemed to be at the end of her life in June http://wp.me/pYql4-1TW is stable, hanging on for while, thanks to a good vet and our daily medical interventions on our behalf of her failing kidney.
Holly, about eight years ago
It’s a blessing to have this extra time with her, to give her special attention even as we learn to let go.
I also posted about my good fortune this summer to be able to attend teachings by a senior Tibetan lama http://wp.me/pYql4-2jk, about his knee surgery and its successful outcome in August.
Long life puja for His Eminence Choden Rinpoche, July 28, 2012
We also have an exciting trip planned for the fall, which will be the subject of more than one post later on.
***
If things are positive in the personal sphere, I know I’m not the only one who finds the public arena disturbing this election year. There’s something schizophrenic about the media messages we receive on one hand, and our day to day experience on the other.
As the election nears, we constantly hear how polarized we are as a nation, yet in my experience, in parks and public places, restaurants, and stores, people mostly treat each other with courtesy and respect. I haven’t seen kamikaze parking lot behavior since last year’s Christmas season.
Last week, as I glanced around our local waffle place, it struck me that at places like this across the country, you see “ordinary” people who, if given a chance, could do a better job of getting things done for the good of the nation than our elected representatives. Did anyone in that breakfast place, or ones like it across the nation, decide to vote for the candidates most likely to freeze up government like an engine without any oil?
And yet it happened, which means (a) it benefits some group of influential people or (b) our politicians are morons or (c) somehow our dysfunction has become systemic.
I lean toward the third choice. In it’s Labor Day editorial, The Sacramento Bee underscored a point I made several days ago http://wp.me/pYql4-2lV – that the fortunes of the middle class mirror the fortunes of labor unions:
“Draw one line on a graph charting the decline in union membership, then superimpose a second line charting the decline in middle-class income share and you will find that the two lines are nearly identical.” The middle class has shrunk significantly, from 61 percent of the adult population in 1971 to 51 percent in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/03/4781267/editorial-to-rebound-labor-needs.html
A forty year decline indicates that the trend is truly systemic. It’s not the exclusive fault of Bush and/or Obama – rather it’s something built into our current political/economic system.
I know I’m thinking that way now because of Bill Moyer’s guest on Sunday, Mike Lofgren, author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
In his interview with Moyers, Lofgren is not sanguine about our chances to reform the status quo. He advocates something like folding our hand and asking for a new deck:
BILL MOYERS: But what do we do about it? Nothing seems to tame the power of money in politics.
MIKE LOFGREN: The only thing that will achieve it is fundamental political reform. And the only way you’re going to get that is mass defection from the parties. Because the parties simply do not serve our interests anymore…there is a point where if there is mass public outrage at this, just as there was in the prairies in the 1880’s and 1890’s, eventually they’ll get the message.
http://billmoyers.com/segment/mike-lofgren-on-dysfunction-in-our-political-parties/
When Moyers asks him to state greatest fear and hope, Lofgren says:
“My greatest fear is that this whole impasse simply carries on. And this country becomes more and more polarized and ungovernable. And we could be faced with a very bad situation, internationally and domestically….My greatest hope is that we can govern ourselves again in a spirit of bipartisanship.”
When Moyers asks if he thinks that’s realistic, Lofgren replies, “We must let our hopes be greater than our fears.”
If his answer doesn’t ring with confidence, it’s still good to remember that more than anything else, it is fear that drives us to act in mean spirited ways. Generosity follows finding the threads of faith and confidence within, and generosity of spirit is what we desperately need. Sometimes I imagine this through one of William Stafford’s last poems. It’s a simple but powerful answer to give to our fears.
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Lewis Richmond, an ordained Zen priest and author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice, began his studies 40 years ago with the renowned teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Richmond relates that one day, after a talk, a student said, “Suzuki Roshi – you’ve talked for an hour, and I haven’t understood a word you’ve said. Could you please tell me one thing about Buddhism I can understand?”
The master waited for the laughter to die down and said, “Everything changes.”
“Everything changes” is a truth we often would rather forget, but sometimes events make that impossible. Our oldest dog, Holly, has serious medical issues. She has come to the end of her life. This month has been a daily exercise in letting go, in watching her, in trying to gauge the quality of her life and which interventions make sense.
The vet confirms that she’s not in any pain. She is still feisty and cuddlesome in turn. She turns up her nose at dog food much of the time, but still likes buttered toast and hot dogs, so antibiotics make sense. So does medication to increase the blood flow to her kidneys, which are failing. We take turns administering “subcutaneous fluid replacement therapy” each morning, which was scary at first, but has become a very serene, if bitter-sweet, time to bond with her and reflect. With quiet music and morning sun slanting into the room, we calm ourselves so Holly calms down and stroke her head while 150 ml of solution flow through the drip.
We brought her home as a puppy when she was eight weeks old. She’ll be 16 at the end of the month if she lasts that long – we don’t know – it could be days or weeks or months. It’s hard to believe how quickly sixteen years goes by.
Is there anything that doesn’t change? All of the major religions say yes, there are the ways to unravel the knot. A reminder of why there is nothing more important may be Holly’s final gift.
She answers to Kit, but her real name is Kitsune, the Japanese word for fox. That’s because when we adopted her four years ago today, she looked so much like a fox.
We’d been looking for a second dog for over a year and had even spent six weeks with a foster animal with the option to keep, but it didn’t work out. We’d put the word out, and one afternoon it paid off. The owners of a mom and pop kennel called concerning a year old animal that needed a home.
Kit had been rescued by a roommate from a couple who mistreated her and were planning to dump her by the side of a highway. She was frightened of men, and at first ran away when I tried to pick her up, yet by the end of the day, she was at home in our home, and after a walk in the park the next morning, she was my new best buddy.
First walk in the park
She was just over eight pounds when we got her, and her ribs showed. Now she has the opposite problem – she’s on low fat kibble. Officially, she’s a Chipom, a Chihuahua / Pomeranian mix, although we suspect there’s something else in there, because she’s bigger than either of those breeds. We’ve wondered how much the dog DNA tests cost, sometimes wondering if she really might have a fox in the family tree.
Kit is foxlike in more ways than appearance, not all of them good. Rescue dogs often carry baggage and hers manifests as aggression, which can be very sudden. Work with a trainer has helped moderate it, but we’re still not done. Kit is smart like a fox too, not always in healthy way. Everyone thinks their dog is brilliant; let’s just say that this one, among other tricks, has learned how to paw the button to lower the backseat windows while driving. We have to put on the lock as if she was a kid. And an instant after such indiscretions, she’ll turn on the charm that makes strangers ask, “What kind of dog is that?”
Like any complex creature, she’s full of contradictions. She’s as brave as a dog twice her size, and the unquestioned alpha to the others, and yet she’s a wimp when it comes to rain. With tail between legs she’ll duck for cover if the drops start to fall on her arctic quality fur.
In the end, it’s like William Stafford said in his poem, “Choosing a Dog:”
“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.
The First Gates 