you scamp
Not much faith to go around these days.
You can see it in people’s eyes, the way that they talk. The bitter nihilism that has come to define the American Way of Life™ results in a culture of calculated performance for profit, or at least in the hope of profit. A desensitized mind is a mind that has lost the contours of memory, each successive outrage arriving already stale unless it is Happening To You™.
Trickster, an archetype we don’t see much of anymore, is defined by appetite, by want. Trickster sees the steaming pie on the windowsill, the beautiful person on the park bench, the shining bauble behind the glass window—sees, and hungers.
Appetite always makes trickster the villain or the hero of the story, depending on what kind of narrative you’re dealing with, and what the trickster’s appetite is for. There are tricksters that externalize a love of chaos and discord and rejoice in watching other people become uncomfortable and unsettled. They want to see society burn—the judge in Blood Meridian, dancing in the brutal and bloody aftermath of the scalp hunters.
The platonic ideal of the heroic trickster is my dog, Elvis. He only listens to authority when there is the possibility of a treat, and his small, blind, sausage-shaped presence is indomitable. He possesses the absolute faith of the good dog, which is faith in the good human by the transitive property. Elvis can ignore the calls to stop doing whatever he’s up to out in the yard because he is possessed with the faith that the door back inside will always open when he is ready to return.
I don’t believe in closed doors either. I suppose this is something Elvis and I have in common, though he is by far more heroic in his daily questing.
Tricksters are creatures of faith, creatures that believe there is always more, there is something to look forward to, something new to be born, some new pie to try, another mischievous glint in the eye to stumble after in hot pursuit. It is not hope. Tricksters are not creatures of hope, they are creatures of certainty, of faith. A trickster cannot be destroyed because there is always something.
The world seems darker and harder because it is. That darkness comes from the seemingly endless repetition of tiresome and cruel patterns in day-to-day life. How many more times must I, must we, be confronted with yet another act of wanton violence, and then watch it fade from collective memory like the countless tragedies before it?
How many more times?
There is no end to suffering, not so long as we continue to exist within a society that enshrines hierarchies of contempt, so long that our politics are defined by lies wearing the clothing of righteousness. If we accept that there is no future, if we lose faith in its possibility, if we enshrine death—death is what we will make.
Perhaps we have lost our appetite—or at least the ones that are worth a damn. We look down, not at each other, but at our phones, because we cannot bear to see the recrimination in each other’s eyes. We are hungry for connection, but cannot bring ourselves to reach for it. We accept the tyranny and authority of our collective death cult because to have faith in an alternative, in a different way, perhaps even a better one, scares the living shit out of us.
But to the trickster, there is no authority, at least no authority worth listening to. The door will open again.
There is always the chance it won’t, but you and I, we tricksters, won’t concern ourselves with that.