trickster artistry (and its playfulness). Trickster’s style is not so heavy, not so elevated. At the meal after the funeral, he makes the first off-color joke. Moreover, to work in his spirit is to be less obedient to “the parents,” less likely to be drawn into their tasks. When Hermes returns from his night of thieving, his mother chastises him; she has a clear image of what he is and, by implication, an image of what she’d prefer him to be. But her preferences do not move him. Like the story of the baby Krishna, the Hymn to Hermes imagines an infant so fully independent that he never plays a part to please his parents, never puts on a mask his elders have designed. In the story about Coyote going to the Land of the Dead we might get the feeling that a “proper” Coyote would have been able to contain his impulses, but the story is no argument for propriety. It is surely sad when his desires escape him and disaster follows, but it would have been sadder had he contained himself, as it is sad whenever men or women become so well behaved that no “joyous impulse” ever disturbs their lives.
In all this, trickster stories are radically anti-idealist; they are made in and for a world of imperfections. But they are not therefore tragic. After his trip to the Land of the Dead, Coyote is left alone and weeping, but his wider story does not end on that note. In fact, it may be exactly because these stories do not wish away or deny what seems low, dirty, and imperfect that their hero otherwise enjoys such playful freedom. Trickster is the great shape-shifter, which I take to mean not so much that he shifts the shape of his own body but that, given the materials of this world, he demonstrates the degree to which the way we have shaped them may be altered. He makes this world and then he plays with its materials. There is the given of death, the given of waterfalls and sunlight, of sleep and impulse, but there is also an intelligence able to form the givens into a remarkable number of designs. There is no healing for death, but it does not follow that humans must “live witless.”
Still, it is the wit to reshape the story that seems unavailable to the frustrated dreamer of my dream, a man trapped in a tale that no longer serves, one he cannot escape—at least not until he wakes, not until some Guide of Souls, some psychopomp, comes along to help him cross the line, out of that dream where the stuff of a life (dead baby, grieving mother, grown man’s art) seems so tightly knit together, and into a shiftier consciousness where old stories fall apart so that new ones may form from the fragments. (Maybe that isn’t Edith’s soul the dreamer retrieves; maybe it’s the baby Hermes, or a child of my own, or a returning portion of my youth; maybe it’s the “baby, baby” in an old blues song …) The Guide of Souls who allows a plot to be deeply rearranged is rarely an obvious actor in the story at hand, for durable stories are self-containing, self-defended against change and fragmentation. The high gods set guard dogs around their sacred meadows. If there is to be a change, its agent will have to hypnotize those dogs and slip in from the shadows, like an embarrassing impulse, a cunning pathogen, a love affair, a shameless thief taking a chance.
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