the entrances when need be, turning pores into barriers. Just as the Greek poros is a passageway, a hole in the skin, so aporos is an impassable place, something that cannot be seen through. What Thlókunyana or Coyote do is to turn an escape route into a trap, a hole into a snare, a poros into an aporos, a clear medium into an aporia.
In rhetoric and logic, “aporia”—the English word derived from aporos—means a contradiction or irreconcilable paradox. To experience aporia is to be caught in a tunnel with a fire at either end, to be bewildered by clouds of ink or encircled by a net of bubbles. No matter how many times you reverse yourself, you’re still caught. Aporia is the trap of bafflement, invented by a being whose hunger has made him or her more cunning than those who only think to travel forward through a transparent world.
One mark of trickster’s mind, then, is that it exploits and frustrates opportunity. To move to a related but distinct feature—trickster’s cunning in regard to doubling back or reversing himself—let us take a somewhat more complicated example of the trap of bafflement. When the baby Hermes steals fifty of his brother Apollo’s cattle, he resorts to several clever ruses to hide his theft. First of all, he makes the cattle walk backward so that their footprints give the impression they were walking toward the meadow from which they were stolen. Second, Hermes makes himself a pair of tricky sandals, binding to his feet bunches of myrtle twigs and tamarisk, leaves and all. His own tracks are thus hard to read; they seem to point in all directions; they have no orientation. Hermes also zigzags as he walks and perhaps, being Hermes, flies a little between steps so that his apparent stride is strange. Later, Hermes throws his sandals into a river and spreads sand over the ashes of his sacrificial fire. (This is what travelers do to hide their camps; they bury each night’s campfire so as to move invisibly on their journey.)
In short, Hermes makes all the signs of his theft hard to find and harder to read. He covers his tracks, obviously, and those he doesn’t cover he confuses with what I’d like to call “confounded polarity.” Hermes’ sandals have no “heel and toe,” and therefore seem to go both ways at once, just as the cattle do when they move forward backward. Folklore about foxes has it that a fox, pursued by the hounds, will sometimes run a distance and then double back on its own tracks; when the hounds come to the place where the fox turned they are flummoxed and wander around barking at one another.
With both the cattle tracks and his sandals Hermes similarly confuses or erases polarity. It is as if, lost in the woods, you took out a compass and the needle spun aimlessly instead of pointing north. You could not then get oriented or find a path; you could not proceed. In this way, confounded polarity makes the world unpassable and is a kind of aporia. It blocks all passage by destroying the orientation that passage requires. When Apollo comes upon the tracks that Hermes and the cattle leave, he is stopped in his own tracks, unable to move:
And when the Great Archer made out the footprints, he cried out: “Well, well! This is remarkable, what I’m seeing. Clearly these are longhorned cattle tracks, but they all point backwards, toward the fields of daffodils! And these others, they are not the tracks of a man or a woman, nor of a gray wolf or a bear or lion. And I don’t think the shaggy-maned Centaur leaves such prints. What swift feet took these long strides? The tracks on this side of the path are weird, but those on the other side are weirder still!”
Such is the voice of the baffled man caught in a set of cunning reversals.
A scene such as this, with one character tracking another, points back to the earlier discussion of cunning that arises from the tension between predators and their prey. The animal able to read tracks has an invaluable tool in its hunting repertoire, as the animal able to disguise its tracks has a tool for its defense. Moreover, to read a track is an ancient and elemental interpretive act. From a broken twig, the depth of a footprint, a whiff of urine, a bit of fur snagged on a thorn, the hunter infers the presence of a particular animal, infers its direction, speed, size, habits. From potentially cryptic signs, the hunter speculates toward larger meanings. Stories about tricksters and tracking are therefore stories about reading and writing. The tale of Hermes and Apollo, in particular, pits a skilled encoder against a skilled decoder, a wary writer against a cunning reader. The writer makes his tracks lie in hopes of misleading the reader; the reader tries to get at a second or third level of signification so he can figure out what really happened.
Some humor is built into this scene, for normally Apollo is the god who can read a sign. Whenever a bird drops from the clouds, Apollo is the one who notices it and announces the meaning hidden from all less gifted readers. Apollo knows the mind of Zeus; he has prophetic powers; he has his own oracle at Delphi that brings him a handsome little income. In any other tale he would surely be able to read a set of tricky footprints, but this hymn belongs to Hermes, and he seems to be inventing something his older sibling hasn’t seen before. The tracks he leaves have multiple meanings, disguised meanings, contextual meanings, ambiguity, a first hint of something that will come forward in the next chapter, the idea that the Hymn to Hermes is a creation myth for the mind that is a master of signs.
Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks—these are some of the marks of trickster’s intelligence. The last of them leads to the final item on this initial list: if trickster can disguise his tracks, surely he can disguise himself. He can encrypt his own image, distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another.
The latter may be harder to imagine, so let’s begin with an example from natural history. Because the mythology suggests it, I have been deriving each of trickster’s tricks from predator-prey relationships; to illustrate skin-changing, let’s take a case in which the prey is humankind and the predator is a microbe, Trypanosoma brucei, the protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness. This worm-like creature kills thousands of people each year in Africa. It enters the bloodstream through the bite of the tsetse fly and then begins to multiply. Once the invader is detected, the victim’s immune system fights back with the single weapon at its command: it produces antibodies specific to the shape of the intruder’s skin, or outer protein coat. But this trypanosome can change its skin into as many as a thousand shapes, and the immune system never catches up. Each time it produces an antibody specific to any one skin, brucei drops that skin and produces another from its enormous wardrobe. Brucei is like a con man at a masquerade; it is not attached to any particular mask or face or persona, but fluidly alters each as the situation demands.
There are many such shifty-skinned or versipellis animals. The flounder, like the chameleon, eludes its enemies by mimicking the sea floor: when it swims in pebbled seas it sports a pebbled back; when it swims in sandy seas it sports a sandy back. In the Greek tradition the creature most renowned for its wily skin is the octopus, which takes both the shape and the color of the rock to which it clings, then reaches out from that mineral disguise to snare and eat its prey.
For the Greeks, skin-shifting versatility was a virtue. The elegiac poet Theognis praises the octopus for its flexibility. It is better to shift one’s ground than to stand inflexibly and fight, Theognis says.
Present a different aspect of yourself to each of your friends … Follow the example of the octopus with its many coils which assumes the appearance of the stone to which it is going to cling. Attach yourself to one on one day and, another day, change color. Cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility.
Theognis’ word for “inflexibility” is atropia, or as we might anglicize it, a kind of non-tropic-ness. “Tropic” means “turning” (the phototropic plant turns to follow light); thus the non-tropic being is unturning, inflexible, fixed in its skin and quite unlike the octopus.
I introduce these lines from Theognis because they offer a neat link between skin-shifting and another way that trickster’s shiftiness has
