TRICKSTER & SHAMAN

What drives the commentors and critics crazy is that they want to know EXACTLY who Timothy Patrick Barrus really is. What category to put him in. What is his label? What is his pedigree, his class, his CV, his family tree, his job record, his antibody status, and so on until it’s no wonder he’s allergic to the topic. And it only makes him trickier. Journalists can make all the phone calls, interviews, investigations, computer checks, Googles, documentations they want. It won’t tell them much. The problem is not the availability of information -- it is their capacity to “get it.” As Tim says, “They see what they want to.” The category of “failed S/M porn writer” is in them, not him; and also the nurturing half-Navajo father called Nasdijj, to the same degree. Ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, metaphor, allusion and elision are his modus operandi. Check out his videos: now you see, now you don’t. Was that a blue heeler helping dog that just streaked by? Or was it a coyote? The human brain struggles to define and constructs an explanation: this is well-documented in the psychology literature. They call it “closure,” as in a closed mind. Trickster resists all closure -- Trickster looks for openings, whether they are porn, NA literature, or boys at risk.
In the end of “Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde finally comes to a simple comparison of the two related archetypes of Shaman and Trickster. His way of thinking is that the Shaman is the one who had the extraordinary death/renewal experience that caused his guts to be replaced with quartz, which he can occasionally draw out crystal by crystal through his skin. (You can read this into Tim’s life.) But Trickster is Coyote, who says, “Sure, I can get something out of my guts, too!” And makes a big poop, with a lot of unnecessary sound effects and smells. He could as easily have made an ejaculation that was not verbal.


Trickster says, as in the title of that once-popular and always-relevant book, “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” Because if you put all your eggs in one basket (Don’t you love mixed metaphors? Trickster does.) you risk trying so hard to protect them that you won’t have a life anymore. When Buddha leaves off wandering, settles down, grows healing herbs, and does elegant tea ceremonies, his role has changed. Now he’s Shaman with a mystical embeddedness in creation. I’m happy to claim that role. Tim can be Trickster. I’m the One Who Watches, Tsalgiglalal. The stars wheel over my head. All the salmon I have eaten (a LOT) leap in the river that passes me.

Hyde tells us (p.292) that in 1964 Mac Linscott Ricketts suggested that “tales locate the trickster in opposition to the practice and beliefs of shamanism.” The shaman “bows before the spiritual world and seeks alliances.” Trickster “recognizes no power beyond it’s own intelligence, and seeks to seize and subdue the unknown with wit and cunning. Trickster . . . embodies an experience of Reality . . . in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are powers not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.”

Continuing, Hyde says, “. . . trickster is an outsider. . . He has no friends in that other world” [the world of spirit] ". . . All that humans have gained from the unseen powers beyond -- fire, fish, game, fresh water, and so forth -- have been obtained by necessity through trickery or theft . . .” Unlike Shaman, Trickster “seems to need no friends: he gets along very well by himself.” “From the Shaman’s point of view, the rules that trickster breaks articulates the ideal world, but from trickster’s vantage point, if we think the ideal is the real we are seriously mistaken and won’t see half of what is right in front of us.”

But look closer at that Venn Diagram of two circles that is the friendship between Tim and Mary. In that overlap of the two identities is the shared Truth: desire for experience in the world, search for gates giving access to closed cultures, discovery of the plenitude and variety of what is there, and a lively flexible mind that can move among them. The story Hyde presents is that of Krishna as a crawling child cramming dirt into his mouth. When the baby’s mother looks in between his lips, she sees the enormous shining wheel of the universe and faints. This is spirit world, not a sci-fi or supernatural or magic world. Shaman knows this and surrenders. Trickster won’t.

Because the overlap between Tim and Mary matches the overlap between Shaman and Trickster (oh, the hubris of this idea!), we know that in Shaman there is a little Trickster and some healing Shaman in Trickster, like Yin and Yang. Physical distance and the difference in our pasts help us keep matters clear, but sometimes emotional intimacy and shared intensity bring us into a momentary embrace. Then I sit back down and Trickster goes merrily on down the trail. The moment is enlivening, even inspiring, but it passes. Still, I am faithful in my watching and do not leave. Trickster is as faithful in his traveling and will pass by again.

Why do you need so many facts? Why isn’t it enough to have the stories? The journalists scurry around in a scavenger hunt, looking in all the wrong places and finding all the wrong things. Or are they? Sometimes Trickster has left clues that are quite right, but deceptive in appearance. One of them is attachment to place. Another is the father. And then there's that Lost Son.

But don’t ask Shaman to explain beyond pointing to method, in the University of Chicago seminarian way. Shaman doesn’t do dogma, because she understands the shifting chimera of this seemingly real world. Tolerance of ambiguity, love of the search rather than the destination, deep appreciation of desire and the preciousness of its fulfillment are her hinge and her role as a gate, knowing there are many other gates in the articulation of the world’s bones. It is Trickster who suffers the pain of those joints.

TIM THE TRICKSTER RESPONDS:

Tim Barrus: The Sacred and Profane

I cannot tell you all my secrets. It would be like draining blood.

The difference between the two of us — the writer and the reader — is that I will tell you I have secrets. You dare not do it.

You pretend.

The bottom line is about who has the power.

Yet I am supposed to be the one so consumed with the enigmatic machinations of pretense.

I do not pretend not to see the world in different ways than you do. My experience informs me that if I were to share the things I see and know, you would be afraid, and out of that fear, you would attempt to destroy me. I do not trust you not to do it.

You speak of reality as if it were a given.

What you know of reality would fit inside the tip of a urethra.

And yet you pretend that your knowledge of reality is all-encompassing, absolute, unimpeachable.

There is a caveat to this assuredness. It is a nagging doubt, very small, a pinprick, hot as liquid metal, and it burns through you with the awareness that there is more out there than you can know.

You shove this away. You choose not to look at it. You swallow it. But you know.

I am easily dismissed.

I am supposed to care.

I know this: there is too much richness in the vast chaos to focus however briefly anything whatsoever — even the subliminal, the minute, the seemingly irrelevant — on what it is you know. You are the audience. It’s not about you. The chaos of what is reality, the breathtaking complexity of reality as a living thing, embodies such interpretations as chance and wisdom; leaves you as a pedestrian left behind in a wind of subatomic particles racing through the universe at speeds you cannot even imagine even as they pass through entire planets as if that solid mass did not exist. What the audience sees, what the reader knows, what the pedestrian asserts, is smaller in its context or a plethora of them than a neutron to its point of reference. A quark is even smaller. We are not even sure (no one has ever seen one) that the quark exists. We simply assume it might. We can find no shape or structure to the thing. And yet from this we surmise that a quark could be a point in time and space that needs no structure. You are shaking your head, yes. But another reality suggests the concept of something that significant yet that small is not, in fact, a reality the human mind can quite grasp or put its arms around.

What I know and what you pretend to understand is chaos. Even now, you are thinking of chaos as being that which is disordered.

You would be wrong. The obvious is an illusion.

Chaos is about an underlying order in what appears to be perfectly random.

Beyond God, the universe is utter chaos. Universality is and it isn’t.

From a distance, I observe Mary Scriver (http://prairiemary.blogspot.com) making assumptions about my life and person and then testing those assumptions against historical analogy.

There have been many times when I wish I could have given her a big bear hug and told her to stop worrying: it’s all ok.

My life is just a quark. It is a point in time and space. It has no structure. It can only be assumed to exist at all. It is a mistake to assume it has evolved from one determinism into another based on what can be measured. Determinism being the purely philosophical (since there is no structure to the thing) belief that every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions. Thus, in rationality at least, every event or action can be completely predicted in advance, or in retrospect.

But if time is measured in the number of rotations around a particular star, what is space if a quark can pass through the object (a planet) as it rotates. Let us assume the obvious: That these mathematical orbit equations are deterministic means, of course, that by knowing the initial conditions—-in this case, the positions and velocities of the planets at a given starting time—-you find out the positions and speeds of the planets at any time in the future or past.

I would argue that there is no such thing as the past. Only our ideas of it.

Of course, you reject that out of hand. Without the past, where would that leave the reality of the present. It is supposedly theoretically possible to obtain nearly-perfect predictions for the behavior of any physical system.

You only imagine the past. Making long-term predictions to any degree of precision at all would require giving the initial conditions to infinite precision.

You only imagine infinite precision. Your assumption that there is such a thing as the past assumes we can predict if not necessarily the future, then we can at least apply deterministic values to the present.

But what if one gets drastically different results each time. Thusly the separation between the human animal and his behavior. Even when we add up everything we know about the biology of the human animal, his genealogy, his genetic structures, his variable demographics, his sociology, gradually the smallest imaginable discrepancy between two sets of initial conditions would always result in a huge discrepancy at later or earlier times, the hallmark of a chaotic system.

Those quarks that travel through the planets, travel through the human animal as well.

None of this is hocus-pocus. All of it is basic physics.

What we think we know (and is thusly safe to assume) is sacred.

What questions the fundamental nature and structure of the above is the profane. Our brains can’t even build a template where something (like an electron) can exist in two places at the same time.

I would argue that I can exist in twenty places at the same time.

Not only are persons spread out through worlds, but they, like everything else, are quantized through time in any given world. Time is a series of moments, and a person who exists at a moment exists there forever in four-dimensional spacetime, rather than being transformed continuously through the flow of time. Such change and flow are mythical. The argument doesn’t strictly require the multiverse hypothesis, because deterministic physics since Newton has implied that the openness of the future is an illusion, and consequently that free will is an illusion.

So what is real.

Chaos is real.

Human existence as we know the animal — Homo sapien sapien — supposedly can be traced back in time 100,000 years. A mere blink of an evolutionary eye. I read Mary’s analysis of who I am and note she keeps it open-ended. Both of us can agree that reality is complex enough to be the trickster of all the tricksters. Personally, I just don’t buy the historical analogies to mythology not because they are too old and superstitious but because they are not old enough. Mary and I travel at different speeds toward some of the same destinations. Time travel is assured by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says that an observer who accelerates or decelerates will experience less time than an observer who is at rest or in uniform motion. This time dilation could make an astronaut’s flight very short and the duration on Earth very long, but such a trip to Earth’s future would be irreversible as “no amount of time dilation can allow a spaceship to return from a flight before it took off.” As for past-directed time travel, it is possible as a sort of sidestep from one universe to another, requiring a path between the two universes that is “hard-wired” into the structure of the multiverse. Whether such paths exist or not is an unresolved empirical question. What we know is safe. What we do not know causes us to regard both the past and the future with some amount of anxiety and fear.

I believe in evil. Mary doesn’t.

Power. Who has the power. It’s not about Mary and it’s not about me. It’s about you and who has the power.

What I believe about evil is that it’s simply another way of perceiving and seeing the universe. It only is. But it’s definitely there.

It’s you. That is how I see the universe.

Most of you as observers and not participants are evil. Your assumption that you are not participating is erroneous.

I am accused of employing smoke and mirrors. The reality is that I do not need them. Reflection is everywhere and it’s only information. It can be obfuscated at any point along the way toward recognition and that includes all the boxes and categories that you keep it in.

Mary believes that there is such a thing as good, practical, common sense. I believe that common sense is an illusion and that the human animal is capable of knowing very little of what is actually out there in much the same way a slug exists under a rock. The slug barely knows the slug exists. But what does it know and how much does it know about the rock.

A person should be grounded in good, practical, common sense. Both feet planted firmly on the ground.

A slug has no feet but it can wiggle.

Even as the ground spins through space and what we know is but a grain of sand in a urethra, and what we do not know is the rest of the bleeding universe. I reject analogy (especially to mythology) in the same way I reject the idea of the past.

You can’t go back and change anything until such time as you can fathom exactly what time is. You can’t go forward and change anything until such time as you can assume the physical attributes of a quark. A you in the form of a nothing but a you as a fixed point in time and space. All you are left to work with as best you can is right here right now this very moment. What is awesome about that reality is that you are responsible for what happens in it even as the rest of the organic and inorganic universe spreads itself out into endless and infinite variations of its kind, and flies apart into the vast unknown.

WOMEN IN LOVE: A "Hyde-bound" Review

So. . . the three basic ingredients for a trickster/artist are:
Insatiability, which is hunger in the original myths -- not just any hunger but hunger for meat, which is the proper sacrifice for the gods. That is, living, aware creatures (creations). Not veggies. The kind of craving that drives plotting and planning traps to get more.

Reflexivity, which is awareness of symbolizing, the ability to separate the real thing from the symbol of the thing. Just plain consciousness of oneself as an artist and therefore the creator of new things, not as unconscious expression but as deliberate forming. (This goes to my quarrel with Paul Schilpp about whether “art is an expression of the relationship between the artist and the universe” or a COMMUNICATION of that expression, which eliminates all the naive and untrained folks who express their hearts out, thinking that’s enough. And I would not argue that indigenous or “folk” artists don’t have “techne,” technique as much as school-taught technology.)

Ambiguity, which is awareness that a thing can mean one thing here and quite another there and maybe both at the same time. Variability, for camouflage or for show. Sophistication, experience of more than one culture.

That’s a pretty good Trinitarian check list so let’s try it out on “Women in Love,” which I just watched on the DVD three times: one as audience, the second with the screenwriter (Kramer), the third with the director (Russell). But let’s pretend we’re talking about Lawrence first, since he was almost always writing about himself, not just to portray himself but to present his deep issues.

He was certainly insatiable, both in terms of craving for experience and in terms of writing: he wrote every day, not just manuscripts but tons and tons of letters -- none, of course, on the computer. No doubt talking to him was much like reading him, esp. the dialogues between persons. In WIL, the two sisters and the two men are really there to continue debate about the purpose of life, what one needs and wishes for, what is really possible, and so on. But with actors, more than with the writing, it’s possible to see what is the “subtext,” that is, what they aren’t really saying in so many words but acting out and revealing through what they do. The avatar of Lady Ottoline seems so very sophisticated, but she is not communicating anything. But in defense of her, to whom is Gudrun communicating in her Isadora Duncan dance before the Highland cattle? She’s not yet above self-indulgence.

Most people are less interested in the two sisters than in the two men who think they are friends. Under their differences is constant competition as well as yearning for sexual fulfillment. They are pre-homosexual, not “gay” in the way we know gays today, and -- in fact -- Kramer later came out, writing frankly gay material and then becoming a major activist, demanding justice for AIDS victims. Acting UP.

There are many interesting stories about the naked wrestling scene in terms of the characters struggling versus the actors struggling. Alan Bates was an educated man who truly understood Lawrence and identified with him. Oliver Reed was far less sophisticated, a man who believed manhood lay in being well-muscled (if fat), stoic, drunk, and well-hung. As it turned out, Bates worried a bit about that, too. The double of one of them, clearly observant and smart, saw the difficulty and realized that therein was their real worry about the scene: not their bodies per se, but the comparison of their male equipment. Perhaps he had dressed with each of them and knew their worries were unfounded. In fact, he got them to go drinking beer with him and to take a side-by-side piss where they could covertly size each other up. Then it was fine.

Russell had planned to shoot the scene in the moonlight by the river if necessary, but Oliver (plainly trying to be sophisticated though he spent his spare time in the bars instead of reading) turned up a literary lady who INSISTED that it would be a naive desecration not to do exactly what was in the book. Oliver adopted this point of view. Since the book had been exempted from censorship since 1926, the main defense Russell and Kramer threw up was that since the book was acceptable, so was the screenplay. Such was the weight of Lawrence as a cultural icon that the argument carried.

The overtly homosexual character, who calls Gudrun towards a broader world, is shown as vaguely sinister and nothing is explicit between the two, though the symbolism is a bit blatant. In fact, one of the controversies about the film is that Russell ended WIL by beginning his next movie about Tchaikovsky. This tale finally ends with Lawrence and the avatar of Freida by the domestic fireside but in reality this was only the beginning.

Like Odysseus, the Lawrences were on the road almost constantly, which means learning to separate out what is local from the universal, not just what is sophisticated but also what is humanly shared. They were always penniless, at the mercy of “bungling hosts”(see Hyde) from whom to learn. I suspect Lawrence learned that there are many kinds of unhappiness besides the poverty of a drunken coal miner’s son or even the smothering love of an over-needy mother, embodied in Frieda, but that he knew these were just his own version of the problem. It is not in denying or just leaving those forces that make him a great writer, but rather his consciousness of them and his growing technical ability to explore them.

Quite apart from Lawrence moving through different cultures and becoming more sophisticated because of it, the times were moving. This was the modern/post-modern time period, responding to industrialization, particularly as it affected the British class system and the church. In the confusion of times changing the Oliver Reed character (as well as Oliver himself eventually) died because his powers became irrelevant, but the people who hungered, like Alan Bates’ character and Gudrun, found themselves released from the killing stagnant pond of the given order into a rushing sluicing torrent that filled them with oxygen, so that they could become Tricksters. By the time the movie was made, nearly fifty years ago, the book’s nudity and sexual frankness, nearly a hundred years old, modernity had broken up the old rules enough that even Britain’s tight censors were willing to allow full frontal real humans.