More notes and extracts from Lewis Hyde Trickster makes this world:

[When Hermes finds the lyre, is it luck? Or is it something else? When Picasso says ‘I do not seek, I find’, what is he saying about research?]

P214: “Much like Hermes’ lies and thefts, the creation of the lyre from the shell of the tortoise [a lucky find for Hermes that brought him ‘unending riches’] produces its own befuddlement, its own confusion of categories. Archaic Greeks believed that if wealth was not earned by the sweat of the brow or received as a gift from a friend, then it must have been stolen. Earned or stolen, gift or theft: by such oppositions agrarian kinship understood the acquisition of riches. A lucky find, a hermaion such as the lyre, eludes these categories.” […] “it seems to come out of nowhere and, at first, to have no place in the order of things. It seems a bit shady […]”

Hermes happens upon this material by chance, and is able to summon the technique to create the lyre from the happenstance turtle shell, because he is not constrained by the structures around him. His production of and achievement of value for his lyre (within the Olympian schema to which he aspires as his birthright) are part of the work of ‘tearing a hole’ in the perfection of the Olympian envelope. He eludes categories.

I’d like to ask what is at work when we have experiences of research serendipity. It too, is a little shady. We end up with notions and interpretation that are 'out of left field', that are perhaps a little 'far –fetched'. They don’t have the legitimacy of toil. (Incidentally, I’m sure that the sheer toil of grounded theory is just about all separates it from free interpretation… apart from the fact that it leave a nice trail of the assumptions the researcher is making.)

When we have materials in the library that elude categories, too, they may be apt for us to stumble across; and further, they may perhaps help to keep us alive to the possibility of fresh conjunctions, fresh meanings for the things around us that are usually so circumscribed by categories. A pharmakon if you will; a notional poison (it breaks the system) that really brings the system back to lively life (it reorients the system more usefully and vividly with the present and opens the way to new plenitude). As with the system, so with the researcher too, especially when we become used to a smoother, more personalized experience of information