Extract and notes from Lewis Hyde Trickster Makes this World

·         On polytropism:
p51-2

“There are many such shifty-skinned or verispellis animals […] In the Greek tradition the creature […] most renowned is the octopus […] for the Greeks, shape-shifting was a virtue.”

[Hyde here quotes Theognis “cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility”; ]

P52
“Trickster is polytropic, which in its simplest sense means “turning many ways” (though the Greek polutropos  is also translated “wily,” “versatile,” and “much-traveled” […] thus is Trickster and thus is the polytropic man, shifty as an octopus and colouring himself to fit his surroundings, putting on a fresh face for each man or woman he meets, charming, disarming, and not to be trusted. […] For the ancients, the ability to change one’s skin was not merely a matter of disguise, because the skin was often imagined to reveal the inner being […] to be able to change the skin raises serious puzzles about identity.”

·         P62- general note on trickster–
“He knows how to slip through pores, and how to block them; he confuses polarity by doubling back and reversing himself; he covers his tracks and twists their meanings; and he Is polytropic, changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires.

·         On Aporia:

·         P49 “ In rhetoric and logic “aporia” – the English word derived from aporos – means a contradiction or an irreconcilable paradox. To experience aporia is to be caught in a tunnel with a fire at either end…”

My notes on aporia as it relates to the artists’  book take on the problem with definition: the definition of essences is related to the Aristotelian idea of classification. A thing is essentially one type of thing and not another. Understanding the world depends on identifying the true nature of such essentials. When I have elsewhere described artists’ books as metaphorising both the artists’ practice, and the potentialities of their physical form, I was describing the process whereby they render themselves both one thing and another. To catalogue the artists’ book is to enter into such a quandary. When the book artist enters into the process of creating artists’ books, there is something of an intention to provoke such a problem, I think; the identity of the artist is changed, the definition of the object is uncertain, and it unsettles and penetrates different orders of legitimacy. This is trickster work; unsettling order and opening the door to plenitude.

p.13 “When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth”, we are closer to the old Trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this world seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form.”

That twisting form, that uncertainty of the artists’ book, is a mark of its polytropism. It appeals to different contexts at different times. It is always locally-relevant, its meaning based on context, rather than occupying a spot in a fixed system of categories. That is why, I think, it poses an interesting problem in librarianship, because it epitomises one of the struggles(or, indeed, aporia) libraries face in making knowledge accessible. In order to create the means of access, catalogues must pretend to the possibility of essences, even though these are, in both the relativist and practical senses, only the most temporary of arrangements.

·         On the relationship of serendipity and research.

·         P 128 “”I do not seek, I find.” Picasso’s famous dictum underlies the wandering portion of his artistic practice. […] a friend was stuck writing her thesis when, wandering aimlessly through the library, she happened on a carrel where someone had spread out just the article she needed. […] if only preconception does not block the avenues of sense, accidental finds are all around us.”

·         P131 [Quoting Picasso again] “In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the pocketbook that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something […] even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our imagination […] When I paint, my object is to show what I have found, and not what I am looking for.”

[These are instances of the lucky find, the serendipitous event. For Picasso, it wasn’t so much about looking for what he wanted, but about having a state of readiness to react to what was available, of being open to serendipity. This is a different sort of intelligence to that which searches out and categorises in the sense we mostly mean when we think of research. But it would seem to be an important if less-acknowedged part of our experiences of creativity in all areas (not just the creative arts). Think of the examples of inventors dreaming the solution to their problems, or of adapting the solutions they happen upon in nature or in other disciplines. These are as often found as sought.

I think that it may be important to keep at least an underground stream of this sort of consciousness available to us as we strategise the future of libraries, especially in an era when the pendulum of search is swinging so far towards the quantified and the personalised. When the internet decides it knows what I want to find, it places a barrier in the way of my finding-by-accident. That is not to say that those serendipitous materials are no longer available to me, but that they become more of a matter of searching than finding. There are effects on our creativity (more fulsomely explored in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble and elsewhere) of getting what we want and what we expect to get, all the time. We might wind up badly prepared for those moments where the world brings us the unexpected.]

·         On the notion of ‘dirt’
[In the sense that is important here, dirt is that which is not included in the framework under consideration – it’s the stuff which doesn’t fit in to the catalogue, so to speak.]

p176 “Where there is dirt, there is always a system of some kind, and rules about dirt are meant to preserve it.” [but] “Dirt is one of the tools available to Trickster as he makes this world.”

[One of the uses of dirt is to fertilise the world. Dirt is, in a sense, revivifying; the rot of dying matter is what new life springs from, or …]

p. 179 “In this world, in Trickster’s world, life and death are one thing, not two, and therefore no one gets rid of death without getting rid of life as well […] When purity approaches sterility [Trickster] will tear a hole in the sacred enclosure and [import dirt]”

[In fact, transgression itself can be seen to possess a ‘vivifying grace’  see the section around p182 on Mercurius, the Christian tradition, and the place of the unconscious symbol and the occult science, in dealing with that which the orthodoxy – ‘arid’ and ‘powerless’ when entirely removed from this world – cannot encompass. The worker in dirt is also sometimes a worker in the powerful connections necessary to make the order work again. There needs to be traffic with dirt. And, just so, a lively catalogue, a lively structure for knowledge, needs continuously to del with its ‘occult’ side; that which is not, or is difficult to catalogue, holds the dirt that can revivify our understanding of how to progress the structure, or better, to keep it tropic – or turning. The ‘turn’ is seen as the hallmark of the hermeneutic; of the understanding that continually interprets in new ways. Lewis puns on this in passing, coining ‘heremes-neutic’. Indeed the interpreter does partake of the Trickster sometimes; in each new interpretation or translation of cultural material there is at least a little bit of ‘something coming in the back door’. For all that is lost in translation, there is usually something gained, also.

It’s interesting to me that Lewis chooses artworks as the examples he can find of present-day dirt rituals (he looks at Serrano’s Piss Christ, and an exhibition of some of Mapplethorpe’s S-and-M homoerotic photographic works.) The social drama that these works unfold is one of importing that which does not belong into the public arena. But as the drama unfolds, these works and the discussions they arouse revivify the values of church and the plenitude of human sexuality. Rather than remaining dirt, they expand and open up the values of the things they might at first set out to attack or shock. Serrano is a Christian, and the jurors who sat on the obscenity trial for the Mapplethorpe show reported that they felt enlightened by the images. Doors – or pores –  are opened. This is one of the things art does. Like trickster, it travels around recontextualising the world as it finds it: the world we occupy is largely built on the foundations of previous generations of such interpretation. Culture doesn’t just happen. It’s built on the meanings of generations of people. Art in particular is the art of opening up new ways of seeing the world; not simply visually, but in all meanings of the term. Where I have described artists’ books elsewhere as better described as being like a camera than a ghetto, I meant to evoke this sense that they could be a travelling doorway into other contexts. Projecting the space they find themselves in to themselves, they can be a permanently available threshold across which to argue new turns.

Part of the strategy of artists’ books is to do with their subject matter and construction. But another, equally important part, is their particular style of distribution. They piggyback the circuits of legitimacy that belong to publishing, the library; into national collections and the bookshelves of their readers. They get to where they don’t belong. Like dirt, like Trickster.

Another effect of such dirt, one that lewis notes too, its its effect of ‘making us see what is in front of us’  – “how do we see what is really in front of us?” p192  — Piss Christ makes us see the figure of Christ through the body fluids that do not belong there: through urine, through blood, through milk (in different iterations of Serrano’s theme). This is really no different to the theme of the crucifix itself: it is there to distanciate us from the purity of the thing we are looking at. Here God is a suffering man; the dirt is there to shock us into seeing how absolutely real the event is. I’d relate this to the effects certain kinds of difficulty in research can give us too. When we are faced with a less personalised, less easily-consumed set of information, our faculties of critical interpretation are better-engaged. We work better when there is an occasional jagged edge to keep us awake. (This is something explored in both Eli Pariser’ s The Filter Bubble and in McGonnigal’s Reality is Broken). My larger theme is to propose artists’ books in the library as exemplary of the sort of material experience libraries can provide that keep the ‘detailed texture’ of search rougher and more interesting.]

More soon…