What I'm Reading: November 2022
Trickster Makes This World & Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
Hello everyone! I’ve decided to start a new monthly series reviewing and recapping books I’m reading throughout the year. These recaps will include books we’re reading together as a part of the MGSW Book Club, but it will feature other books as well.
I would love to hear from you all too! Leave a comment about what you read this month at the bottom of the post. Let’s share good books with each other! (And maybe also help each other avoid the duds.)
Without further ado, here’s what I read in November…
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
“He is the archetype who attacks all archetypes. He is the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart. He is an 'eternal state of mind’ that is suspicious of eternals, dragging them from their heavenly preserves to see how they fare down here in this time-haunted world.”
This was one of those books that kept whispering to me, appearing and reappearing in my peripheral view until I was ready to heed the signs.
Téo Montoya’s book club is what finally got me to pull the trigger and order it. (Nothing like a deadline to help me start and finish a book!)
I read Trickster Makes This World in three days, and was enthralled the entire time.
In the six years that I’ve been studying astrology and mythology, the archetype of the trickster has always been an archetype that perplexed me. (Trickster is associated with Hermes, Mercury, Loki, Coyote, etc.) Given that trickster is the archetype of bafflement and elusiveness, perhaps my confusion has been warranted. Either way, Hyde’s book provided far more context and insight to my understanding and appreciation of tricks, puzzles, paradoxes, and unpredictabilities.
What struck me most about this book was its portrayal of trickster as a hero of sorts; an archetype that has the ability to provoke widespread change by finding cracks in the structures that house our belief systems, customs, and assumptions.
If there’s a weak point, trickster will find it and expose it.
“When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property, and by doing so, open the road to possible new worlds.”
This is the archetype of Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, of cryptocurrency, and of the turd that fell on the Church in Carl Jung’s childhood vision. The trickster doesn’t sugar coat, and doesn’t emerge with pleasantries. He appears in ways that make us squirm, and gives us an opportunity to respond to the discomfort with an open mind… but this is easier said than done.
The trickster’s shamelessness triggers our own shame.
Loopholes are exposed, inconsistencies revealed, and conjectures disenchanted.
Because of his proclivity for unpleasant, confronting, and unpredictable surprises, the trickster has long been misunderstood, projected upon, blamed, and accused.
Tricks are mistaken for attacks. Questions misperceived as threats. Games mistaken as wars. Of course, paradoxically, the tricks, questions and games the trickster presents can very well do just that – attack, threaten and wage war on personal and collective belief systems, mythologies, values, and traditions.
This book helped me to understand why my own tendency to embody this archetype has so often led to alienation. My curiosity has been been labeled as “an attack,” my objective questioning has been taken personally, and my embracing of paradox and nuance has been over-simplified, or judged out of context.
Perhaps we need to do a better job at disconnecting the message from the messenger. Maybe it’s time we restore trickster to his rightful place as an imperative participant in the creation and recreation of all things, inclusive of the threat he poses to our sense of control and stability.
I walk away from this book with greater self-awareness, and an increased appreciation for an archetype that manages to provoke such profound reimagining and restructuring, all the while maintaining a refreshing sense of humor.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in changing the world, so long as you are willing to embrace the comedy, curiosity and courage that such a task requires.
“Wise to the tricks of language, the light-bodied escape from shame refuses the whole setup – refuses the metonymic shift, the enchantment of the group story, and the rules of silence – and by these refusals detaches the supposed overlapping levels of inscription from one another so that the body, especially, need no longer stand as the mute, incarnate seal of social and psychological order. All this, but especially the speaking out where shame demands silence, depends largely on a consciousness that doesn’t feel much inhibition, and knows how traps are made, and knows how to subvert them.”
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”
I only finished reading this book yesterday thanks once again to the deadline of my own book club discussion, so my thoughts about it are still percolating.
That said, what I do know is that there were sections of this book that blew me away. Annie Dillard’s writing is so descriptive and detailed that at times I felt completely enraptured, right there alongside her. Whether she was stalking a muskrat, watching a mosquito bite a snake, or watching the local creek’s water rise over eleven feet during a hurricane, each scene felt vivid and alive within me.
However, I didn’t feel this way the whole way through. There were sections of this book that bored me. Whether it was the wordiness, the run-on-sentences or the subtle self-righteousness that seemed to creep up from time to time, there were a few moments where I found myself debating whether or not I wanted to finish it.
There were also sections I found disturbing. The same level of detail that Dillard ascribed to adorable muskrats was ascribed to parasites, locusts, and water bugs that feed themselves by sucking out the insides of live frogs.
Ultimately, despite my hesitations, I’m glad I read through to the end.
Any self-righteousness I sensed was equally matched with unmistakeable intelligence, humility, and wisdom. While some sections seemed to describe nature as ruthless and “red in tooth and claw,” they were equally matched with sections of deep reverence for nature’s beauty and ineffability.
Dillard’s ability to sit still, to be present, and to follow the path of her curiosity wherever it led was inspiring.
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections, but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”
There are so many parts of this book that will never leave me and that I know will provoke rippled insights for years to come. For that, I am grateful.
I am also grateful to the humans who read this book alongside me for this month’s book club! If you want to tune into our live discussion, you can do so by watching the recording below.
Next month for the book club we’ll be reading Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson, and the discussion will be co-hosted by Maren Morgan of Death in the Garden.
If you want to join us and stay up to date on all the book club happenings, click here for all the information.
In addition to Die Wise, I will also be reading Sophie Strand’s new book, The Flowering Wand: Rewinding the Sacred Masculine in December. Maybe I’ll find time to squeeze a third book in there, but no guarantees.
I’m looking forward to sharing my reflections with you all in a month’s time, and can’t wait to see more of your faces next month for our Die Wise group discussion!