I have never thought April Fool’s Day was in any way worthy of recognition. I, like many others, insisted that this nonsense day serves no real purpose and should be abolished. But I think I was wrong.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, in his discussion on Carnival, describes it and similar festivities as times when, “the ordinary order of things was inverted, or ‘the world was turned upside down.’” What was the true purpose of these activities? Taylor acknowledges the difficulty in knowing for certain, but offers a few theories. One is that because these festivities reversed the normal societal order for a time they acted as a sort of safety valve where built up moral and religious pressure could be released without destroying the whole system. Another is that the societal order needs periodic renewal to prevent stagnation, and this is achieved through contact with the forces of chaos, which reinvigorates the system for a time. Taylor puts it this way:
“…[O]rder binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order.”
So perhaps this is one of the functions of April Fool’s, to not only release some of the pressure that has built up over the winter months, but to come into contact with the raw, chaotic forces of nature. To break apart the frozen and stagnant Lenten waters and unleash a freshet of creativity into the human world, germinating new life in its wake. The fecundity of these moments emerges, in part, from the uncertainty of the encounter—the disorientation and discomfort of having our familiar world turned upside down.
Mythologist and author Martin Shaw says, “the correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories.” But lest we are tempted to use the act of mythmaking or storytelling to ease our discomfort with uncertainty and offer solutions to our problems he is quick to add:
“And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.”
No cure, no resolution, no steady ground. Just deeper into the unknown. Shaw continues:
Because if there’s uncertainty, then we are no longer sure quite what’s the right way to behave. And there’s potential in that, an openness to new forms. We are susceptible to what I call sacred transgression. Not straight-up theft but a recalibrating of taboo to further the making of culture.
The paradigmatic or archetypal agent of sacred transgression and chaotic renewal is the trickster. Trickster bridges the sacred and the profane, heaven and earth, and then for good measure burns the bridge down. He, “is the archetype who attacks all archetypes. He is the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart,” as Lewis Hyde puts it. Trickster, in other words, is that character who turns things upside down, who makes us reconsider—in our uncertain and disoriented state—if we really know what the right way to behave is, and who, most likely, was the one to put us in that state of uncertainty and disorientation in the first place. Hyde again:
“In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser… We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.”
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, on the Nordic Animism podcast, describes the Yoruba trickster Èṣù in similar terms:
“Èṣù takes a stone and throws it today and kills a bird yesterday; he stretches his body in the palace but it is too small for him, so he relocates to a seed, a kernel, and now he stretched and there is enough space. [Èṣù is] that which disturbs our conceptions, however rigid, of space, of time, of identity.”
Upon hearing this I was immediately reminded of that great Daoist trickster, Zhuangzi. He says some remarkably similar things in chapter 2: “that would be like leaving for Yue today and arriving there yesterday,” and “Nothing in the world is larger than the tip of a hair in autumn, and Mt. Tai is small. No one lives longer than a dead child, and old Pengzu died an early death. Heaven and earth are born together with me, and the ten thousand things and I are one.” I would argue that the Zhuangzi of the Inner Chapters is best approached as a trickster figure. Always subverting and overturning, undermining and confusing, he speaks in riddles and paradoxes and makes sure we never have any solid ground upon which to stand:
“Nevertheless, let me try to say it. There is a beginning. There is not-yet-beginning-to-be-a-beginning. There is a not-yet-beginning-to-not-yet-begin-to-be-a-beginning. There is existence. There is nonexistence. There is a not-yet-beginning-to-be-nonexistence. There is a not-yet-beginning-to-not-yet-begin-to-be-nonexistence. Suddenly there is nonexistence. But I do not-yet know whether “the existence of nonexistence” is ultimately existence or nonexistence. Now I have said something. But I do not-yet know: has what I have said really said anything? Or has it not really said anything?”
Akomolafe mentions in the interview that Èṣù is not the kind of figure you want to get too close to. Best to keep him a safe distance away. There is an association with crossroads and Èṣù, with all tricksters in fact. Crossroads are those liminal places where our path is uncertain, the in-between space outside the safety of our village but not a fully wild space. Hyde, in a nod to the etymology of the trickster figure Hermes, says, “Travelers used to mark such roads with cairns, each adding a stone to the pile in passing. The name Hermes once meant ‘he of the stone heap,’ which tells us that the cairn is more than a trail marker—it is an altar to the forces that govern these spaces of heightened uncertainty, and to the intelligence needed to negotiate them.”
And there is an intelligence unique to trickster that is different from our merely human intelligence. It is an intelligence that blurs the lines between the normal distinctions and boundaries we usually word hard to keep firm. Often, tricksters introduce some new technology, techne, into the human world derived from this unique intelligence.
In Chapter 1, Zhuangzi admonishes his friend Huizi for his stupidity and narrow-mindedness regarding his use of a large gourd. Huizi, having grown a large gourd from seed, uses it in the same ways he always has—fills it with water and tries to make a dipper out of it. But once filled with water, it isn’t sturdy enough to move or lift; once cut in half for a dipper he realizes it is too large to use. So, because of its uselessness, he smashes it.
Zhuangzi, after belittling Huizi, points out the limits to his thinking. “How is it that you never thought of making it into an enormous vessel for yourself and floating through the lakes and rivers in it? Instead, you worried that it was too wide to scoop into anything, which I guess means the mind of our greatly esteemed master here is still all clogged up, occupied with its bushes and branches!”
Here, then, we see Zhuangzi injecting some new life into the clogged, stagnant waters of Huizi’s mind by introducing a new technique for using his gourd and his mind.
The question I’m left with at this point is how? How does trickster, agent of uncertainty and transgression, actually get life going again? How does contact with the forces of chaos and uncertainty lead to the emergence of new life?
“Èṣù is everywhere and nowhere at all. This ancient and yet new archetypal flow that is part of the emergence of the world. There is no way to think about Èṣù without thinking about the relationality, the proccessuality, of a world that is constantly becoming. A world that is not made up of things, but is made up of relationships. ‘But how do those things become other things,’ you would ask. Through Èṣù, through the trickster. It is the trickster that troubles the edges long enough for the edges to bleed, to menstruate, to become something entirely other.”
As Akomolafe explains, the trickster uses the disorientation and disruption, the uncertainty and confusion to generate new things. This is perhaps putting it too kindly and too cleanly because trickster’s work is necessarily bloody, excretory, parasitic, and grotesque. Thoreau captures the energy and power of trickster perfectly at the end of the “Spring” chapter in Walden, where he meditates on the sand foliage emerging from the bank of the railroad near Walden pond:
“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation…”
Thoreau is witnessing the generation of new forms from thawing sand, first botanical in nature, then moving to the animal, and finally to the scatological. A “grotesque vegetation” birthed from the edge of a sand bank, the bowels of the earth as herald of Spring. This is the domain of trickster. And while Thoreau doesn’t label it as such, there is a recognition that these processes he is observing are concomitant with life itself:
“This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is ‘in full blast’ within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves.”
It is tempting to neatly conclude with some trite summary of what I’ve said so far, to tie up all the lose ends and smooth over the surface of things. But I’m not going to do that. This is much messier than I normally like to leave things. I am most definitely not a trickster, but I want to try to allow myself to go deeper into the uncertainty. Zhuangzi calls this kind of disorientation and uncertainty the “Shadowy Splendor.” It is the “Course that gives no guidance, the Course that is not a course.” The only map we have for navigating the “Course that isn’t a course” is, as Zhuangzi says, the “Radiance of Drift and Doubt.” The seems like just the sort of thing a trickster would say.
So it would seem that the illumination that comes from our doubt and uncertainty is the only way to get life going again, to renew the stagnant waters, to birth new forms. Whatever that means.
One final thought from Tyson Yunkaporta:
“An ecosystem will move a couple of 100 meters every year, it’s constantly moving, and there is constant exchange between those systems. A system in itself, if it was just self contained, entropy will build up in that over time—that’s that second law of thermodynamics, and it will just collapse in on itself. So every system must dump entropy out into another system. And in nature, the idea is, the way that’s evolved is that the entropy that you’re dumping is another system’s lunch. So you’re putting that into there, and then that system is also exchanging things back.”
One system’s excretions are another system’s lunch. This is the living earth that Thoreau extolls. Stagnation occurs if systems aren’t constantly renewed with the chaos and uncertainty of tricksters. The fools of April fertilize the earth with their grotesque transgressions, deepening uncertainty and chaos, until new forms emerge from the mire.
“Master Eastwall asked Zhuangzi, ‘Where is this Course you speak of?”
Zhuangzi said, ‘There is nowehere it is not.’
‘You must be more specific.’
‘It is in the ants and crickets.’
‘So low?’
‘It is in the grasses and weeds.’
‘Even lower?’
It is in the tiles and shards.’
So extreme?’
‘It is in the piss and shit.’”