Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde

       THE FIRST LIE

      A SIGN OF YOUTHFUL THEFT

      As I write these pages a mother cardinal nesting near the house is driving herself nuts pecking at her own reflection in my study window. She is convinced there is another bird there, an interloper, a threat to her nest, her eggs, her territory. If I pull the shade, or even prop a book up against the glass, the reflection disappears and the bird calms down. But some days I forget to perform this small, interspecies favor and now the glass is covered with the greasy smudges of her wing tips, like a script with only two brush strokes, a cryptic testament to the stubborn persistence of her limited brain.

      A story we’ll call “The Reflected Plums” was once told all over the North American continent. Here is the version in the Winnebago trickster cycle:

      Trickster happened to look in the water and much to his surprise he saw many plums there. He surveyed them very carefully and then he dived down into the water to get some. But only small stones did he bring back in his hands. Again he dived into the water. But this time he knocked himself unconscious against a rock at the bottom. After a while he floated up and gradually came to. He was lying on the water, flat on his back, when he came to and, as he opened his eyes, there on the top of the bank he saw many plums. What he had seen in the water was only a reflection. Then he realized what he had done. “Oh, my, what a stupid fellow I must be! I should have recognized this. Here I have caused myself a great deal of pain.”

      In the Winnebago cycle, immediately following this event trickster fools some mother raccoons into leaving their children alone so that he might eat them. To get the raccoons to leave their young, trickster tells them where the plums are: “You cannot possibly miss the place … for there are so many plums there … If, toward evening, as the sun sets, you see the sky red, you will know that the plums are causing it. Do not turn back for you will surely find it.” As Paul Radin points out, the joke here is that for the Winnebago “a red sky is the stereotype symbol for death. This is what it should have meant to the foolish women for their children are about to be killed.” Trickster is toying with them, offering them a figurative hint as to what is about to happen; they take his language literally, however, and suffer the consequences, just as trickster himself took the reflected plums literally and consequently suffered. As is often the case, we see trickster being simultaneously stupid and clever—one minute taking an image for the real thing, the next teasing others too dumb to hear an image for its layered senses.

      Whether or not it is right to say that this story’s sequence of events describes trickster learning something, it is right, I think, to say that the story portrays a character living on the cusp of reflective consciousness. Trickster embodies reflection coming into being; in him we see both the need for reflective consciousness (without it he suffers) and the rewards of that consciousness (with it he exploits the world). In addition, we have a narrative in which mental experience (trickster playing with an image) replaces physical experience (trickster actually jumping in the water, hitting his head). We see trickster waking to symbolic life or becoming aware of his own imagination and its powers.

      How, in the history of an individual consciousness, does such an awakening come about? More perplexing, how, in the history of the race, did imagination itself emerge? How did mind first acquire the ability to make images and how then did it come to reflect on its images? In trickster’s case, how did mental fakery come to replace incarnate fakery? What happened between the witless straight man who takes reflected plums literally and the double-talker who says “red sky” to mean “I’m about to eat your kids”?

      We cannot take on such questions without pausing to differentiate some things that I have been mixing up. In describing the marks of trickster’s cunning, I have been conflating natural history with mental and cultural phenomena. It is one thing for trypanosomes to change their skins; another for Raven to become a leaf floating in spring water; another still for storytellers to have imagined Raven in the first place, or for one of us to reimagine him. Before picking these strands apart, however, we should remember that the mythology itself asks us to confuse them. Coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind; the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning. These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinking conflation but, on the contrary, an accurate description of the way things are. To learn about intelligence from the meat-thief Coyote is to know that we are embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut.

      Nevertheless, the cunning of animals is not the cunning of Alcibiades. The octopus, the flounder, the trypanosome—each of these creatures has its tricks, but none reflects upon its own devices. The alligator snapping turtle has that clever tongue, but it’s a one-trick turtle, never able to fashion new lures for new suckers. As we’ve seen, even when these creatures lie, their deceptions lack the plasticity of human deceit. The octopus has no choice in the matter; if for some strange reason it would be useful to turn scarlet on a gray rock, it couldn’t do it. It is bound to its own reflexes in which gray rocks evoke gray skins. And the feedback system that produced those reflexes is not located in the octopus’s mind but in evolution’s slow, dimwitted carnage.

      That said, let us ask again how, in the history of cunning, the lure tongue gives way to the mind that imagines lures.

      As with inquiries into the origin of language, there may be no good way to answer such questions. In earlier drafts of this chapter, I rehearsed some of the ways that evolutionary biologists have tried to respond, but I always had the feeling that mysteries were being shunted from one area to another, rather than resolved. The strangeness and wonder of reflective imagination seems still to elude the grasp of biological narrative. I suspect it still eludes all narrative. And yet, with humility beforehand, it’s hard to resist speculation.

      Several places in the trickster mythology itself seem to me to suggest a creation story for the imagination. “The Reflected Plums,” as we’ve seen, implies that the pain of trickster’s witlessness moves him toward reflection. To this, let’s add a thought-provoking sequence of events from the Hymn to Hermes. Remember what happens as Hermes finishes his sacrifice:

      Then glorious Hermes longed to eat the sacrificial meat. The sweet odor weakened him, immortal though he was; and yet, much as his mouth watered, his proud heart would not let him eat. Later he stowed the meat and fat away in the high-roofed barn, setting them high up as a token [sêma] of his youthful theft.

      Hermes, that is, takes some of the sacrificial flesh and hangs it up in the barn to show what he’s done. The Hymn calls this meat a sêma, which in Homeric Greek means a marker, sign, or token. To reflect a little on what’s going on in this scene, we might first decide who is meant to see this sign. For what audience has Hermes posted it? One likely answer is Apollo. After all, later Hermes seems to provoke a confrontation with Apollo, and perhaps, now that his theft has been carried out, he’s beginning to advertise.

      This makes some sense, but in fact Apollo never does notice the token, and when Hermes leaves it in the barn he is still wrapping himself in secrecy (in the same scene he dumps his trick shoes in the river and hides the traces of his fire). It seems more likely, then, that Hermes is presenting this sêma to himself. This is the child, after all, who makes a sacrifice in complete solitude so as to direct a crucial part of it to himself. There is a strong self-reflective strain in this Hymn; the god is making a world for himself. Like the writing we do in our journals, some tokens are addressed first and foremost to their maker. Hermes in this case may be creating an image for his own reflection. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but to give it its full weight let’s turn to the