Trickster Makes This World
   Mischief,Myth & Art
   Lewis Hyde
  1998 Farrar, Straus & Giroux NY USA
   ISBN: 0374279284


Myths say it was the Trickster who made this world as it actually is; it was the other gods who then set out to create an ideal world. Tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, happiest at twilight, slipping through keyholes, subverting defense systems.

Always out to satisfy their appetites by lying, cheating & stealing, tricksters are a bother to have around, yet they are indispensable cultural heroes, giving us language, clothes, art, humor & the ability to know spiritual & material realities.

Picasso: "I do not seek, I find"...an intelligence makes itself at home in the happening world, one not so attached to design or purpose as to blinker out the daily wealth of accidents. I knew a fellow once who taught me to walk the alleyways of a metropolis & find the most spectacular goodies.

There is a hint of Joseph Campbell's mantle upon this writer's ideas & style. Each chapter takes you into his landscape where happenstance & humor swirl through our daily lives, making each moment momentous, if we be aware.

Trickster Makes This World is a thick book which took me a while to get around. All that classical education I soaked up, now dimly remembered yet an integral part of my archetypal consciousness; all those artifacts stared at in glowing museum exhibits over the years & all those silly, coincidental mistakes/accidents that make that adage: many's the slip 'twixt cup & lip - come alive & revealed in Lewis Hyde's company.

Don't worry, if you were not saddled with adoration of the Ancient Greeks or privy to hours of traipsing through dingy corridors in the vast cathedrals of man's scientific exploration of this world, Lewis Hyde will take you there in good time, with good writing & with all good speed.

He will beckon you into The First Lie so you can think about reflective consciousness or The Lucky Find when, in the modern world, we enjoy luck's apparent nonsense & rather than ascribe it to the work of the heavens we have given luck a psychological face, somewhat depleting it, I say!

In Frederick Douglass and Eshu's Hat Lewis Hyde takes us into the traps of shame when cultural patterns get linked to the way the body is imagined. It's all about appetite, knowing when to feed it to excess, thus ensuring the shame of one's station in life as part of one's nature. Even as I read this brief chapter I was extrapolating to Gloria Steinem and Eshu's Bunny Costume. Threw a new light on our affliction with drugs, tobacco & alcohol. Extraordinary stuff this book!

Funny how, when I pulled back from reading Trickster Makes This World & looked at the actual book with an editor's eye, the chapters & sub-chapters are actually quite short:- it's the subject matter therein that offers galaxies of ideas. This stuff is as fascinating, denser & tortuous as the double-helix. Wow!

Trickster Makes This World is a masterful, full-bodied & eminently readable tome & is mind-boggling in the best way!

Also by Lewis Hyde: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property & a book of poems This Error Is the Sign of Love
(06/20/99)

Rebecca