Become a Creative & Spiritual Visionary with this Trickster Trait

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde defines a key characteristic of the trickster figure as being ‘on the road’.

This quality of liminality, of being betwixt and between, is what allows him to cross boundaries, navigate the transitions between realms, and bring different worlds into contact.

It’s also what gives him access to the abundance of the world, and is something you can adopt to expand your vision in your own creative and spiritual practices.

In this article, I’ll explain what it means to describe trickster as ‘on the road’ and how it gives him access to the abundance that our usual ways of seeing obscure.

I’ve also referenced some real-life examples in art and spirituality to illustrate my point.

‘The context of no context’

George W.S. Trow describes trickster as having 'the context of no context'.

A context is anything that can help us understand something more – the circumstances or surrounding information that shed light on something we can't grasp.

There’s a spiritual aspect to this: context implies a history or a future – a set of circumstances that have led to this point or a future goal that one is oriented towards. Without a defined history or future, one is wholly present – an idea that aligns with trickster’s playful spontaneity.

Having no context also means that trickster is in between situations, and isn’t oriented in the way that such situations orient us.

He’s unmoored from traditional systems of meaning; these systems don’t govern him, so he doesn’t play by the same rules.

Aimless exploration

To describe trickster as ‘on the road’ doesn’t mean that he’s oriented towards some fixed endpoint.

His movements are aimless and fluid, abundant with possibility as they defy order and predictability. The opposite of being on the road is to be situated, and one can be situated physically or mentally.

Trickster enlivens with mischief each physical or mental situation he passes through, but he never stays, for he’s unanchored and can never be tied down.

As a result, trickster can see the abundance of the world

As we’ve discussed, being ‘on the road’ means trickster’s not governed by the same systems of meaning or order that govern us.

He’s never situated, either in a physical or ideological place, and so isn’t blind to the abundance that such places exclude to impose order.

For context, all order works by exclusion, right down to the level of the psyche, where Jung taught that the persona maintains order by burying its shadow elements.

That means that wherever there’s a system of order, the abundance of the world has been suppressed.

Those who subscribe to these systems of order will naturally miss this abundance, as the systems train them to do so.

As trickster isn’t subject to these constraints, he’s able to see the natural abundance and coincidence that habitual ways of being obscure.

When Marcel Duchamp lost interest in the visual art of his time, he was able to find inspiration in ideas and objects that the artistic sensibilities of his time rejected.

Duchamp made readymades – mass-produced goods he’d found in obscure stores or rubbish heaps and, with some modification or repositioning, declared to be art – and changed the art landscape forever.

It’s significant that Duchamp’s ability to recognise the abundance available outside traditional systems of meaning and order correlates with his refusal to accept that order as the only source of meaning.

Losing interest in the governing principles of contemporary art meant that he was no longer under their spell, no longer blinded to all the alternatives they excluded.

Vision expands when you recognise the artificiality of the system that you’re ensnared in. That’s as core a spiritual teaching as you’ll find – see it in teachings on emptiness, non-self, Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry practice, and countless others.

He can also mediate between and connect different worlds

Being unsituated means trickster can be a bridge or mediator between worlds.

He ensures communications and contact between worlds remain fluid, because when they doesn’t – when realms become insular and don’t make contact with those things they exclude – they ossify and grow stagnant.

Like Duchamp, John Cage was able to mediate between the worlds of art and non-art in a way that changed the way we see music composition today.

Cage defined modern art as that which cannot be disrupted by non-art. Where the classical sensibility separated art and non-art elements, Cage became the bridge that connected them.

4′33″ is Cage’s best-known work. It’s also one of his most controversial and misunderstood. The composition is 4 minutes 33 seconds of ‘silence’. Musicians performing the piece do nothing other than be present for the entirety of the performance.

In 1952, Cage visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. The room was so fully padded that it was said to be absolutely silent. However, while in the room, Cage heard two sounds, one high and one low. The technicians informed him that these were the sounds of his nervous system and circulating blood.

From this point, Cage became interested in the impossibility of science, preferring to think of intended sound and unintended sound.

4’33” is an invocation of the quality of awareness that recognises the elements that conventions obscure. Hyde describes the piece as a 'structured opportunity to listen to the unintended sound, to hear the plenitude of what happens'.

Cage thought that the audience at the premiere had missed the point, claiming:

'What they thought was silence... was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.'

Here, Cage explicitly states that ambient sounds contribute to the composition. This idea marks the genesis of noise music, where distinctions between musical and non-musical sounds are dropped.

You can learn more about this in my article: John Cage: Art Without Ego.

Be on the road in your mind

You can practise being on the road in your mind by recognising the systems of order or meaning that you’re subscribing to and mentally unmooring yourself from them.

Once you’re disconnected and have something that more resembles a ‘context of no context’, you naturally see the abundance that traditional systems of thought obscure. This is essentially what meditation is.

This can open up near-infinite possibilities in creative work, but the spiritual implications are even more profound, because they lead to larger questions about the nature of ourselves and the world.

This applies to a lot of what I’ve written a lot about Jung and his teachings around how we can retrieve undiscovered elements of ourselves with expanded vision. Applied more fundamentally, we start to get into nondual realms where our whole construction of reality is misunderstood, as it’s based on a false system of order: the subject-object duality.

To summarise, by valuing movement over stasis and recognising the artificiality of systems of order you can engage with life differently, shifting your perspective and becoming more attuned to the possibilities in what seems mundane or irrelevant.