In starting the second year of Trickster’s Way, I am reminded of the power of narrative as when my grandchildren discover how easy it is to manipulate an audience by the use of words by that child’s game of “Peat and Repeat.” You remember how it goes. You start by declaiming that “Peat are Repeat are riding in a rowboat. Peat falls out.” And then you ask, “Who is left?” The mark, usually an adult or a joyous co-conspirator, responds, “Repeat.” And you say again, “Peat are Repeat are riding in a rowboat. Peat falls out.  Who is left?” And the mark again answers, “Repeat,” and the game goes on until one or the other of the players gets tired, irritated, or collapsed in laughter at the game. So when children play this game or as adults we do something of the same recursive dance, we are participating in the power of a trickster narrative to manipulate, irritate, and sometimes enlighten an audience with the dance of our repeating words.

Still, trickster is no mere repeating relay, no simple replicator; it is no mere act of sampling for reduplication, echo, or ommage, for the trickster figure is no mere recursive narrative device. Its iterations are more demanding than extension by quote or ditto; the recursions are the reminders of Otherness, for to repeat is to re-intersect the boundary.  But the repetition game need not be so neutrally epistemological or innocent.  It can also arise out of boredom, autism, or incapacity, and like the herd animals we partially are, we can easily (sometimes prefer to) follow the prompt and do what is expected, conventional, easy or non-disturbing. Like animals in a cultural cage, walking the boundary again and again is a mark of trying to find comfort in our captivity.

On the other hand, it is probably equally true that we human beings long for continuity and consistency, but often also mistake stasis for permanence; so we need to remember that like most things associated with trickster, the repeat game is ambivalent. It can bring laughter and terror, self-awareness and ignorance, tension and release, insight or outsight, etc. If one uses trickster as just an imprimatur or a prototype that is expected to endlessly repeat itself for the pleasure, profit, or construction of the user, one will be surprised by trickster. The very drive in our stabilities is mirrored back to us in how trickster deals with desire, appetite and ritual. Like Robert Browning’s Moses we can play the prophet twice; we can seek to bedazzle the wanderers or we can strike rather than touch the rock, but the waters of the promised land will not be ours to drink. So when trickster seems to be a hall of mirrors or a grand unified theory of symbol, the edge of trickster’s creation will surprise us.

If trickster is, as I believe, connected with the origin of signs and semiosis, then simple repetition has all the complexity of genetic morphing and iteration is never exactly the same process. If trickster does a firstness dance (in Peirce’s sense of Firstness as “absolute potentiality”), then trickster always torques away from where we would place him, and she always takes us to parts of the unsaid that exists in culture. Thus it is appropriate that the first issues of Trickster’s Way be published in January with a nod to the binary, bipolar, ambidextrous, double facing god with two faces. Being at the cross roads or standing in the doorway means looking and thinking to two directions. As in the Yourba incarnation of Trickster, Eshu wears a hat that is black on one side and white on the other; so how one understands the trickster is as much from the perspective one takes as the multiplicity of trickster. Perspective, viewpoint, and one’s semiosic investment may be not be everything, but the fracturing edge of Trickster cleft will move us in directions we yet do not understand. What better way to start a year than that!