Improv’s Paradoxes

The Trick of Trickster

What we have to do now is make clear we do want government to work differently and better than it has, but burning it to the ground won’t do that for anyone.

– Pete Buttigieg

The Trickster archetype is full of delicious paradoxes and contradictions—delicious to those like me who revel in life’s complexity. Lord of the marketplace, Trickster has an ear for both merchants and for thieves. Lord of Liars, he also makes communication possible—between gods and humankind by creating the rituals of sacrifice, and among us, inspiring hermeneutics, the science of interpretation. The god of mischief, Trickster often makes things better, ends up enriching culture. The disruptive voice of improvisation, Trickster challenges decorum, the right way to do things. Amoral, not immoral, neither good nor evil, from Trickster’s mischief the values we live by emerge. From Trickster’s pot stirring, more delicious gumbos flow. Trickster embodies the paradoxes of human existence, including the ultimate paradox: the idea that duality, symbolized by the two snakes on his caduceus, can be unified. (The more familiar medical staff only has one).

Like Trickster, improv too, is laced with paradoxes and contradictions. Improv is all about freedom, choosing the pathway forward at will. Yet, for the paradox master Oscar Wilde, “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.” So too, though well masked behind its ease improv is dependent on years of practice. In the Renaissance, to show their smarts courtiers cultivated sprezzatura, what Baldassare Castiglione defines as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it” (The Book of the Courtier, 1528).

Improv simultaneously invokes man’s free will and longs for its opposite, man’s dependence on powerful, external forces: inspiration. As Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt points out, “we cannot locate a point of pure premeditation or pure randomness.”

Perhaps improv’s greatest paradox is that, posing as something just for fun—we’re just noodling here—improv does have purpose. Its central trope—creating in the moment of presentation—seeks to persuade us that our rational faculties need to take a back seat to our instinctual and intuitive lives. I did this without thinking, so trust me, they say time and again, dazzling us with their adlibs (if meticulously). The trope masks the hard work behind their spontaneous exertions. Soon reason and logic, evidence-based science, and the norms of civic and political life are not just in the back seat but in the ditch.

At bottom, improvisation is both light and dark, creative and destructive, a power and a peril. Improv is the engine of both democracy and demagogy.

Improv is all about freedom. But as we're seeing in America today, improv can shut freedom down. In the hands of a treacherous Trickster, an autocrat, improv’s power is impossible to defeat. Faced with any number of ways forward, the improviser, ever quick as winged Hermes, can choose the least defended.

When Musk and his minions flood the zone, defense is futile. Throwing not just one strand of spaghetti against the wall but the whole pot, Trump defies us to choose the one strand too al dente, certain to break a tooth, throw the whole dish off, or cause havoc rather than better government. Of course they're all uncooked, what Steve Bannon calls “freak experiments” prepared by Musk’s nameless 20-year-old sous-chef-coders who steal our Social Security numbers, our medical and financial records. Uncooked, their invasive, unchecked, and illegal recoding of consequential government data files may do untold harm. For Steve Bannon, “The way to deal with [the opposition] is to flood the zone with shit.” Bannon adds: “This is not about persuasion. This is about disorientation.” All in the name of freedom and the unitary presidency, which paradoxically is to say, all in the name of control from the top. Again Bannon: “Musk is parasitic illegal immigrant.” Al dente? We may soon all be toothless.

When there is a whole potful of these nerds (or shit), where to start?

It’s all a dodge, a sleight of hand. As Rahm Emmanuel put it on Kara Swisher’s podcast On, “We can talk about the price of Greenland, or we can talk about the price of groceries.”

Trickster is lord of the crossroads, he always finds a way. But what do you do when “a fork in the road” fires tens of thousands of civil servants who have long done the work of good government? Who is left to send us our social security checks or audit the tax returns of billionaires?

Who is left to govern?

The king and his minions are left.

And democracy crumbles.

The Trick of Trickster

What makes Trickster so tricky is that he is almost always a source of fun and games. We trust him. Hermes was “the friendliest god.” But improv has a dark side, and Hermes has a dark cousin: Dionysus.

Dionysus, Hermes’s more extreme Trickster cousin, energizes Trump. Dionysus is a nature god, the oldest extant symbol in western culture, symbolized by the grape cultivation and wine fabrication he instilled. Dionysian intoxication represents transformation and rebirth, a challenge to hyperrationality. He is an outsider, known as “the god who comes.” His coming is always an epiphany, always presenting himself in his charismatic state. He is “Bromios,” the loud-roarer. But, promising innovation fueled by intoxication, all he brings is chaos. Hermes responds to Apollo’s anger in The Homeric Hymn with an innocuous fart. In Euripides’s The Bacchae he incites regicide, his own little January 6.

A delicious paradox: a teetotaling president seized by the archetype of Dionysus.

Dionysus has an attractive side. Want to get drunk? Dionysus, the god of wine, is your guy. But once you're intoxicated, he demands utter loyalty. In Euripides’s The Bacchae Dionysus delivers to his followers, the Bacchae, the transformation loyalty (and wine) promise. Intoxication brings unmediated experience of his godhead—radiance—what improvisation has always promised. His drunken Bacchae “see me clearly as divine”—his insistent demand. But compared to Hermes’s baby poot, Dionysus’s demand of loyalty wreaks total chaos. No authority is left standing but him.

Demanding loyalty rather than inspiring freedom, Dionysus is what Tim Snyder calls “the weak strongman, a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak.”

It's not a pretty story. Pentheus, the hyperrational king of Thebes refuses to believe Dionysus’s divinity. His daughter Agavê is a believer. She joins the Bacchae in their drunken festivities outside the walls of Thebes. When Pentheus in disguise is caught by the Bacchae, Agavê beheads her dad and eats his raw flesh. Kingless, Thebes is left in the hands of Dionysus, who seems less interested in governance than blind loyalty.

https://easyreadernews.com/bacchae-outdoors-at-the-getty-villa/

Sound familiar? Dionysian Trump commits not regicide but democracide. He is that “rough beast” of Yeats’s nightmare, that “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” His manger no doubt will be in Gaza’s Mar-a-Lago East. The three kings? Why, Musk, Zuck, and Putin of course.

Musk, Zuck, and Putin, oh my… has a nice ring, doesn’t it? And we’re off to the Emerald City…

Here’s what worries me in this Trump-as-Dionysian-Trickster narrative. Granted this archetype stuff seems a little fuzzy headed. What’s it have to do with everyday life? you might rightly wonder. But you avidly stream the Star Wars series or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Hollywood movies, 80% of which get their power from the “hero’s journey,” right out of Joseph Campbell or the father of archetypal psychology, Carl Jung. These archetypal figures and narratives have the power to keep us watching because they live deep within us. For Jung, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Dionysus, loud, charismatic, and determined—black and dense—is friendly Trickster’s shadow.

Who do you know less conscious and more driven by their subconscious? If this torrent of antidemocratic actions by a democratically elected president seems like a fever dream, it's because we are living within a Trumpian nightmare.

What would Jung and Campbell recommend? We must embrace the Trickster in us. We must embrace our shadow, make it conscious. It’s time for the Resistance to found an Act Up-like project as AIDS activists did in the 80s. It’s time to throw paint on the Constitution as climate activists have done. It’s time to fart in the face of those who would throw a wrench in the spokes of our experiment in democracy.

In an Attention Economy, we are dutybound to call attention in the most outrageous, indecorous fashion to the outrageous, indecorous kakocracy now at the helm of state.

A WWA match Trickster vs. Trickster: that is the paradox we must embrace.

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