Mercury is about when there is moonrise in the mind and the poet is listening, thinking the world by two-light, the actual and the metaphoric. There are no horizons to the mind, now, no limit to its insight. In the potent penumbra of twilight, human vision changes: our peripheral vision is actually better in twilight than in daylight, and this is both literally true and metaphorically true.
God of the periphery, god of the edges, Mercury is on the edge of the twelve Olympians, a margin-dweller in those margin hours of dawn and dusk. One hour in twelve is a twilight hour, the Trickster in the pack of hours, as Hermes or Mercury is Trickster to the pack of gods. The joker. A card sharp who plays his aces high but never plays by the rules. He is a double-dealer, a tricky one, and he can play nasty tricks on the manic-depressive mind, alluring you with a manic marsh-fire, wilfully leading you astray but dumping you stranded in a sump, the claggy mud of depression which he himself wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.
Mercury has been called a generous thief – distracting me, he picked the pocket of my life, stealing a year. If he is a thief, though, he is a disarming one – an attractive one – and he gives as well as takes. Even when he is on the pilfer, he never takes everything; he will not steal all your savings, for he is the god of scavenged things, the overheard remark, the quixotic word; he knows himself to be the picker-up of priceless trifles. As he eavesdrops, he passes on what he hears, if he chooses: altering it if he feels like it, so you can never be quite sure.
Mercury, like all tricksters, is reliably unreliable. He plays Paganini to Saturn’s Johann Sebastian: he plays a riff of extemporized brilliance in the cadenza then throws a wolf note to trip you up. He deals in luck, good or bad, but he never gives you your just desserts or pays his obligations. He is to be welcomed but never completely trusted: he knows where we hide our secrets and he’ll spill them willy-nilly. Beware the quicksilver, for Mercury never minds his manners or his morals. He is a rogue, a rascal, an opportunist who fiddles the books, but he is not bad; he changes things for the better quite as often as he changes them for the worse. Integrity he has none: he is god of tegrity, how every thing touches another, and he leaves you touched by his visit; a little madder hatter with more mercury around the hat brim.
He is a messy lord of misrule and he plays a chaos croquet on a mole-heap lawn. He knows no duty of care but he will sometimes walk miles out of his way for you. A singular god of the unlinked, the surprising, solitary event, he is god of both serendipity and the non-sequitur –
The gap which lets a new conversation begin.
We say when a sudden silence descends on a party of people that an angel is passing over. People used to say that it was Mercury flying past. It is, in essence, the same thought, for Mercury is the messenger, which, as we’ve seen, is angelos in Greek.
The Trickster is Polytropos, turning many ways. Trickster is adept at transformation but also good at turning to new paths, he turns the page, writes the fresh chapter. Mercury, in alchemy, is a transforming agent by which base metals are transmuted, and Mercury is god of transformation, change and metamorphosis. It is the alchemy of art to translate, to spring the meaning from the trap of reality, in the quicksilver unlocking of poetry.
When the story is stuck, the Trickster moves it forward, jump-starting the conversation, oiling the wheels. But. He may equally just stop you in your tracks. He stopped me in mine when he tripped me up at Twyford Down. Mercury never sprains his ankle, his joints are winged where they articulate him. As messenger, he is ‘articulate’, and this word is connected to ‘articulus’, a joint in the body and a turning point in the year. And it was at the turn of the year that he tricked me badly: the winter solstice was the first of two nights when I became very suicidal, Mercury losing my reason on my behalf.
The Indo-European root behind the words ‘articulate’ and articulus is ar, which also gives us arthron (connection or joint). Arthron, meanwhile, was used by Aristotle to describe the connecting words of language, where meaning changes direction at a junction in a sentence, and the articulate Mercury is god of the intersections of thought. He is devious and deviating; his art is to connect and join, or to disconnect and disjoin. He is the hyphen in the sentence, connecting and holding apart. In the human body, he is god of the joints, and etymology is wise to this, showing us how the ar- root of Indo-European, which means ‘to fit together or join’, gives us the words for joints, arthron in Greek, artus in Latin; and, in English, a disease of joints, ‘arthritis’. That ar-root also gives us the Latin word for art (ars) and English ‘art’ and ‘articulate’, the turning of thought into words. These words are cognate with aša, meaning ‘truth’ in Avestan (the language of Zoroastrian scripture). Keats would have been pleased.
Artists and writers are both blessed and cursed with Mercury’s temperament, suffering disproportionately from mercuriality. He is a volatile substance, a fluent flame: a quickcyclist of moods. He doesn’t like straight lines or concentric circles – he’ll tickle the graph till the paper curls. But he raises merry hell as he does so, the old minds ruined, shafted by his sickness like Coleridge, or Byron taking the blame when it is Mercury who is mad, bad and dangerous to know.
He leaves his fingerprints everywhere on the pages of a life – he was reading under the bedclothes as a child, he demands that writers keep notebooks to catch an idea as it flies. Not for nothing is Mercury the god of writers and messengers. Shakespeare – as we’ll see – has a very soft spot for him.
Mercury-Hermes and all tricksters have a special relationship with story, the writer’s craft, names and their meanings, words and the roots of words, signs and the interpretation of signs. Hermes – god of signposts (always wise to notice, particularly at junctions) – was also god of speech, writing and interpretation, and he gives his name to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation. Part of the paradox of Hermes-Mercury is that his own signs are hard to read: he made himself shoes of branches – the branching thought, the dendritic connectivity of metaphor, is his domain – to hide his footsteps, as a poet may throw away the early notes, the steps by which a poem is made. So with Hermes-Mercury: his messages may be hidden but are treasured when found.
Hermes is a quintessential artist. He invented the lyre and ‘lovely the voice that came from him’ says the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. He sang of the gods and the Earth; he was the first poet. As Apollo listened, he was charmed and ‘sweet longing seized his soul.’ Apollo felt:
a deep and irresistible longing
lay hold of his heart and he cried out,
uttering winged words . . .
. . . never before and by nothing else
has my heart been so moved.
A player in gift culture, Hermes is both gifted (talented) and gift-giving, making Apollo a gift of the lyre in exchange for glory. Apollo is intrigued by Hermes’ giftedness – did it come from humans or from gods?
What art is this, what muse
for inconsolable sorrows,
what skill?
Mercury tricks and is tricked, he treats and is treated, as manic depression does. He is volatile, subversive, unruly and liminal; his thoughts fly, he gets high as a kite. This messenger-god danced a fandango with my brain’s chemical messengers till Psyche tried to plead with him on my behalf to calm down a bit. But he was off, playing my mind, stealing the sleep of reason – in hypomania it is hard to sleep – and firing nightmares, waking me with brain fever.
Darian Leader includes among the key motifs of manic depression a ‘large appetite, be it for food, sex or words’. Mercury, like all tricksters, is as libidinous as disinhibited mania; he is appetitive and hungry for meat and sex.
He disrupts the ordinary, sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively, for he is neither moral nor immoral but amoral. The Trickster Puck would ‘mislead night-wanderers’, and the words of the Homeric Hymn apply to Puck as much as to Hermes:
A few he helps, but he endlessly beguiles
the race of human beings in the dark
ness of the night.
He is there in the rolling drollery of Coyote, Native American Trickster. He throws the curve-ball and struts in the comic bouleversement of the clown; he is at the heart of flux, shift and swerve. He is the spin in the serve. The spice in the stew. The sudden skid. He is associated with traps, both releasing things which are trapped and setting traps and snares: often, though, he is himself caught in his own trap.
You probably know him in some of his guises: he is there in Malcolm Tucker, the spin doctor in the series The Thick of It. Wily and amoral, he is a tricky character who drives the action; articulate, funny, trapping people but ultimately caught in his snare: captivating and taken captive both. Douglas Fairbanks plays the Trickster in the silent movie The Thief of Bagdad, as the lascivious, attractive, slippery, mocking pickpocket. Trickster is there in McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, temperamental, mentally agile, clever, observant and funny. Like the classic Trickster of tales, McMurphy makes things happen; he unsticks the story, springs the trap, liberates others even though he is caught for ever in the trap himself.
Zorba the Greek, the exorbitant Zorba with his appetite for food and sex, his mischief and guile, is a perfect portrait of Hermes. ‘His imagination laid traps for him and he fell right into them.’ Amoral to the core, Zorba says, ‘God and the devil are one and the same.’ Zorba lies and cheats and charms: he is magnificently physical, with unbounded energy, and when he danced ‘his feet and arms seemed to sprout wings.’ Zorba is counterpointed by the Apollonian authorial voice, and they have a brotherly relationship. Like Hermes, Zorba plays music of such exquisite entreaty that the narrator-Apollo is moved, and in the very last sentence of the novel we learn that Zorba gives the narrator the gift of the santuri, as Hermes gave the lyre to Apollo.
In real life, the Trickster can be found among cartoonists and comedians, often divisive, communicative and brilliant, and indeed a force that forces a dialogue forward. He is there in the best kind of journalism: mischievous, deft, devilishly good at unpicking a locked politician. But the most significant Trickster of our age is Julian Assange. His first nom de guerre was Splendide Mendax, a name taken from Horace, meaning ‘nobly untruthful’, which precisely suggests the tricksy, unreliable, amoral character of a Trickster. Hacking is our generation’s version of the lock-picking, trap-springing activity of the typical Trickster. Assange works on the borderlines of morality, ethics and politics, driven by an appetite which seems both egocentric and public spirited; he is famously unreliable, but it is impossible to gainsay his influence in the realms of communication and publication. He is the quintessential messenger, passing on millions upon millions of messages. He has often been in flight, literally and in terms of law: like the typical Trickster, it is an appetite for sex which seems to have led him into trouble. His action drove a million plot lines, forced forward a world-narrative of momentous significance. The fact that he utterly divides opinion between those who think he is a hero and those who think he is a nasty little narcissist is exactly the kind of split reaction the Trickster evokes.
You may have picked up a scent of the Trickster in the mad March hare, far from stupid but often unwise; wild, impetuous and hare-brained. Like Trickster, the hare is a changeful creature, moon-struck and associated with lunatic cycles. The hare is associated with fire and flight, with inventiveness and with artistic creation: a shapeshifting creature of lightness over weight (the levity of the leveret). It seems only too appropriate that the manic-depressive poet William Cowper kept tame hares. He described their different characters, but one of them in particular was exceptionally close to him and would let him pet it and carry it in his arms. It would fall asleep on his lap and, waking, would get him to take it into the garden by drumming on his knee or pulling on his coat.
Trickster is everywhere. In ancient Egypt, Thoth was a Trickster god, associated with the moon, wisdom and magic, and was the inventor of language and scribe of the gods: again the Trickster is associated with writing. The Trickster has something of the djinn about him; unstable, mutable, flowing as an arabesque. Shakespeare’s Ariel, djinn-like himself, is a Trickster, both tricker and treater, neither mortal nor divine, creature of air and fire, charged with message.
Raven is a famous North Pacific Trickster figure; a glutton and a lech, he is nevertheless the dynamic principle of life, and in Haida creation myth he steals water and daylight. Raven teaches the first men some clever tricks, and they are adept learners, suggesting that humans may be the tricky addition to nature, the articulation of the world and its art; the trap-setters and the manipulators of nature, making hell and heaven both. Indeed, humans are the motive force which moves the story on, for better or for worse. Appetitive, clever and wily, mankind may, like the Trickster, set a snare but end up being the one caught in it. (The best example of this is, surely, climate change, where humanity, in a form of collective greed, is caught in its own trap and set to suffer its consequences, the monkey with its paw stuck in a jar grasping a nut, so greedy for the nut that it cannot drop the nut and release itself.)
If humans were seen as a trick played on nature, it seems to me that manic depression is a trick played on human nature: that amoral treat-trick hurling you heaven and hell, depression is a terrible trap, which snares you; mania may liberate you, but, in its disinhibition, it sets afresh a new trap to fall into. Mania fizzes around the mind, hyper-connecting at all the joints of art and articulacy, mouth open, words streaming out, while depression under-connects and snaps the trap shut. Author Michael Greenberg, writing of his daughter’s mania, seems to reach unconsciously to Trickster imagery: mania seemed ‘wily and insistent. It speaks to her in a whisper, promising riches, deviously finding a way to escalate and live on.’
Trickster is speedy, as one is speedy in mania, driving too fast and talking too fast: Hermes ‘leapt out’ of his mother’s womb, and ‘did not lie still for long’. Trickster is strongly associated with luck, both good and bad. Gambling in all senses, he is a dicey, opportunistic character. He is ‘genius of the gods and bringer of luck’, says the Homeric Hymn.
The manic-depressive mind recognizes itself in other minds, in certain lines of poetry, in certain memoirs and descriptions. The drum, the glint, the grin, the brain in burlesque visited by a motley fool, emotions somersaulting in an acrobatics of merry-melancholy. This can be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in the zany, the joker, the harlequin, so often depicted in feathers and striped clothing: their variegated moods perfectly expressed in the strong contrasts of light and dark, the bipolar kit, half and half.
Meanwhile, if you half shut your eyes, you see that the sad clowns of our age are dressed in the same feathers (Mercury’s heel feathers) for the flight of speech and mind. Robin Williams. Stephen Fry. Ruby Wax. Each stands alone. They are not herd animals of their craft but a Guild of Singulars, and yet comedians with manic depression come from an ancient and exquisite lineage: the inspired jester, announcing themselves with bells, not attention-seeking but certainly audience-seeking, giving it their all, in the munificent generosity of mania.
The figure of the jester is not the same as the poet, but they overlap in the wise fool, telling the deepest truths, willing to curse and to pray. The ancient figure of the cursing-poet, incidentally, seems to have an uncannily similar posture whether it is the Irish glam dichenn or the Arabic hija, according to literary scholar Enid Welsford, standing to utter curses ‘on one foot, one hand, one eye’. One in each world. One foot, hand and eye in the real world, the other in the spirit world. And that is how many poets live: half in the real world, half in the world of metaphor, imagination and the old glamour of faerie.
The nineteenth-century scholar Paul Lacroix visited Versailles and found an ‘old man living there, with white hair, surrounded by old furniture, old pictures, old knick-knacks and a multitude of relics in the fashion of Louis XVI . . . it was Marie-Antoinette’s fool.’ As Enid Welsford writes: ‘Versailles, empty of its kings, had re
tained a court jester as a living ruin.’
And in our age, which has emptied itself of so much colour, has robbed the human spirit and left little but relics of a psychic splendour, it seems to me that we, the bipolar-mad of today, take the role of the unemployed court jester, crying for our demeaned status as living ruins when, in the remains of magic, mystery and majesty, we are reduced to pathology. If we do not have a role worthy of our wōdness, then we will be ill, for illness is the only category which our culture allows us in this age of literalism, of numbering and of unwonder which, in mass media above all, would destroy the human mind’s Versailles and replace it with the architecture of brutalism.
How to parse the Trickster in the grammar of society? Ask Shakespeare. The captivating Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet was a man ‘possessing all the elements of a Poet: high fancy; rapid thoughts; the whole world was as it were subject to his law of association,’ wrote Coleridge. The very name Mercutio means ‘related to Mercury’, and what Coleridge saw in Mercutio was a mirror for Mercury and, indeed, a mirror for his own psyche. The speed, frenzy, punningness, prolixity and associativeness of Mercutio’s character are mercurial and manic-depressive qualities. His dynamic physical energy dances and soars, it seeks exercise and sex; he is as rude, carnal and appetitive as any Trickster. His mind is in flight with the imagery of wings, in his jesting, leaping, free-associating thinking, connecting anything with everything. Though he is moody and irritable, yet his exuberance is infectious, for he is pure cadenza; the rising falls of mania course through him in air and fire. Mercutio is, like all Tricksters, a neither-nor character: being neither a Capulet nor a Montague, he can cross over between their two worlds. The Nurse calls Mercutio a ‘saucy merchant’, not a gentleman, and Mercury is god of merchants, commerce and transactions. Trans-actor himself, he is alive to border-states in all directions.
Tristimania Page 9