Flipped

I’m always looking in the wrong spaces. Walking in the direction that everyone else is running from. Seeking out hope that can only be found in hopeless places. Turning toward the upside-down to find freedom from all the smothering, consensual repression that the right-side-up world thrives on.

I am sometimes accused of being contrarian or iconoclastic. But I don’t hack away at cherished idols and accepted truths because I am merely oppositional. I have no desire to break things for destruction’s sake. I only want to let fresh air into stifling rooms, to make space for what has been forgotten or devalued, to find what has been lost, to surface whatever has been pressed out or under, to invite in what has been excluded.

This, as you might expect, often makes me a persona non grata in gatherings that have settled down on comfortably agreed upon premises and are enjoying an easy sense of unity. If they allow me in at all, I eventually end up tugging at the rug under their feet, more concerned about what has been hidden under the table than the few cards that have been placed upon it.  In short time, I am usually either shown the door or I must find my own escape route.

The past week or so spent reading Bayo Akolomafe’s book has been a great comfort after a cluster of retracted invitations. It is always a gift to stumble upon a book that makes you feel less alone in the world.

First, the invitation to ‘find the dark’ or seek it on its own terms is shocking to modern contemplation… The shamanic invitation to seek the dark places turns that conception on its head, and grants darkness ‘equal status’: the dark is just as much a means to the light as the light is a means to the dark.  ~ Bayo Akomolafe

I closed the book and fell asleep shortly after reading that, and as any psychoactive text worth its salt will do, it summoned a dream.

I dream I am in a hotel where the comedian Flip Wilson has come back from the dead. I rush to the front of a small crowd to tell him that his character Geraldine Jones went “straight into my brain” as a child, that she was beautiful and I knew that she was important and real. Flip holds my face and looks at me as if I have recognized something essential. Geraldine and I spent the rest of the evening together, Geraldine particularly fabulous in a see-through macrame 1970’s beach cover-up over her bikini, both of us drinking white wine, getting loud and giggling by the hotel pool.

 A dream about flipping realities on their head. That reveals and elevates what has been excessively suppressed. That shows what is hidden underneath. That sees-through the cover-up. And anyone who knows me well knows that I am more likely to hide from someone I deeply admire than to push myself to the front of the crowd. A dream clearly sent by the Trickster gods. The dead vacation with the living. Pretend is reality. The silly and playful is important. And there is clearly not a better name for the Divine Prankster than Flip.

Flip Wilson as Geraldine

I was moved to find that Geraldine Jones was real and important enough to others to warrant her very own Wikipedia page, transcending a simple footnote in a trailblazing comedian’s bio. Mr. Wilson celebrated Geraldine’s humanity rather than mocking her femininity. She was direct, brave, warm, joyful, confident in her beauty, and fully expected to activate the envy and appetites of those around her. Geraldine is a glorious trickster goddess flipping the consensual expectations of the era and the audience.

In fact, the shaman’s tradition adheres to the archetype of the trickster. From the Yoruba Eshu (who is also described as the ‘first particle’ ­­– the one who brings balance) and Maui (the Polynesian deity whose tricks and deception gave us land) to Prometheus (the scamming Greek god who made mortals and gave them fire) and Pan (the horned guardian of the wilds) the trickster is the black sheep of the pantheon.  ~ Bayo Akolomafe

The trickster’s spirit emerges throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures too, incorporated into the monotheists’ God:   An exceptionally good man is made to suffer for a deal with the Devil, another sets down a road to commit mass murder and is struck by grace. A promised messiah never arrives or, when he does, is unexpectedly executed. Liberation from oppressors leaves you starving in the desert for forty years. A father should sacrifice a son who he has been told will be a father to nations. A loyal prophet finds himself in the belly of a whale. A man as stalwart and loyal as “a rock” betrays his beloved teacher again and again and again.

Nothing leads to where one might expect. Joy leads to suffering exactly as often as suffering leads to joy.

He asked her: “Why are you so happy?”

She replied: “Because I know how to cry.”

~ Bayo Akolomafe

The deepest breaths can only be taken when we can withstand impossible paradox. In order to relish your life, you must admit that death is real and embrace it. Hope will only be found in the last place we look, that we have been trained away from considering, by allowing the devalued hidden to claim its space confidently, gloriously. A robust life requires we incorporate the seemingly impossible. We are more likely to find joy when we can accept the unavoidable necessity of suffering and give up on the relentless pursuit of happiness.

I try to look at the crossroads we are approaching, and my own expectations about the fate that awaits us all, remembering that Hermes – and all the other tricksters – particularly love the crossroads and customarily use them to set the collective compass spinning.

I watch our communities rush head long toward a mirage of  “normal” that I know we have already lost. I point to all the brain-melting loss and mourning that no one wants to face as the place that might restore us to sanity. I watch our frantic focus on the state of economy as the one true measure of quality of life, and see it simultaneously devouring human lives along with so many of our sibling species. I image the trickster god laughing and picking clean his teeth.

I try to also remember my own perceptions are in no way protected from such tricks. All my certainties are as likely to be stood on their heads as anybody’s.

There is no solution to the dark. We are never not broken; we are never not whole.  

~ Bayo Akolomafe

Whatever comes next will not be because we “want” it. This world reserves its eternal right to surprise and unsettle us, to disrupt all our certainties whether they are of certain victory or certain doom. Just as all our good intentions can lead to hell, every obviously wrong road we take may lead to the feet of loving God. The trickster’s mission is to continuously flip our puny human expectations, and tip the spinning world – so much larger and interdependent than any human system ever constructed – back toward balance.