Empathy and The Trickster

How Freshman English Shaped My World, an Ode to PLM

Photo by reza hoque on Unsplash

My conscious relationship with mythology began in 9th grade English class. My school days in Clinton, CT took place in three institutions named for a trifecta of New England colonial patriarchs: Abraham Pierson, Jared Eliot and Charles W. Morgan. Ministers, doctors, founders of Yale College and famous whaler respectively, these men embedded the students who walked the halls of the schools named for them in the Puritan narrative of rationality and progress, the right of man to rule the world through tradition.

On graduating from Jared Eliot Middle School, I was fortunate to find a teacher with a true passion for the English language at the helm of freshman AP English. PLM. Patrick Lawrence McKiernan. Back in those days we called all the teachers Mr. and Mrs., but as far as I remember, nobody called PLM “Mr. McKiernan.” He was a bow-tied rebel and a trickster with horn-rimmed glasses with a big grin on his face who slipped all sorts of ideas and ways of thinking into that class without being overly philosophical. We were fifteen, after all. He did not hide things from us, the way so many adults did. His emotions were present in his animated gestures, his enthusiasm for literature, for teaching, and for his students. He was an Irish storyteller and we heard all sorts of things that weren't in the books we read, like of how he’d been a soldier in Europe during the last days of World War II. PLM, though I couldn’t have phrased it like this at the time, had a sense of the mythic in his own life. And he was willing to break the rules. In my senior year, he refused to lower my grade a whole letter when I skipped school with some of my friends right before graduation. The principal had commanded the teachers to do this and PLM refused. Instead, he pulled me aside in the hall after class and asked me with a look of mischievous delight on his face, what I’d been up to. I graduated with an A not a B on my report card. My other teachers stepped into line and downgraded me.

Now some of you may think following the rules is important. Sometimes it is. But following the rules is generally not how one grows, especially as a young adult, and it’s certainly not how innovation occurs. PLM and another teacher Byrnsie (Mr. Byrne) were the first authority figures to tell me I was a writer. (My grandmother had also been encouraging.) It’s not like I was producing masterpieces, but I still remember the feeling I got writing my first lyrical essay, and the astonishment of PLM and Byrnsie when they read it. I had moved them. I took great pride in this and still do. PLM and Byrnsie were highly regarded figures I really looked up to. Their enjoyment of my writing, even more than their approval, set me on the path to taking myself seriously as a writer who could affect people as brilliant as they were.

Up until Freshman English, my contact with the mythic had been through fairy tales, both reading and in the films of the 1970s like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. These films were rare and precious as gemstones. We had to go to the theater to see them, and because we weren’t saturated in images, especially animated ones, the wonder we experienced was far beyond what viewers’ now experience, in my opinion. It could have just been because I was a kid, but I think it’s true. Also, these films were drawn by hand, not on a computer. There was something about knowing this magic before our eyes was composed of thousands of drawings to create just one dance at a ball that seemed truly miraculous. It was. Human beings are miraculous. In addition, these early Disney princesses were much more sophisticated and grown up than the later versions. It all changed in 1989, with Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid. While I do like this film, the heroine Ariel is a full blown American pre-teen, not the elegant and vaguely erotic Princess Aurora of 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. The 1975 Japanese anime version of The Little Mermaid was so filled with longing, romance and duende it seared the concept of sacrifice into my seven year old imagination in ways that would play out in beautiful and dangerous ways as my life unfolded in the linear. As I began to understand how these patterns moved and shaped my experience, I gained the ability to see how the mythic had been a part of my story all along. This is true for us all. Though we may find ourselves bogged down in the tedium of the mundane, or even in terror or despair if we live in a place on the planet where our lives are truly in danger, there is a story guiding our story as individuals and as a collective. Our task, if we choose, is to figure out what story we are in and complete it. Only then, will we move onto the next story. I hear a lot of talk in the spiritual community these days about finding the “new” story, but I prefer the word next. New implies a progressive timeline. Next envelops us in a spiral. When we relearn how to think in spirals we will realign ourselves with the natural world and fulfill the potential of the organic human, the one who can draw thousands of pictures of a princess dancing one evening at a ball only to lose her glass slipper running down to her coach before it turns back into a pumpkin.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that my passion for Greek mythology began with the 1981 film Clash of the Titans starring Harry Hamlin as Theseus and Ursula Andress as Aphrodite (And Laurence Olivier as Zeus!), but this film did prime me for that copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology I found on my desk in PLM’s freshman English. I don’t remember ever hearing in that class that a myth was something that wasn’t true, a common belief in my birth culture, but the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greek weren’t presented as historical figures either. PLM was a master at getting us, as Coleridge advised, to willingly “suspend disbelief.” At age 18, I found myself in Greece for a month where the landscape was enlivened because I had learned how to do this. I wasn’t just looking at Greek ruins at Olympia and Epidauros or the Acropolis, I was walking in the places where the gods I’d read about loved, raged and played.

It wasn’t until I came to Hawai’i a few years later at age 26, however, that I encountered a culture where the mythology was not something from the past, or something fantastical, it was alive and present in rocks, streams, plants, clouds and volcanoes.

I’m not sure, but I doubt if there is a word for mythology in the ‘Olelo Hawai’i, the Hawaiian language. Here, I lived with people who commonly spoke of Pele as an active force in their lives and who took me swimming at a waterfall where the shark-god Nanaue swam up from the sea through an underground passage. I did not resist these ideas. On the contrary, I was delighted. Finally, I had found a place where the magical was accepted as normal, affirming what I knew to be true. Mythology is how the patterns of the magical realms speak to us. The land speaks to us in stories, and in my encounter with people who still told these stories, often in everyday conversation, I was able to begin the work of repairing my brain damaged by a culture that dismissed the mythological as fantasy. This took many years and most of the time I had no clue what was happening. I was in the experience, and I commend myself for being willing to see it through. Through my longing I transcended the sacrifice of the Little Mermaid who, in Hans Christian Andersen’s and the 1975 film I saw at age 7, gave up her life in order that her beloved prince could live. I entered a relationship with that story and I completed it.

Other stories came in as guides. Sedna, the Inuit girl who becomes a sea goddess after being sacrificed by her father, was one. I dove deep into victimhood. This story in particular, helped me move out of victimhood and begin to become a source of food for others, as Sedna’s fingers, severed by her father’s axe as she clung to their kayak, became the sea creatures that sustain the Inuit on the Arctic ice. For years The Handless Maiden was my guide to growing back my own hands. She helped me create a feeling of safety in my core, and then helped me move out into the world with something to offer as a contribution to others. Persephone and Inanna were also powerful guides in helping me understand how I’d come to be in the Underworld and in navigating my way back up to the human village.

I knew my inner landscape had changed, that I was in new mythological territory, when I inquired what story I was in now and no heroines or anti-heroines raised their hands and said let’s go. I scanned the stories I knew in my mind to see if I could locate myself, but didn’t relate to any that I knew. In March of 2020, right before I began the ceremony that became my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, it came to me. I was in the story of Inanna, but I was not the Queen of Heaven descending to the Underworld. I was not her dark sister Ereshkigal, who forces Inanna to strip off all her royal garments and then slays her when she makes it all the way down. I was not Inanna’s faithful servant Ninshubur, or her faithless husband Dumuzi who parties with abandon while his wife is in hell. I was the two imps, the Kurgarra and the Galatur, created by Inanna’s uncle Enki, god of water and mischief, to go down and rescue her with the food and water of life. These imps were made of clay, and notably-they were androgynous. They were able to act beyond the polarities of the feminine and the masculine. They were also tricksters who, instructed by Enki to imitate Ereshkigal’s moans and cries of pain, made her believe they empathized with her until she offered them a gift. She was surprised when the asked for Inanna’s corpse hanging on a meathook on the wall, but she gave it to them. Promptly, they sprinkled the food and water of life on the corpse and Inanna was restored to the living.

Does it matter if the empathy wasn’t real? We don’t really know it wasn’t from the Sumerian text. The interior life of the Kurgarra and the Galatur is not fleshed out. Maybe they really did empathize with Ereshkigal’s pain. My next question is, if their empathy was real were they actually tricksters?

I think yes. To be a trickster does not require meanness or a desire to see someone fall flat on their face like Wiley Coyote in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. On the contrary, tricksters are so willing to help, they are willing to take the rebel’s path, the one that’s often considered less noble. PLM should have changed my grade from an A to a B. The principal knew I had skipped. Not downgrading me was an open act of defiance. As a teacher, he was my hero, but it’s the trickster’s gleam in his eye in the hall that day when he asked me what I’d been up to that I’ll always remember. Maybe PLM felt bad for the principal, too, having to uphold the law, but he was not having it. I deserved that A and he was going to give it to me. It wasn’t just a grade, it was the food and water of life. I would need that sustenance in the years that followed. Thank you PLM.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about stories or myths that have been guides your life. Please share and let’s explore this together. I would also love to have you on as voluntary paid subscribers. Last week’s essay was my most popular so far and has reignited my dream to make a living as a writer. Your subscription of $7 a month (or $70 a year), the price of a latte or so many other little things you buy throughout your daily life, could make this possible!