The Rules Are Not There to Help You

Sometimes, social conventions need to be shattered.

I looked up.

The cry of an eagle split the sky. But I couldn’t see it.

Eagles don’t sound the way you think. The proud shriek TV and movies have trained us to expect belongs to hawks. Eagles sound more like seagulls. They have a kind of high-pitched giggle that always seems faintly ridiculous, coming from a bird with a six-foot wingspan and razor-sharp black talons on each foot.

In the mountain valley where I live, eagles are more common than crows. Especially in the winter. But it’s not common to see them flying under an overcast sky.

And while I scanned the low scudding clouds, I heard the noise again. There was no eagle in sight. On a tree branch far above me, a blue jay cocked its crested head and turned a glittering black eye on me.

Jays imitate the noises made by birds of prey.

Harnessing the same powers of mimicry as parrots and ravens, they can sound, with practice, exactly like the real thing. If you can’t be dangerous in a dangerous world, it’s best to look or sound like you are.

Given this talent for deception, it’s not surprising that the trickster god you find in almost every mythology around the world is represented here, in these endless Pacific forests, by the blue jay. The great plains have the coyote, and Africa has its spiders, but here, it’s the mischievous jay that plays the role of trickster and fool.

The Chehalis Indians tell a story about a chief who held the sun in a box. He selfishly kept it for himself, only allowing his daughter to take it with her to light her way while she picked berries. When a man from another tribe came to steal it, Prometheus-like, and give it to all the world, Blue Jay concocted a series of lies to distract the selfish chief so the heist could be pulled off.

The jay is a comic figure, almost slapstick. But there’s more at work here than simple comedy. The reason why every mythology has a divine trickster is because they shatter social conventions.

We easily get bogged down in the rules.

Even though we should know better. We know that the rules of our society are just that — specific and local. Go somewhere else, and the rules change.

Across the English-speaking world, the rules have an individual focus. Get an education. Get a job. Support yourself. Become a success, a self-made man. The words may vary from one period of time to another, but the tune never changes. Whether it’s the corner office or shady side hustles, our rules revolve around financial success.

Even in our relationships, there’s an element of achievement. Finding that perfect partner becomes an exercise in frustration, spurred on by too much choice and too little time. Too many people see being part of a romantic relationship as yet another achievement to check off the list, like unlocking trophies in a videogame.

It’s what you’re meant to do. And so people do it, without stopping to consider if it’s what they truly want and whether it will really make them happy.

The trickster breaks through all of this. By turning everything on its head, the trickster forces us to examine the things we’re told to believe in. This is why kings had jesters. Without his fool, Lear would been even more obnoxious and narcissistic than he already was.

In An Open Life, Joseph Campbell breaks down the function of the trickster.

“The mind structures a lifestyle,” Campbell says, “and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values you set up for yourself, and smashes them.”

No productive life emerges when cultures ossify. No matter how painful it can be, we need our values smashed sometimes. Everything beautiful is built on the ruins of something else. Cathedrals blossom on top of graveyards, and the rubble of palaces finds new life in the walls of the maternity ward.

He was still watching me.

As I continued on my way through the forest, the jay jumped from his perch and darted through the green air to another tree further along the trail. Even the startling flash of cobalt blue feathers isn’t real.

Blue jays aren’t blue. It’s just the structure of their feathers that makes them seem that way, refracting the light to give a false impression of color.

And as I followed the jay through the forest, his fake cries of eagles and hawks failed to turn me away. Instead, they made me smile as I followed an almost invisible trail through towering trees.

Finally, I stepped out from the forest. The green water of the lake stretched out in front of me, a long tongue losing itself in a maze of mountain islands. From a branch at the very edge of the forest, just before the rocks of the cliff emerged, the jay let out one fake, final screech. Then he flew off in a blaze of fraudulent blue and vanished into the branches.

Viewed from a certain perspective, everything we love could be a lie. Nothing is the way we think it is. For all we know, we may not even exist.

But there’s joy in the pretense, just as there’s joy in any performance done well. Our whole lives could be a trick, a joke, a tale told by an idiot. The greatest trick is to play our parts, fake as they may be, with joy.