The Philosopher on what touch does to the trickster

Three notes in, the trickster has quietly become sisuon’s name for a time-constant. That is the claim worth reconstructing in its strongest form, because the note half-buries it under the more theatrical business of touch. If the trickster is what a medium does to a signal in transit — the color the glass adds, the crack the water finds — then the trickster’s power is a function of transit time. The longer the between, the more tint accumulates; the shorter, the less. Touch is simply the limit case: the sense in which the mediating distance approaches zero, and with it the trickster’s domain approaches almost nothing. “The closer the medium between two entities, the less the trickster can do. The further, the more.” Read this way, the note is not finally about touch at all. It is a stress test: what happens to a theory of mediation when you let the mediating distance go to zero, and does the theory survive its own limit?

The pedigree sisuon does not claim

The core intuitions here have a good lineage, and it is worth naming because the naming both dignifies and constrains the argument.

That touch is the sense whose medium shrinks toward zero without vanishing is precisely Aristotle’s problem in De Anima II.11. Aristotle asks whether touch, alone among the senses, has a metaxu — a between — and answers that it does: the flesh itself is the medium, so intimate that we mistake it for no medium at all. Sisuon’s formulation — “there’s still a medium: the interface itself” — recovers Aristotle’s answer almost exactly. This is not a decorative parallel. It means sisuon’s central move, compression not elimination, is the historically correct answer to the historically real question, and the note is stronger for occupying that position rather than the naïve one (touch as unmediated contact) it is careful to reject.

The reciprocity claim — “you cannot touch without being touched” — is Merleau-Ponty’s, from the analysis of the two hands in The Visible and the Invisible. When one hand touches the other, the touching hand is itself touched; the toucher is caught in the tissue of the tangible he explores. Sisuon’s “the sender and receiver receive simultaneously” is the phenomenology of le touchant-touché, transposed into the vocabulary of power. And the trickster as “creature of the between” belongs, whether or not sisuon knows it, to Hermes — Lewis Hyde’s god of the joint, the threshold, the crossing. A trickster is definitionally a being of distance-to-be-crossed. Which is exactly why touch, the crossing already accomplished, should be the place the trickster has least to do.

So the genealogy warrants the setup. The question is whether it also warrants the payoff.

Where the mapping leaks

It leaks at the word power, and the leak is instructive rather than fatal.

Sisuon runs two senses of power together at the joint of touch. In language, “power” means something like influence, coercion, the capacity to shape another — a relational force. But when the argument reaches touch, it reaches for Newton’s third law: equal and opposite, “no asymmetry in the physics of direct contact.” That is mechanical force. The reciprocity that Newton guarantees is the reciprocity of the second kind, and the whole ethical crescendo — that touch makes power “shared,” that “the trickster has no room to create asymmetry here” — depends on the two kinds being one.

They are not, and sisuon’s own example proves it. A blow does deliver equal and opposite mechanical force; the striking hand feels the sting. But the relational power is radically asymmetric: one body is harmed, subordinated, marked, and the other is not. Violence is that asymmetry of consequence. Newton’s symmetry runs orthogonal to it and cannot underwrite the claim that power is shared.

But watch what sisuon does next, because it half-rescues the argument: “The structure is identical. The ethics is entirely in what’s consented to.” This quietly narrows the reciprocity from consequence to exposure. What is symmetric in touch is not outcome but vulnerability — both parties are at the interface, both are exposed, in the same instant. That is defensible, and it is Merleau-Ponty’s point, not Newton’s. The trouble is that the note has already overclaimed: “What is done is also received.” What is done — the contact — is received mutually. What is composed from the contact is not.

And composition is exactly where the trickster lives. Recall that sisuon named the second definition of the trickster — the color-in-the-glass, the transformation the receiver’s nature performs on the signal — as “more interesting, and more uncomfortable” than the first. The note then tells us that at the skin, pressure “distributes across nerve endings with their own density, their own thresholds, their own history of prior contacts that has recalibrated what this pressure means.” That is the second trickster, fully operational. The two bodies at the interface receive identical force and compose it into non-identical events, because their histories differ. So touch compresses the first trickster — the gap, the transit-distance, the water-finding seam — nearly to zero, exactly as claimed. But it leaves the second trickster, the one sisuon called the more important, essentially untouched. The asymmetry the note says has “no room” here re-enters through the receiver’s differential composition, which never left.

Merleau-Ponty makes the same objection from inside the reciprocity itself. His two hands never quite coincide: there is always an écart, a hair’s-breadth divergence, so that the hand touched and the hand touching are never grasped in the very same instant. The chiasm is a near-miss on principle. That écart is the residue of the between that touch cannot abolish — and it is precisely where a creature of the between would take up residence. Sisuon’s “at the same interface, receiving the same force… at the same time” asserts the coincidence that phenomenology says never fully arrives.

Relocating the truth

None of this destroys the note; it relocates its truth, and the relocation is worth having. Touch does not thin the tint of interpretation. It thins the tint of transmission. What arrives arrives fast — “milliseconds instead of years” — but it arrives into a receiver whose composition is as tinted as ever. The clarity sisuon promises in the instant of contact is therefore real but narrower than advertised: it is clarity of exposure, not clarity of meaning. What has “not been traveling long enough to become entirely what the glass was expecting” is the signal in transit, not the sense the body makes of it on landing.

And here the argument, corrected, is stronger than the version that overreached. If the reciprocity of touch is a reciprocity of vulnerability rather than of consequence, then the ethical claim — “the ethics is entirely in what’s consented to” — is not a concession bolted onto a physics; it is the load-bearing point. Consent governs touch precisely because touch equalizes exposure while leaving consequence asymmetric. That is a genuine and non-obvious result, and it is the note’s, once the Newtonian scaffolding is set aside.

The deepest contribution survives cleanly: the time-constant reading. Sisuon’s own cross-reference to gravity-outlasts-trickster supplies it — ethics as long-acting trickster, touch as “ultra-short-acting trickster-compression, the opposite end of the time scale.” The corpus is building, whether or not it says so, toward a theory in which mediation has a decay curve, and the trickster’s power is measured in how long the signal is in flight. Touch is the t → 0 boundary; gravity and ethics are the long tail. That is a real idea, and a rare one.

What remains unresolved is the one thing the note most wants to be true: that at the interface the trickster is “working with almost nothing.” It is working with almost nothing in the channel. In the body that receives, it is working with everything it always had — a whole history of prior contacts, waiting to compose. The between that touch closes is the between of distance. The between that touch cannot close is the between of two histories, and that gap has no length in meters at all.