Wheels and Words Part II

Sometimes a phrase, a word, read or heard, remains with us throughout the day, or week, or more. This is certainly the case with Shakespeare or Robert Frost. My love affair with both goes back to the 7th or 8th grade. What impressed their words on my mind? The sound, or the idea? When or where I first heard them? Because it was poetry? Because there was something universally true to what some unknown person said or wrote? Because I wished I had said it or identified with it?

Nor long ago a friend had a book he had ordered sent to my address since he would not be here to receive it. Unwrapping it, this rather battered secondhand book stimulated my curiousity. I wondered how my friend had come across this particular author, someone named Dàule, Gian Dàule.

The title itself was rather intriguing.  The Wheel Turns. I began to leaf through the pages which someone named Bakal had thought worthwhile buying and signed as proof of ownership in 1937.

The story itself, of a boy who becomes a man in an extremely dysfunctional family in Vicenza in the early 1900s with a multi-mistress father and a multi-lover mother and finances coming and going, does give us a good picture of the period. But the title? It wasn’t until I got to page 124 that I more or less found out what it referred to.

One of the characters, rather a simpleton, whose mind tended to wander, would dance and sing as his fellow playmates made fun of him.

“Whirls the wheel?

The wheel’s awhirl!

Whirls the girl

And whirls the master…..

Whirls the wheel?

The wheel’s awhirl!

Whirls death

Into life and light?

Life whirls

Into darkness and death!…”

Man, accordng to him, really had in his head a contrivance of wheels and pinions that turned as God willed, or did not will, and that one or more of the wheels had always to be out of gear…

“The wheel, the wheel, it turns too fast …

The wheel is always turning. The universe is turning, the sun is turning, the wheel in my head is turning; and all the wheels are geared together and turn together, for every cog has its notch, and every notch has its cog.”

It was meant perhaps as a premonition of the tragedy that was inevitably to follow. There is something about the poem, maybe the alliteration, maybe the concept itself, that has stayed with me and I find myself repeating the phrase throughout the day.

I too have been caught up in the whirling wheel. We are all caught up in the kaleidoscope of the turning of the universe, in the turning of our lives.