We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.
I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.
But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.
The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.
Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.
There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.
At that moment something very strange happened to me.
The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.
But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.
The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.
Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.
The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.
Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.
So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.
And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.
The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.
I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.
But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.
The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.
Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.
There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.
At that moment something very strange happened to me.
The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.
But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.
The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.
Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.
The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.
Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.
So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.
And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.
The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.
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