The Wheel

Ten turkeys pace the school courtyard, wobbling blue fossils of heads, gurgling mutinously. They ruffle as I pass and begin to follow me. Perhaps in recognition: Lately I’m full of hot feathers. My insides whirl and squawk.

I’ll be home in three weeks. In the forest, boughs mix their wind-blown susurrus with distant boxcars, a promise or warning— chass-chass-chass-chass— час, the word for time.

 …

For the Anglo-Saxons, time was not about progress but a looping process. You see how wyrd (fate) weaves poems like Beowulf, how its intricate patterns hoop and hasp together. Such a structure expresses “the recurrence of human behavior,” Peter Ackroyd writes, “and the circularity of time as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.” The great wheel spins its thread around and in it everyone’s bound.

A pleasing metaphor, but no longer a live one. Who uses spinning wheels anymore? For myself, I’ve never had patience to make things or mend them. 

My mother is good at sewing. She’s good at divination, too. A fruitful years is ahead, she tells me, and I’m inclined to believe her; as an astrologer, she speaks with the authority of the entire universe behind her.
Part heavenly bodies, part choice taken to a radical extent, my mother has a personal mythology about destiny—all souls choose the body in which they’ll be born. “I’m so glad,” she’ll say at times, “your soul chose this body, so that I could be your mom.”

The sentiment used to frustrate me. My intelligent, sensible mother, rationalizing the “why” of human existence with such crude strokes! Really, it was worse than organized religion. Older and less dismissive, I see in her mythology a metaphor: Nothing happens to a person that she did not choose. Not perhaps that she chooses a life laid out before her, but in that she’s always the sum of accumulated choices.

It doesn’t follow, though, that these choices were made with purpose or direction. If one can’t explain or trace them all, how can one account for the soul they’ve made?

…

“Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can one escape from the Wheel?” Imprisonment within a circular concept of time is, Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess, “the main problem of paganism.” Samson tied to the corn-mill (a symbol in Greek philosophy, Graves tells us, for the revolving heavens) “resolved the problem magnificently by pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon everyone.”

Submission and destruction seem the only choices available to those “hooped within the great wheel of necessity,” as Seamus Heaney refers to Beowulf’s characters. Within this wheel your actions are both meaningless and meaningful. As an individual—say, as a shoemaker—you mean little. But your life assumes a place among the greater order. Your father was a shoemaker, your son will be a shoemaker, the circle rolls on.

Then Christ comes and bends time into a line. Under the new order, an individual’s options may not change in any substantial or material way (making shoes still blows). Yet he gains, in Christ’s redemptive love, a greater sense of being an individual. Time for him is linear in that his soul—no longer ensnared in the wheel’s indifferent spokes—may progress, aspire heavenward. As Paul writes, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” His position in a larger social or cosmic order is immaterial—the prize is the soul’s perfection.

But Christianity doesn’t exactly liberate the soul. Rather, it replaces the burden of eternal revolutions with a new one—the burden of free choice.    

…

If life recurred endlessly, as in Nietzsche’s eternal return, we could measure the effects of one choice against all possible effects, all possible worlds. Living only once, we’re at the mercy of chance, of choices made blindly and imperfectly.

The “lightness” of a one-time-around life makes up the central problem of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At one point in the novel, the lovers Tereza and Tomas discuss a friend of the latter’s. If she hadn’t fallen in love with Tomas, Tereza says, she almost certainly would have fallen in love with the friend.

It shocks Tomas to realize no necessity led Tereza to him. She could have just as easily loved another man. “Necessity knows no magic formulae—they are all left to chance,” Kundera writes. “If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.”

…

Freedom of choice and individuality make up the foundation of liberal democracy. As Ukraine has transitioned to a democratic society, these values have fueled (at least in theory) changes to education. In English lessons, for example, teachers have increasingly opted for more classroom discussion, rather than rote memorization and regurgitation.

Whether my pupils would master English or not, I believed two years ago, mattered less than their ability to make a cogent argument and to analyze the opinions of others. Any ancient Roman citizen—well-versed in the trivium of rhetoric, grammar and logic—would tell you these skills are essential not just to personal development but to democracy.

To learn how to express an opinion, however, one first must have an opinion to express. Throughout my service, I’ve reached hair-pulling-out, alcoholism-inducing levels of frustrations with my comatose pupils. Naturally inclined toward hyperbole and gloom, I often forget the motivated kids, all the surprising moments, and focus only on my failures, on their apathy.

There’s Zhennya, whose response to “What will you do for fall break?” was “Play with dick” (his lack of articles or possessive pronouns generating, perhaps, a moment of ambiguous queerdom) or Vitallic’s blow-job faces from the back row. There’s the tween girls, dressed like tragic baby prostitutes, who allow their fear of uncoolness to cow them into silence and feigned stupidity. There’s countless others whose names I always forget because they never speak except to spit out a “ Suka!” in my direction, whose range of expression is limited to a single SMS as their thumbs worry at cell phones. The old order gone, they have no given roles ahead of them; from the new order, they have taken only individualism and consumption.* 

Discipline’s not the problem now; I’ve learned how to brush off the small humiliations, to let out a dry remark in Ukrainian and dispel tension in class. What kills me is, their apathy becomes my own.

Two summers ago, not rooted in my work, not compelled in any one direction, I almost went home. I’m glad I didn’t. But in low moments, my staying here seems less an active choice, more an inability to think of something better to choose.

I have said that action was, in pre-Christian societies, meaningless on an individual level, only meaningful to the larger whole. Does it follow that, for modern society, action inverts? That is, unbound from the wheel, free to pursue her own inclinations, the individual’s choices pullulate infinitely and without necessity. And so, without meaning; the line of time tilts to a vertiginous drop.

…

The lady in the bra department spoke very softly. She interjected “dear” between every few words and looked at us in an abstracted though gentle way. My mother told her I was headed to Peace Corps in a few weeks. “You’re a humanitarian, dear,” the woman said. I had been shifting my weight from one foot to the other; bra departments make me nervous out of adolescent PTSD. “No,” I said, “I’m not.” 

This autumn brings final gatherings with other volunteers. With them comes the tacit expectation that we’ll sum up, weigh, and hold our experiences within phrases. “What are you going to do next?” we ask, whether in benign curiosity or to measure our plans against another’s. We also ask because we believe in that “next”: that each life stage builds on the last, logically progressing towards—something.

Raking together two years, I can’t sum up nor remember the original necessity which compelled me to come here. I get a conversation, nine years ago in my parents’ basement, with a friend who talked about joining Peace Corps when he got older, and myself in love with the friend, with service and purpose.

I would like to think myself more human with time if not humanitarian but am mostly a beast of need and impulse. The friend passed away and sometimes I forget him. “Do you feel grown-up after these years?” I asked Avital. No, she said—“I feel aged.”   

…

My first summer in Ukraine I memorized “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot’s leaden dirge of modernist paralysis. My choice was somewhat masochistic, as I couldn’t read these lines without bursting into tears: I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have waited and listened and watched, and sometimes grown bitter and closed myself, but I don’t consider anything wasted. I don’t despair for the future. My generation, so my mother’s divined from positions of planets in the late ‘80s, is destined “to make order out of chaos.” As I saw off my compatriots this month, I could have believed them capable of conquering anything—their light, their aliveness.

How to free oneself from time? The Orphics engraved their solution to gold tablets, tied to the throats of their dead. It was written there the reminder “to refuse to drink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe,” Robert Graves writes, “however thirsty one might be,” and so escape another cycle on the earth. Not to forget what their lives were.

I can’t sum up. But I store up fragments, not coherent nor ordered but mine. Barren platforms, the train’s nauseous florescence. Valentina’s strawberries. Poems about boars. That time on my way to a conference when, in my blazer and pencil skirt, profoundly hungover, I crouched in the Kyiv University subway station and vomited. All the bawdy bawling speech we exchanged in bars and winter streets, loud and not caring, what was said and lost to be remembered again. My knee’s purple scar. Snow.

…
*The opposing relationship between circular time/communality and linear time/individualism is not quite as clear-cut as I’ve made it seem here. The “old order” for Ukraine may not have been an individualist one, but of course, it was not same worldview as that of Beowulf or the ancient Greeks. The concept of time within fascism and communism, these regimes that ravaged Eastern Europe in the 20^th century, was entirely linear, their doctrines future-oriented. Louis Menand, in a recent book review, writes that these regimes “regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.”