Wheel inside a Wheel

This morning I parked my car in the lot and got out into a light rain. Nothing surprising. The sky was low and the asphalt was riddled with dots. In contrast to the car’s coffee and exhaust, the parking lot, near a stand of trees, was fresh and sharp, wet and cold. Fall in the air and the same sort of feeling that drives the geese to array themselves and travel hit me as it does every year. Must be the slant of light, the cold, the smell of autumnal weeds fizzing at the margins of fields and yards, the colors: raspberry and yellowpurplecrimson, the sort of colors that make me think of dyed wool and medieval celebrations (not sure where that last one comes from). Doesn’t matter. At my age there is a certain resonance to fall that gets deeper every year. The urge to travel, to find horizons, to build fences and fires. Maybe I can blame it all on my pituitary gland. Circadian rhythm. The earth is a drum.

And as I get out of the car I’m thinking vaguely of Yeats’ political theory about the gyres, two intersecting spirals that represent the apposition and opposition of everything, that explain history and my place in it. I think it’s cool Yeats found an image, a figure, an emblem to crystallize his feelings about growing older in troubled times and the poet’s role in that turmoil. Such a literate mind at work, it invents an ideogram.

My ideogram is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel. These appear in clocks and car transmissions as far as I know. There is a complicated mathematics to the synchronized wheels, as any kid using a Spirograph can sense, but my feeling as I get older is that there are many, many wheels, maybe an infinite number, that all spiral, spin, and revolve. At times, a master wheel – in this case, the seasons – pulls the contraption around to a particular notch and the inner and outer wheels turn madly on their frictionless pivots in response, compensating and adjusting. So the wheels today are being 50, fall, the beginning of the day, the end of rain, the opening up of a new part of my heart work in my new house, the death of my acquaintance Matty, the end of the book, and the like.

This entire system can be ported to language, where rhymes (slant, rich, and full) stand for the various synchronicities that the wheels carry. Where characters and their motives are the distances between stars. Where genres are the toothy wheels. (Caution: Extreme number crunching needed to communicate between these two systems. See the formula at the right).

Regardless of the system, today I felt in the balance. I remember learning to ride a bike and realizing that it’s not in the hands and head, it’s in the butt. You drive with your ass. It’s correcting on the fly, not pointing, stiff, white, and vector-like, at the end of the driveway. It’s pointing and cycling, spinning and wobbling. Balance is dynamic. Look again at the formula above. It’s obvious.

Sometimes in poems there is attempt to talk about the plentitude of accepting what’s around us. I remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But to carry on” or the poems of Stevens, and I found it again recently in a poem from a friend of mine, Brian Fay:

The sun shines over the bare branches of trees
unconcerned with autumn, unafraid of the cold winter,
focused only on buds, blossoms,
and cool green leaves in all this sunlight.

So for me, this morning, there was a moment when the constellations aligned. When my age was exactly the time of year, of day, of the decade, of my waking hours.

Locking the car, I hefted my books and walked inside.