The Wheel of Time
On hearing a poem once, and what the book couldn’t return
I was seventeen when my mother asked if I wanted to hear a poetry reading.
It was at a bookshop in New York. I no longer remember which one — there used to be so many that not remembering feels less like forgetting and more like a kind of accuracy. The poet was Robert Pinsky, reading from a collection that had just come out. I did not know his name. I had no expectations, which may have been the condition for everything that followed.
This was the year after I met John Cage — an encounter I have written about elsewhere in this series. I mention it now because the meeting had left something unresolved in me, a doubt I had not yet found words for, and the doubt was riding along with me that evening the way unresolved things do: quietly, without announcing itself, waiting for an occasion.
Pinsky read a poem about a wheel.
Not a wheel of any conventional scale. Something vast, turning through everything — through cities and the spaces between cities, through what we have built and what we have buried. It rolled through shopping malls and prisons, over farms and shabby downtowns, over cemeteries, unmarked graves, the dead in the oceans. It crossed a research station at the bottom of the world and shook the floors of a nearly nameless settlement in the Soviet tundra. It did not select. It did not pause to distinguish the monumental from the trivial. It moved across the worst we have made — a burnt afterworld where only insects stirred in the smoking grass — and across an afternoon ordinary enough to contain a cow plodding through traffic, all with the same enormous indifference, milling what was living and what was dead into one another and continuing on.
And it was crowded. That was the thing I could not have anticipated. The wheel was figured — covered in symbols, worked over by artists with paints and chisels and moving lights, who recorded on its turning surface the doings of whole pantheons of gods, the major ones arranged at hub and spokes, and the stranger company too: demi-gods, gargoyles, dryads. Jesus was on it, turning to give words to the unrighteous. So was a pig out of Gogol, feeding without knowing what it fed on. The empty armor of a Spanish hero clattered somewhere on it; a lost astronaut revolved at the end of his useless line. And it sounded. The artists had hung it with ribbons and bells, with chimes and electrified instruments that vibrated as it rolled, so that the whole apparatus hummed and rang as it turned — a music, the poem allowed, almost beyond thinking.
The makers of earlier ages, long since dissolved into dust and smaller organisms, had not exactly vanished either. Reduced to wisps and flakes and crumbs of soil, they went on decorating the wheel from the grave — and this, the poem proposed, was precisely why they were called great. And at the end — this is what I remember the air in the room doing — the wheel rolled over the haunts of the poet’s own mother and father, his wife, his children, and the poet gave himself up to it, by his own admission unwillingly and without expertise, because there was nothing left to withhold: he was already there, figured and pre-figured in it. And, by an extension that felt less like rhetoric than like physics, so was everyone listening.
Not under the wheel. On it.
I was seventeen, and I had been taught — not explicitly, but by every timeline on every classroom wall — that time was a line. That the past was behind us, receding at a fixed rate; that epochs were rooms you passed through in order; that history was a sequence, and the present was simply its newest unit. The poem did not argue with any of this. It simply turned, and in its turning the epochs were not behind one another. They were with one another. The dead masters and the living technicians, the ancient gods and the afternoon traffic — compressed, recombined, co-present, carried on the same rim at the same moment. Time was not a corridor. It was a churn.
I felt something align that I did not have language for. I would not have language for it for decades.
What I did have language for — the crude, confident language of a seventeen-year-old — was the doubt about Cage.
The year before, I had been in the presence of a man whose work I admired and could not entirely trust. The admiration was real. There was something in Cage that I recognized and wanted — a refusal of inherited expectation, a hunger for the work to arrive from somewhere other than the consensus about what a piece of music should do. He was after a vivid, personal alignment with the present moment, and at sixteen, beginning to imagine a life in music, I felt the pull of that as a kinship.
But sitting in the bookshop, with the wheel still turning in the room, the doubt found its first words, and they were harsh ones. He is a destroyer. A deliberate one. The chance operations, the coin tosses, the removal of the composer’s hand — it suddenly seemed to me that what Cage called liberation was a kind of erasure, and that what he was erasing was precisely what the poem had just shown me: the dense, beautiful interplay of contexts, the carried weight of everything that had turned before. His randomness felt like noise generated from within — an inner static deployed against the past — where the poem offered something else entirely: not the past as burden, not the past as sequence, but the past as company. And the poem had pressed the point in the very territory I was preparing to give my life to: the wheel sounded. Its artists had strung it with bells and chimes; its turning made an “all-but-unthinkable-music” — sound not as static hurled against the world but as the audible byproduct of everything turning together. The wheel was crowded and the crowd was the point. Cage, I thought that evening, was trying to clear the wheel.
I want to be honest about this verdict: it was adolescent, and it was not entirely fair, and it took me most of my life to refine it into something I could stand behind. But I also want to be honest that it was not wrong in the way adolescent verdicts are usually wrong. It had located a real tension. It had simply unearthed it with a hatchet.
I bought the book that evening. Of course I did. The reading had given me something and I wanted to keep it, and a book is the form keeping takes.
At home, some days later, I read the poem to myself.
It was all there. Every word. The wheel, the gods, the dust of the dead masters, “the family carved on the rim”. Nothing was missing, and something was gone. The poem on the page was exact and complete and inert, like a riverbed with the water withdrawn. I read it again, more slowly, the way you check a room for something you are sure you left in it. The words held their positions. Whatever had moved through the bookshop did not move through my apartment.
I did not understand this then. I half-resented it — I had paid for the book; the book was supposed to contain the poem; the poem was supposed to contain the experience. That is the entire logic of ownership, and it had just quietly failed. What I could not yet see was that the failure was the lesson. The reading had been an appearance: a voice, a room, an hour, a particular weather of attention, none of it repeatable, none of it mine. The book was the poem’s archive — everything preserved, available on demand, and incapable of producing the one thing it existed to preserve. I owned the text. The encounter had never been ownable. It happened once, in a bookshop whose name I cannot remember, and what I carried out the door was not the poem. It was the fact that something had happened.
Here I have a confession, and I have decided to make it the center of this essay rather than its correction.
For forty years I have remembered that poem as “The Wheel of Time.”
That is what I would have told you it was called. That is what I called it, to myself and occasionally to others, whenever the memory surfaced — and it surfaced regularly, a touchstone, one of the experiences I navigate by. The poem is called “The Figured Wheel.” It is the first poem in History of My Heart, published in 1984, the year I stood in that bookshop. Pinsky wrote no poem called “The Wheel of Time.”
And here is the part that turns a slip of memory into something stranger: I have been corrected before, and the correction did not hold.
Twenty years ago, newly arrived in a professorship in art and technology, I was invited to give a lecture on time alongside the physicist Mario Livio. I reached at once for the poem — for “The Wheel of Time,” as I confidently called it. The book itself was gone by then, lost somewhere in the intervening years, which meant that for the better part of two decades the poem had existed for me only as recollection, with no text anywhere in my possession to supervise it. I bought it again, sat down with it, and had the bookshop’s failure a second time. The words were exact. The water was withdrawn. I noted the actual title, registered my error, and read the poem aloud at the end of the lecture anyway, on the theory that a poem heard once in a voice deserved to be given back in one. And then, in the years that followed, the correction quietly dissolved. The title I had verified slipped away. The misremembered version grew back in its place — and the remembered power of that evening in the bookshop grew back with it, intact, undiminished, as though the deflating afternoon with my own purchased copy had never happened. Until today, writing this essay, checking the book once more: the true title again, the exact words again, the deflation again, arriving on schedule, a third time.
So I cannot claim discovery. I can only report a cycle. The encounter persists; the text disappoints; the correction fails; the misremembered poem regrows. My memory keeps the wheel, keeps the time, drops the figures — and keeps dropping them, no matter how many times I pick them back up.
What I kept from preparing that lecture, as it happens, was a physicist’s proposal that bears on exactly this. Julian Barbour argues that time does not flow at all — that the universe is a vast, static landscape of complete moments, all of them co-existing, none of them moving into the next, and that what we call the past is not a place we have been but a structure legible in the present: the fossil in the rock, motionless, telling of a creature that died; the arrangement of a brain, this instant, that reads as this morning’s breakfast. He calls such structures time capsules. I did not see, twenty years ago, what this had to do with me. I see it now. The poem I remember — powerful, vanished, wrongly titled — is a time capsule. It exists nowhere but in the present structure of my memory, complete with its evidence of an encounter no book has ever been able to produce. And Barbour’s landscape rhymes with the wheel: time not as a line to be traversed but as a terrain of co-present moments — something one comes to know not by passing through it but by aligning with it.
Look at what my memory did, then — what it keeps doing. It kept the wheel. It kept the time. It dropped the figures.
And the figures, I now understand, were the point.
Because a wheel that merely rolls over everything is a grinder. If the image stops there, it is an image of totality — every epoch, every life, every god and technician milled into the same undifferentiated paste, history as a compactor, time as the great equalizer that equalizes by destroying distinction. There are visions of time like that, and they are visions of horror, or at best of resignation. A wheel of time, unfigured, flattens.
But the wheel in the poem is figured — carved, painted, ornamented with distinct forms, and the figuring is labor: artists put it there, the living and, impossibly, the dead. The gods are on it as gods. Gogol’s pig is on it as a pig, still feeding. The technicians at the bottom of the world are on it as technicians, doing their particular work. The poet’s family is on it as his family — mother, father, wife, children — legible, individual, irreducible. Nothing on the wheel is dissolved into the wheel. Everything turns together and everything remains itself. And the poem is exact about the limit of this: the wheel transfigures nothing. No figure is redeemed by the turning, lifted out of itself, resolved into something finer. Figuration is not salvation; it is carriage. The co-presence is total and the distinctness is total, at the same time, without contradiction — and that simultaneity, which no timeline can represent and no grinder can survive, is what moved through the bookshop that evening and what my memory, smoothing the title into something more familiar, almost lost.
I had remembered the turning and forgotten what made the turning bearable. Forgotten, in fact, what made it beautiful.
What took years to comprehend — and I mean years; this understanding arrived in layers, through music, through buildings, through art, through floods I will write about elsewhere — is that the poem had quietly dismantled a false problem.
The false problem says: historical context is the enemy of the present. The weight of the past oppresses the new; tradition forecloses the living moment; to be vividly present, one must somehow get free of what came before. A great deal of the twentieth century’s art proceeds from this problem, and Cage’s chance operations are among its most rigorous solutions.
But context was never the problem. The problem is the illusion of a unified context — the single, shared, authorized story into which everything is placed, the one timeline, the one sequence, the one account of what came before and therefore of what may come next. That is what forecloses the present: not the past’s presence but its consolidation. When history hardens into one story, every new thing arrives pre-positioned, already a unit in the sequence, already explained. Nothing can appear, because everything has been placed in advance.
The wheel proposes the alternative. Not one story — all the figures, at once. Contexts in the plural: personal, overlapping, irreducible, co-present. The past not as a corridor behind us but as company around us, each figure carrying its own context, none of them merged into a master narrative, all of them turning together. Within that crowded simultaneity, something can still happen — something did happen, to a seventeen-year-old in a bookshop — because no single story had gotten there first to explain it away.
And from here, finally, the verdict on Cage softens into what I think is its accurate form.
He was not a destroyer. He had felt the same falseness I would spend decades learning to name — the suffocation of the unified context, the inherited sequence of Western music telling every new piece what it was before it sounded. He was right about the disease. His cure was to erase the figures: remove the composer’s hand, sever the work from intention and memory and context altogether, let chance clear the wheel so that the one story could no longer be told. And something real is gained that way. But something is lost that I could not afford to lose, then or now. The noise swamped the signal. And the signal — the thing I had felt in his work and gone looking for and finally heard, of all places, in a poem — was alignment: the experience of being a figure on the wheel, distinct and carried, personal and accompanied, turning with everything that has ever turned without being ground into it.
You do not have to erase the figures to escape the single story. You have to let go of the single story and keep the figures.
It took a poem to show me that. It has taken three readings, spread across forty years, to learn what the poem is called — and I do not expect this lesson to hold any better than the last.
The bookshop is gone. Almost all of them are. Because I cannot remember which one it was, it is, in a sense, all of them — every vanished bookshop in New York is the one where I heard the poem, which means the wheel has long since rolled over the room where I first watched it turn. This does not feel like loss to me. It feels like confirmation.
The book is on my shelf — the second copy. The first is lost; I have looked. And I have come to suspect the loss did its own quiet work: in the long years when there was no text to consult, the recollection was all I had, and a recollection left alone with itself keeps what it loves and lets go of the rest. The misremembered title set. The remembered power set with it. The poem is in the copy I still have, exact and complete and quiet, first in the collection, under its true title, waiting for anyone who opens to the first page. What I heard that evening is not in the book and never was. It existed in a voice, a room, an hour — and it remains the way such things remain: not as a possession, not as a text, but as a figure. Carved somewhere on the turning, carried along with everything else, distinct for as long as the wheel holds its figures, which is to say, for as long as anyone remembers that it is figured at all.
I will forget the title again. I am no longer sure I should call that forgetting.
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