What Goes Around Comes Around

June 2023 – May 2025

It is difficult to conceive of human civilization without the wheel, yet humans existed for centuries without it. Many other innovations came first  –  woven cloth, rope, boats, dolls, the flute!  The inspiration of rolling circular objects was doubtless where it all started. In the Neolithic era, logs were placed beneath heavy loads to more easily slide the load along from place to place. As humans began to cultivate barley, wheat and rice, round stones were placed on top of each other and rotated against one another to grind the grains and separate husk from seed. The first potter’s wheels were terra cotta, with a socket on the underside fixed to a low pivot, allowing the wheel to turn without wobbling. A significant breakthrough came as precision cutting tools were refined and discs made of wood became possible. True freely spinning “fast wheels” for pottery were invented around 4200–4000 BCE and used throughout Egypt and Mesopotamia. Wheeled wagons came afterward, around 3500–3350 BCE. It took more than 1500 years for the development of spokes, making the wheel lighter, stronger, and faster. The creation and use of chariots spread widely from the Caucuses throughout the Mediterranean starting around 2100 BCE. Wheel tracks dated to 2200 BCE have been found in China. Nubians were using water wheels around 400 BCE. After spokes, the next innovation was a metal rim. Later came the cogwheels, the flywheel, the turbine, metal-spoked wheels, pneumatic wheels. And we were off! Since then the wheel has come to permeate every aspect of our lives. Not a day goes by that we don’t interact in some way with a wheel.

But its utilitarian functionality is just one aspect of what makes the wheel so deeply important to human life. The wheel compels because it contains the profound mystery of circularity. Its elegant form suggests infinity, the state of having neither beginning nor ending. Ezekiel’s fiery wheels in the sky, the snake swallowing his own tail, the bhavachakra clutched in Yama’s jaws of death – the wheel saturates our religious imagery and illustrates complex cosmologies. By its very action the wheel suggests repetition but also renewal. As a wheel spins, any given place on its rim returns to where it started relative to the central hub over and over and over. Yet each revolution of a wheel implies movement – not just a stale return to where we started but profound change, going somewhere. Wheels poignantly remind us that while we are doomed to repeat ourselves again and again, that repetition also holds within it the potential of transformation. Wheels are emblematic of fate, and retribution. Empires rise and fall with the capricious spinning of fortune’s wheel, but we also know that the wheel brings back to us just what we have meted out – what goes around comes around.

Wheels afford us the ecstasy of speed and experiences of sheer joy as well as their flip side – the terror of uncontrolled, lightning velocity.  Wheels have enabled the development of movies as well as warfare, amusement parks and punch clocks. The wheels of turbines generate our electricity. The rotating cylinders of repeating firearms are regular agents of tragedy in our communities. We talk of spinning our wheels when we fail to make progress and of the wheels spinning when we are thinking deeply. Capitalist culture in particular loves the wheel, enthralled as it is by the teleological god of forward motion and unlimited growth. Yet the wheel also remains an object lesson in turning and overturning, its action described as Revolution. Indeed, attempting to represent all aspects of the wheel is an impossible task, so enormous is its scope and reach into every aspect of life. We can only circle around and around the subject of the Wheel, rotating here and spinning there, departing, returning, ad infinitum, like wheels upon wheels upon wheels.