Another Turn at the Wheel

For the past 10 days with help from family and friends who know much more than I about this expanding digital universe we all inhabit, I've been launching a website that I call, Another Turn Of the Wheel. It is not a new site but a redesigned version of one I started a few years ago to assuage my sense of inadequacy at never having produced a book I rashly promised years ago.

The name of the site comes from a passage in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. The temptation as Kazantzakis conceived it was that Christ in agony on the Cross realizes that he has connections in the highest of places, as the Son he has a get-out-of-jail-free card.

And in his imagination, he plays that card. A reprieve is granted, he is brought down and his wounds are tended to, he heals and goes off to enjoy the life others enjoy. He makes love with Mary Magdalene, and when she is stoned to death soon after, he understands that in the eyes of the community she is after all a fallen woman. He marries two sisters also named Mary and has a brood of children. He lives the contented life of a carpenter until one day his old band of disciples come by and to his great surprise they are led by the prophet Thomas.

Kazantzakis had portrayed Thomas not as doubting Thomas but as sly Thomas, Thomas the shrewd.

So Christ and Thomas go off for a walk and when they stop to talk Christ voices his surprise. “You, Thomas? Who would have thought you would be the one?” And Thomas replies, “Yes but, you see, I learned the secret of prophecy . . . When others hope, I despair, when others despair I hope: the Wheel Turns!”

I just wanted to make it clear that the Wheel that I will be writing about is not just a physical wheel, though I am well served by the ones I ride on.

So we can all be prophets as long as we don’t get swell headed about it. We can prophesize the coming of the spring and better days ahead, and we can tell each other stories we treasure of times and people and place we remember.