Fulgour said:
And yet the odd contraption we see labled as
La Roue de Fortune
would collapse or fall at the touch of a hand.
Extremely odd! On that strange water-like surface, the wheel floats. Is it our unstable home, or a mockery of our fears? You suggest the image attacks the idea that we are predestined, that Dame Fortuna has decided all ahead of time. We are free, the wheel shows, to monkey about. And yet...Fortuna is just as capricious as any god. She might not keep the Predestination Book of the Calvinists, but she will spin and stop her useless wheel as she pleases. We map our own way, but are limited by our birth, our death, and various other external or internal circumstances not of our choosing (wars, earthquakes, where we were born, the parents we have, our aptitude for this or that mode of expression, illness). Isn't that strange inapt wheel the grotesque picture of those events that catch us in our fondest loves, or dearest ambitions?
The wheel turns - wobbles, ungainly - here you lose your beloved, there, you inherit her money. Yet still you are not predestined. How will you mourn? Will her death bring you closer or further away from your fellows? Will you recover with a sense of blessing for having known her or morbidly remain attached for decades, fetishising her memory? What will you do with her money? Build a mausoleum in her memory? Give it to charity (yet she wanted you to have it)? Go away on vacation where you will meet someone else? Buy yourself a few months in Paris and shoot art videos?
That odd wheel is not ugly or frightening, though. It looks like a rejected cartwheel painted to look like fair-ground wheel, it reassures us, perhaps, that life is after all nothing but a merry-go-round, that we have one go on it, we won't survive it, so we might as well enjoy it. It offers both an exhilaration and a torture.
Lifting the veil on La Roue entails living with that silly-looking wheel. Living with the limits, and still building our lives as though we had no limits, not minding what the other monkeys are doing, falling, climbing, one day king, the next, beggar - except that you might want to offer help to the beggar, and the king might help you. Finding an infinite space of freedom in the gaps between the spokes, which are wide, and look far more supportive than the wheel itself.