Editor's Note

Turning the Wheel

by Brian K. Mahoney, March 25, 2010

Through a fluke of circumstance, I recently had the opportunity to watch the first few minutes of Conan the Barbarian (1982) for the first time in 20 years. Say what you want about the acting chops of the Austrian bodybuilder they hired to play the lead, the screenplay was written by pros—John Milius (Apocalypse Now) and Oliver Stone. Based loosely on the sword-and-sorcery stories of Robert E. Howard, the film follows a conventional rags-to-riches arc. After witnessing the slaughter of his parents, the young Conan is sold into slavery, where he is forced with others to push a human-powered mill, the Wheel of Pain. Eventually, Conan is the only wheel-pusher left standing, trudging around in an Sisyphean circle. (There is a darkly humorous YouTube mash-up of this scene set to the guttural droning of the Slovenian industrial band Laibach’s “Life is Life.”)

In case you haven’t seen the film—and I’m not saying you should; its flaws are legion—Conan slays James Earl Jones in the end, as all good heroes are wont to do. But the Wheel of Pain became embedded in my mind as such a fantastic metaphor that I found myself carrying it around in my pocket like a string of worry beads.

Waiting in line at the grocery store, stuck behind four full grocery carts, my own cart stacked with a week’s provisions, inching toward checkout, I thought—sadly and with little comfort— “This is just like that scene in Conan!” All of us shuffling forward, an inch at a time; out to our cars, home to our cupboards, and back again next week.

In the midst of shoveling snow during that last, mad March snowstorm, my back aching, feet and hands cold and wet, the Wheel came to mind.

Looking at the mountain of work on my desk, I was again reminded of the Wheel. (Actually, this is not entirely true. In an irony of the Digital Age, most of the work we are responsible for is not stacked in reams of paper anymore but queued in unanswered e-mails in our computers. The tool that empowers also enslaves. Just like the Wheel of Pain!)

At the gym this winter, spinning the pedals in yet another stationary cycle class while waiting for the weather to warm up, the Wheel was much in my thoughts.

Scraping three layers of caked-on old paint off the intricately rounded columns on my front porch, the Wheel was being shouldered.