Science, Bread, and Circuses by Gregory Schrempp

Author:Gregory Schrempp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

So, it was a yearly trip to a yearly event, set at harvest time to mark the culmination and beginning of the end of the farmers’ year, or canning season as it is known in the rural vernacular. The Ferris wheel is a microcosm, a wheel within a wheel, a revolution within the larger one marked by the yearly pilgrimage. Toward the end of the passage the Ferris wheel’s rotation merges with the individual’s life cycle, the cyclic linearity of the fair with that of human generations: the wheel stops to let some people off and others on. The language alludes to the Christian cycle of “the fall” and redemption-resurrection, as the wheel “fell back to earth and rose again.” The cyclicity is punctuated with clear intrusions of linearity, most notably the reference to the beginning of seventh grade as the year in which the vision occurred (seven is a mystical number in the Judaeo-Christian cosmology, no doubt the single most important source feeding into Keillorian cosmography). But “it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose” (ibid.:124). Such punctuations do not lessen but rather intensify the sense of cycles by calling to attention the sameness within the difference.

Third, overlying, or perhaps pervading, the theme of plenitude, one finds, as in many other religious cosmologies, a dualism of good and evil. Religious cosmic dualism is often accompanied by the notion that the opposed qualities are transcendable and possibly mysteriously balanced and interrelated, a pattern Carl Gustav Jung studied as coniuntio oppositorum, or “union of opposites.” 1 Keillor recalls:

Because we were Christians we gave a wide berth to the Midway, where ladies danced and did other things at the Persian Palms and Harlem Revue tent shows. We avoided sin, but it was exciting for me to be so close to it . . .

I loved the Fair, the good and the bad. (ibid.:110)

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