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| Does it work? |
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| KW: Oh yes, it works very precisely, in accordance with the lunar month. The earth is divided into 24 segments, each one representing one hour in time. For every twenty nine and half times the earth rotates, the moon rotates around the earth once. |
| One of the panels of the chariot is actually a painting. What is the significance of this painting? |
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KW: In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us. The female figure represented in the painting could be the great-great-great-great granddaughter of the Yellow Emperor and represents impoverished aristocracy. In the present world, in which no-one believes in living gods anymore, she is a travelling player who as transported around in a beautiful South Pointing Chariot hoping to attract an audience. But no-one ever comes to see her perform. In a past life she may have been the Yellow Emperor's wife, the Lady of the Black Peony, who called upon the craftsman Fang Bo to build for her husband a chariot that always faced south because she wanted him to always feel the warmth of the sun upon him.
Today she is the lady of death, which I believe is the best muse to have.
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| Why is that? |
| KW: It's because the knowledge that we are mortal, that life must come to an end, is the best inspiration and motivation an artist can have. |
| What about the famous inventors, the dog, the rabbit and the hoop. What role do they play in the tale? |
| KW: The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery. If you look closely you can see that they are all interconnected, symbolic of a never-ending circle in which it is simply impossible for the dog to catch the rabbit. The mechanism illustrated is not from an orrery but from a music box - its purpose is to create jingles. |
| Advertising jingles? |
| KW: Precisely. The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising. If we listen human instinct actually tells us what we need, but advertising makes us want things we don't need and things we can't have. It's a never-ending cycle and it makes us dissatisfied. The hoop is there to remind us not to jump through it, not to submit to someone else's control. The dog and the rabbit are telling us not to chase unattainable material goals. |
| This scene is repeated in the intesia (marquetry) below the painting, isn't it? |
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KW: Ah yes, but in that scene the little dog is curled up asleep. He's far too clever to chase a rabbit he cannot catch. The rabbit is significant in that the handle on the original South Pointing Chariot was carved in the form of a rabbit. Because the handle extended out front it meant that wherever the rabbit went the chariot had to follow. |
| What about the inventors? |
| KW: There were several things in the history of science that I wanted to include in the tale in a kind of whimsical way. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was an expert on differentials and made thousands of drawings of gears in his lifetime, largely for military purposes. He was so tenacious he defied the distraction of women by refusing to have them in his presence, just as later in life he denied his blindness by calling for more and more candles. As the tale reveals, his muse is destined to pace up and down in the street, but even then differential impossibilities remain. |
| And Daedalus? |
KW: Daedalus was the master of the maze and also built a chariot, similar to the South Pointing Chariot, which he pulled along to map out complex grids of interlocking pathways that were never allowed to cross. The rabbit in this segment is my invention and was introduced to demonstrate how much more creative a three dimensional labyrinth would be.
Newton, of course, was the inventor of differential calculus so his place in the tale is quite special. Even the loss of two years worth of formulae wasn't enough to dislodge him from his dogged path, if you know what I mean... |
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Yes, Diamond had a lot to answer for. The segments of prose are short but beautifully written and full of mystery. |
| KW: Food for the imagination. |
| At the end the muse isn't particularly happy, is she? |
| KW: She's not happy about the life she is living but to jump through the hoop would mean to succumb to death. Looking back she sees the moon coming over the horizon and realizes that in life anything can happen, whereas in death... |
| In the book Engines of Ingenuity your chariot lives on and its beauty and elegance will be shared and enjoyed by many. What actually happened to the original? |
KW: The chariot was purchased by a private collector who took it home to New York. I take pleasure in knowing that it was built to last for at least a thousand years.  |
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| Note: Kit Williams exhibits for only one week each year in his own studio. His previous publications include the 1980s bestseller, Masquerade. |
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