Second blog -- answers to an ocean of prompts |
Prompt: “As the images unwind Like the circles that you find In the windmills of your mind” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk63Psr3wzY Prose, poem, or story: How do the song or the windmills of your own mind affect and inspire you? ----------- The Windmills of your Mind is the theme song for the movie, The Thomas Crown Affair. In the plot of the movie, there are two high-achieving main characters: the millionaire Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) who concocts a scheme to rob a bank and Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), an investigator for the bank's insurance company. These two play a chasing game (involving both the crime and the romance), at the end of which no one totally wins. I have always loved the song, though not the movie so much, because sometimes my mind works in circles, too, but in the personal sense and when I am writing. I think this happens because of my content-related associative mind or thinking=feeling system, which detects a novelty when it hits on a related bunch of memories. Thus, the song. Even though I have the Sting’s version in the prompt, I like the original one as Michel Legrand sang it. In its entirety, the words to the song are: “Round Like a circle in a spiral Like a wheel within a wheel Never ending on beginning On an ever-spinning reel Like a snowball down a mountain Or a carnival balloon Like a carousel that's turning Running rings around the moon Like a clock whose hands are sweeping Past the minutes on its face And the world is like an apple Spinning silently in space Like the circles that you find In the windmills of your mind! Like a tunnel that you follow To a tunnel of its own Down a hollow to a cavern Where the sun has never shone Like a door that keeps revolving In a half-forgotten dream Like the ripples from a pebble Someone tosses in a stream Like a clock whose hands are sweeping Past the minutes on its face And the world is like an apple Spinning silently in space Like the circles that you find In the windmills of your mind! Keys that jingle in your pocket Words that jangle in your head Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that you said? Lovers walk along a shore And leave their footprints in the sand Was the sound of distant drumming Just the fingers of your hand? Pictures hanging in a hallway Or the fragment of a song Half-remembered names and faces But to whom do they belong? When you knew that it was over Were you suddenly aware That the autumn leaves were turning To the color of her hair? Like a circle in a spiral Like a wheel within a wheel Never ending or beginning On an ever-spinning reel As the images unwind Like the circles that you find In the windmills of your mind” |