Everyday Canvas

The Windmills of Your Mind

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?

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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”