…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 of its face,
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space,
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind…
I was four years old when a song called ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, as the theme for the film, The Thomas Crown Affair.
I already knew, even as a four-year-old, what a windmill was. (I had no idea what an ‘affair’ was. But I know now.)
In 1968, a windmill looked like this…
…or maybe this…
…or possibly, this…
The wind was used to grind grain — hence the word ‘mill’ — or to pump ground water. Hardly anyone was using a windmill to generate electricity. We had lots of cheap oil and cheap coal to generate electricity. We also had some monster dams to produce hydroelectricity, and more were planned. And we had water stored behind the dams. Back in 1968.
Use the wind, to generate electricity? What a crazy idea. Even as a four-year-old, I could have told you it was crazy.
But then a certain hit song started playing on the radio.
…Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon,
Like a carousel that’s turning running rings around the moon…
The lyrics of the song were really weird. A carousel running rings around the moon? What the heck does that even mean? Now, maybe a space capsule running rings around the moon… that made some kind of sense. But from what little I knew about the moon, there’s no air there. Thus, a windmill on the moon would be pretty useless.
…Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face,
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space…
Okay, yes, the world is whirling silently in space. At least, it’s whirling silently at night, when everyone is asleep.
But the world is not anything like an apple.
…Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind…
I don’t know what the songwriters were trying to get across in 1968, but I’ve definitely decided that, in 2022, the windmills of my mind are generating electricity.
In fact, the windmills of my mind are stretched across a vast agricultural landscape where someone has planted acres and acres of daffodils.
I was not responsible for the choice of daffodils. Somebody else made that decision. I’m just pointing it out.
Another name for daffodil is ‘narcissus’… a name that naturally brings to mind the Greek myth about Narcissus, a mythical man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, and couldn’t pull himself away. He eventually died, of starvation I guess. (The myths are not always clear about those details.)
Later, Sigmund Freud invented a mental illness he called ‘Narcissism’. Freud was not Greek, but apparently he’d heard the story somewhere.
Why someone decided to use the name ‘narcissus’ for the flowers we all know as daffodils, I have no idea. I think they are simply innocent flowers, without any evidence of mental illness.
But for some reason, the acres of fields below the windmills of my mind are planted in daffodils.
I hope no one will draw conclusions from that.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.