Story: The Sixth Window
A particularly clean pointer from this is: “Thought is actual; its content is conceptual.” That preserves the richness of thinking without confusing the map with what it describes.
Verse 1
I heard them say come back again
get out of your head
feel the floor beneath your feet
forget the words instead
so every time a thought appeared
I treated it as wrong
like thinking was a stranger
that had wandered through the song
I watched the breath
I felt the chair
I listened to the rain
then thought appeared:
I’m thinking now
and spoiled the thing again
Until one day the question came
so obvious and new:
If everything is happening here
doesn’t thought belong here too?
Chorus
Thought belongs here too
memory and view
every little sentence
every thing the mind can do
The story may point elsewhere
but the story happens here
the future is a thought now
the memory now appears
No need to throw the thinking out
to make experiencing true
Sight and sound
and touch and thought
thought belongs here too
Verse 2
The sentence:
Something’s missing
came with pressure in the chest
I used to call the pressure real
and throw away the rest
but words were also happening
a rhythm in the mind
actual as words appearing
though the missing thing I couldn’t find
The thought was real as thinking
not necessarily as fact
the map was really on the table
that didn’t make it the actual track
and suddenly the difference
was simple, clean, and clear:
the story may be somewhere else
but storytelling happens here
Chorus
Thought belongs here too
memory and view
every little sentence
every thing the mind can do
The story may point elsewhere
but the story happens here
the future is a thought now
the memory now appears
No need to throw the thinking out
to make experiencing true
Sight and sound
and touch and thought
thought belongs here too
Verse 3
I travelled back to childhood
without leaving my old chair
father’s voice came through the years
and tightened something there
the past was not returning
though it felt so close and strong
a memory was happening now
with sadness moving on
Then tomorrow came to visit
with a hundred things to fear
none of them had happened
but imagining was here
the mind can cross a thousand years
while never leaving now
every past and future scene
is present somehow
Bridge
Feeling is not holier
thinking is not sin
there isn’t some pure kingdom
that the intellect can’t enter in
Understanding happens
confusion happens too
calculation, recognition
all are forms life travels through
Even the thought:
I’ve got it!
even:
I don’t understand
even:
This is merely intellectual
appears exactly where I am
No thinker on the outside
no witness keeping score
just thinking as a movement
among a million movements more
Verse 4
So let the body tighten
let the sentence make its claim
let analysis investigate
and memory speak a name
let intellect be brilliant
let intellect be wrong
none of it stands separate
from the living of the song
A concept is a brushstroke
not the landscape it describes
but brushstrokes too are part of life
when brush and canvas rise
nothing needs removing
nothing banished from the view
even this understanding—
thought belongs here too
Final Chorus
Thought belongs here too
every why and who
every explanation
every intellectual view
The story may contain a world
that isn’t present here
but the thinking of that world
is something presently clear
No need to stop the mind
to make the immediacy true
Grass and breath
and grief and maths
thought belongs here too
Outro
A sound
a thought
a memory
a view
an understanding forming
then dissolving too
No inside
no outside
no thinker passing through
just this—
sometimes silent
sometimes thinking
thought belongs here too.
