My friend was talking about a painting by Magritte, of a pipe that is not a pipe. Straight into my head, with calm fidelity, I saw an image of a pipe, floating in space - the sort of pipe water flows through, with a right-angled bend in its shiny metal. I looked up the painting, to be sure, and I'd got the wrong sort of pipe all together. It was not a pipe, but a pipe. Hmm... Maybe I was thinking of the cover of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells? Out comes the phone again. Closer! The background is as I imagined and the material is similar, but still no pipe. Unsurprisingly, this floating monolith is a triangular tubular bell. So where did I see the pipe? If I did see the pipe. Which is of course not a pipe (of any sort) anyway...
I just saw the cord of my blind swinging and was surprised by the strange shapes of its shadow; the differing of an object and its shadow felt like original thinking, until I remembered the cave of an old chap called Plato. Other languages probably have a word for when you felt so mindful but were beaten to the idea by more than 2000 years, when out of the obscured, spins a thought, so graceful, until new light means the shadow disappears.
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