Ian McMillan: Let’s not worry too much about those windmills

I bet you remember it. I bet I’ve got you singing it now and it’ll be going round your head all day like a, well, like a Windmill in your Mind, to be honest. I bet you remember the bit towards the end that goes, in grave and downbeat tones “like the circles that you find…in the windmills of your mind” and if you sing it in the bath or on a stroll, the longer you can make the gap halfway through the line between the ‘“find” and the “in”the more loaded with truth the song will become. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

My mate John Morris tried it all the time. He used to put The Windmills of Your Mind on the jukebox in one of the more run down pubs in Stafford that we went in when we were students there.

Don’t ask me what a song like that was doing on a jukebox alongside Anarchy in the UK by The Sex Pistols and White Riot by the Clash, but we used to love it when John put it on and he’d sing along and get to that bit with the gap and kick the ancient jukebox so that it momentarily stopped playing to make the bit between the “find” and the “in” even more packed with meaning.

But of course the great thing about that phrase “windmills of my mind” is that it signifies absolutely nothing. It’s a totally meaningless bunch of words that somehow sound profound because of the way they’re put together or, in the case of these words, the way they go with the tune in the song.

You could of course swap some of the words for some other words and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. You could sing “The settees of my soul” and it would sound like you were explaining a great philosophical truth. Or you could take it even further and sing “the pandas of my sink” and it would still appear, to the naked ear, to contain a kernel of profundity. I’ve got a name for these faux-meaningful phrases. I call them Mind Windmills.

People in power are very good at blinding us all with the whizzing sails of mind-windmills. The say things like “Let me make it absolutely clear’” and truth’s waters are muddied and rendered opaque by a whirring mind-windmill. They refer to meaningless entities like The Squeezed Middle which sounds to me like an indie band from the late 1980’s or a make of corset, or a mind-windmill refusing to go round.

In fact those in power often sound like they’re reading out a list of who’s on at one of the Leeds Festival’s smaller stages: The Strivers, The Skivers, Alarm-clock Britain, The Workers, The Shirkers. They think they’re being clever and precise and they’re not: they’re being vague and slack in their thinking.

Over the years, I’ve run loads of 
poetry workshops all over the place 
and one of the first things I say to people who want to write is that they should impose a ban on abstract nouns. You know the kind of thing I mean: Truth, Despair, Hope, Love and all their extended and abstract family. They may sound good but they ring hollow. Try the Windmills of My Mind test on them: The Windmills of My Truth. The Windmills of My Hope. You see: meaningless, but it sounds like it should mean something. Take it further. Introduce random words. Try pieces of cooking equipment for example: The Kettle of My Love. The Spatula of My Despair. The music’s there but the lyrics are daft. Once I’ve got trainee writers to throw their abstract nouns away, I get them to write in specific images, because an image will always say more than a slippery abstract noun will.

If we’re talking about Despair then give me a snapshot of somebody sticking their hands down the back of the sofa to try to find enough change to pay a bill, or somebody waiting by the letterbox for a reply, any kind of reply, to all those job applications they’ve sent off into the void.

If we’re talking about Hope then write about a cleaner getting up at the crack of dawn and walking to work in an office hours before anybody in a suit arrives; write about that cleaner just for a second sitting in the boss’s swivelling chair, dreaming of the moment when she’ll get a job that really suits her abilities.

Let’s all be very wary of mind-windmills. Let’s beware of the ones in charge when they talk in abstracts. Kick their jukebox so you alter the tune to make it sound like you want it to sound. Like the Wordmills of my Brain. Sorry: can’t get that song out of my head.