The speaker lingers on a paradoxical phrase: an object of thought, as if the mind’s products could not truly be things. In the moment imagined, a blue bus filled with travelers appears. The crowd is so dense that their identities blur, and the speaker wonders about ownership of a limb. The right arm seems not to belong to him, perhaps to the person beside him, and a subtle shift confirms the sensation. In that instant, the speaker faces a disquieting awareness of possession, and a careful search begins to locate a sense of self. The limb is eventually found to exist, yet it seems to belong to someone else as well. Anxiety rises, restrained by a practiced calm that resembles soothing a frightened animal. In this process, words themselves become objects in the mind, and the speaker acknowledges them as real mental constructs.
The reflection then travels backward to old language, to phrases spoken by the speaker’s now-deceased mother and father. Memories unfold like a tape being unsnapped, a child’s mind disassembling a set of ideas the way a craftsman would take apart a Meccano model. There are echoes of warnings and predictions from a mother who insisted the speaker would end up in jail, a sentiment carried through the years as a haunting forecast rather than a simple memory. The thought remains vivid, even as time obscures some details, and the speaker listens to those motherly sentences as if they still have immediate weight.
Several moments reveal attempts to please a paternal figure, only to be halted by a preservation instinct that overrides curiosity and risk. Each time, the speaker recalls the practice of reporting and the charged atmosphere of inquiry. In the imagination, the speaker visualizes a scene where self-awareness shifts, as if visiting someone else’s life. Then comes a question about whether intellectualized versions of children can be described as mental objects, and the answer is yes, voiced with the tongue that moves in the mouth. The tongue belongs to a real mouth, yet in imagined speech it multiplies, allowing each language to deploy multiple tongues in a single, layered space.
The mind’s bus continues its journey, crowded by figures who share the ride yet remain separate, until the vehicle slows and arrivals begin. One by one, the travelers alight, and the speaker reaches street level with a free right arm that had fallen asleep under the bus’s pressure. There is a moment of careful observation as the hands settle into ordinary use, but they instantly reveal themselves as two mental instruments capable of countless acts of perception, reflection, and translation from sensation into thought. The scene closes with a quiet recognition: the body and the mind are intertwined so tightly that each movement, each detail of touch, becomes a note in a larger symphony of consciousness.