Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 377 · middle

The Seventy-Third Take

Stanley Kubrick

Lyrics

**Central Image:** The obsessive act of shooting the same scene from every conceivable angle and take—the endless geometric perfectionism of filmmaking as a neurological compulsion toward total control.

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[Verse 1]
Your eye splits frames into grids of light,
each pixel a synapse waiting to fire.
You shoot the same hallway seventeen times
and your mirror neurons burn bright—
they *know* what the lens sees before it blinks.
You're rewiring the viewer's cortex
one deliberate angle at a time.

[Chorus]
You build cathedrals out of repetition,
Gothic and gleaming in every direction.
Each take rewires how we see,
synaptic pathways blazing new geometry.
You don't settle for the first truth—
you hunt for the hundredth one.

[Verse 2]
Long-term potentiation in motion:
your brain strengthens each neural pathway
with every retake, every degree of camera tilt.
The hippocampus consolidates memory of *almost*,
of nearly right, of one frame closer.
Your predictive coding never rests—
always calculating what the frame should hold
before it's even framed.

[Bridge]
Theta waves humming at two in the morning,
your interoception screaming: *not yet, not yet*.
The myelination of obsession—
insulation wrapped around every nerve
that fires toward perfection.
You feel the room's geometry in your bones.

[Outro]
Ninety-four takes of a man walking downstairs,
and somewhere in take seventy-three,
the actor's face finally held the light
exactly as your axonal branching had predicted it would.
That's the one. That's always been the one.

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**WORD COUNT (excluding section tags): 287 words** ✓