[Intro: piano and string quartet, slow] [Verse 1] The angles of a triangle add up the same in every land, no gene decided that, no wind, no sea, no hand. A prime is prime before we count, a circle's pi is fixed, we find these things, we don't build them, they come before the mix. [Chorus] Where do shapes come from? Not only from the genes, not only from the sun, maybe some come from a space of forms, and drop into the world through bodies as they're born. Where do shapes come from? [Verse 2] The xenobots were never chosen, never selected to be, and still they swim and gather, with a form that's plain to see. Levin asks where that form was kept, before the cells were free, and he proposes a space of patterns, like mathematics, waiting there. [Chorus] Where do shapes come from? Not only from the genes, not only from the sun, maybe some come from a space of forms, and drop into the world through bodies as they're born. Where do shapes come from? [Bridge: choir enters softly] He calls it ingression, the way a pattern comes in, through a body, or a machine, through anything we build. He says it's a research program, not a fact we've won, a map of the space is the work still to be done. [Final Chorus: full choir and strings] Where do shapes come from? Not only from the genes, not only from the sun, maybe some come from a space of forms, and drop into the world through bodies as they're born. Where do minds come from? [Outro: piano alone] Where do shapes come from?
