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Place Where Things Got I always thought if I could just remember where I started, I could understand the end. The cat upon my lap infolds itself, intends itself; it makes itself a compact package, perfectly adapted to the transient circumstance of my repose. It chooses, out of live adjacency, best balance in the fewest gestures, all intelligence, no thought. It wraps the rest around itself, and settles. For a time its engine runs continuous, it bumbles and it hums and drones, and then slows down, so little interludes of stiller stuff occur, some quietude in patches, here and there, and then another strength of hum crops up, to just drop off, drop deep and deeper in to dream, to stir, to dream, till only little nubs of noise arise, the intermittent particles of purr . . . When moments hadn't melted into ages yet my sister Jan and I conducted sound experiments at night in our shared room. We ground the parts of sentences down past a word to syllables, 209 past syllables to letters, letters into even less. The grindstone was the voice's own slow-motion: if you spoke in strictest graduality the symbol turned to substance, meaning broke down into means. Beginning atomists, we shifted rpm until the noise was gravel, and the gravel grain, and then the particles themselves became distinct. In exquisitely slowed-down utterance you found the sands inside a saying, molecules like what a cartoon Superman is made of, held up close. The grown-ups wouldn't tell us what is in a loaf of time or life of story, what's inside a voice, in other words— not counting what the English teachers wanted and not counting what the weary took for granted—what's in there, aside from coins of meaning? That is why we took the trail of crumbs ourselves, broke breadstuff down, backtracked from mines of money toward the mill where dough turned into seed and seed to cell and there (beyond iotas of the minuscule) we found a place where things got huge again. 210 ...

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