What the Room Did with the Opening

In the alga it was never the gate that turned. Blue came in at the eyespot, the gate let in its small charge, and the turning happened further along, in two flagella changing how hard they pulled. That was the cell's own business.

So the gate had only ever known one thing: blue, and open. It did not know about swimming then either.

In the frog's egg the charge went in and nothing followed. An egg has nowhere it needs to be by morning.

In the rat's nerve cell the charge went in and the cell did what nerve cells do with a charge at threshold, which the alga had never once asked of it.

In the mouse, down a fibre, the same small opening, and what came back was not a turn toward brightness. It was a stillness in the legs, or a lean toward the lever. Those were the mouse's. Nobody lent it those.

You can borrow a door and learn where the hallway goes. Holding it open on a schedule won't tell you what the house walked down that hallway for. That the circuit had to say for itself, if it said anything, in the pattern it kept when the light was off.

Last night the word was there before the sound arrived. Today the sound was written in from a pond by a cell that never had a word. Both times the meaning stood further in than the signal, in the room that got the charge and decided what a charge was for.