It is not the vowel sounds themselves, they point to a difference that is both abstract and prior to the concrete, a difference upstream of conscious experience. The upstream is not necessarily prior in linear time but prior within each moment. Before the moment is fully embodied there is a partial moment that is conscious but incohate, fully present but unutterable. The space of these partial moments is vast and their time is miniscule. It is an infolded experience which may be unfolded in different ways when it presumable would give rise to very different fully conscious experiences, or become an element in very different kinds of flow. The basic vowel difference belongs to this realm. The vowel is a simple note that can be sounded for a long or a short period of time, and be inflected in various ways, and yet it is not a musical note but a condition of discursive meaning and has its entire existence in the semantic frame of language, while paradoxically still remaining pre-verbal; a baby's babble, and as such closely tied to the body, it is felt as a body formation, rather like a standing wave.