Waggle Dance
I was nervous, chatty, trying to impress you
with trivia I'd learned the day before
to make you think I wasn't boring.
I told you how honey bees communicate
through movement: the waggle dance
they do to tell the hive
there's food nearby, and where to find it.
It's not like how we talk. Our words are
digital, composed of smaller pieces, concatenations
of a finite alphabet of sounds. Their alphabets
are their bodies, or the motions they make
with them, continuous: the subtlest movement
carries meaning. And yet, for all this,
their conversations are a simple thing: just a short
relay of the necessary information. There's no
meandering, no small talk, no anxiety over
misinterpretation. No embarrassed stream of
nonsense that trails off into silence.
It serves a function. Then it stops.
After I'd finish talking, your expression
changed, almost imperceptibly.
I had no idea what that meant.
I was nervous, chatty, trying to impress you
with trivia I'd learned the day before
to make you think I wasn't boring.
I told you how honey bees communicate
through movement: the waggle dance
they do to tell the hive
there's food nearby, and where to find it.
It's not like how we talk. Our words are
digital, composed of smaller pieces, concatenations
of a finite alphabet of sounds. Their alphabets
are their bodies, or the motions they make
with them, continuous: the subtlest movement
carries meaning. And yet, for all this,
their conversations are a simple thing: just a short
relay of the necessary information. There's no
meandering, no small talk, no anxiety over
misinterpretation. No embarrassed stream of
nonsense that trails off into silence.
It serves a function. Then it stops.
After I'd finish talking, your expression
changed, almost imperceptibly.
I had no idea what that meant.