Don’t Be So Quick to Say It’s Dancing

I almost said that sunflower seedling was dancing. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but first they met the speed of the footage: one frame every twenty minutes, later played back at twelve frames per second. Several hours of growth compressed into a few seconds, and only then did the swaying seem to acquire a beat. At the time, I did not yet know that another plant movement could be so fast it would snap this word shut. Viewed at its original speed, the screen would be almost quiet; the leaves would hide their movement beyond the reach of patience. It did not arrive before my eyes as it was, but first passed through a change of speed; after that change, the stems and leaves seemed suddenly to have a small hesitation, leaning a little to one side, then pulling themselves back.

The light is very low. The image gives it no stage, only a patch of brightness too small to be enough. When the seedling begins to move, it really does look as if it is testing something. To say it is seeking light is not too far-fetched; seeking light still clings to light, still remains growth and response. But “dancing” goes one step further. It pushes that small swaying toward performance, as if the seedling already knew I was watching, as if in those few seconds it were handing me a gesture.

The differential growth in the stem stopped the word for a moment. The mechanism did not exhaust the image; it only made the word slow down. It reminded me that this swaying was not a posture that first possessed meaning, but the two sides of a body growing differently; the beat was something I heard afterward, not necessarily something it had given over.

The Venus flytrap does not wait for me to turn “slow” into a virtue. The instant it closes lasts about one hundred milliseconds, so fast that before a word like “dancing” has time to approach, it has already been snapped shut. Photography only slows that instant enough for the human eye to follow; the word is still too late. Some movements are too fast: by the time description is still on its way, the leaves have already closed.

Looking again at the seedling on the screen, it is still swaying. The low light is still there, and that “like” still wants to come out. I do not want to delete it. Once deleted, the sentence would be a little cleaner, but it would also lose that instant of offense and intimacy. Before it could finish speaking, it first ran into twenty minutes, twelve frames, and one hundred milliseconds.