THE SECOND LANGUAGE

The Show

Eight species round a fire, and a question that turns out to have a physical answer. The Visitor wants to know how you say a thing you have no word for; the Spire tells it that you do not say such a thing, you show it, and the rest of the evening is everybody discovering they have been showing things all along.

The gestures in this film are not performances anybody recorded. Each one is a function of a single number -- how far through itself it is -- writing angles into named joints, so the same shrug runs on anything with a collarbone and the same wave travelling up a spine runs on anything with a spine. A body missing a joint gets the rest of the gesture rather than nothing, and every angle is clamped to that body's own measured limits, so a gesture cannot put a limb through a chest however wrong its arithmetic is.

The Spire's line in the middle is the rule the whole set is built on, and it is true of people: a gesture arrives BEFORE the word it belongs to. Never after. A stroke that lands late does not read as a late gesture, it reads as a gesture about the next thing you were going to say, which is a different and wrong meaning. Every gesture here fires between nought and two seconds ahead of its own line.