Blithering tweetertwits

I am one of those old-fashioned gentlefolk carved out of mahogany, inclined, at the veriest drop of a titfer, to pour myself a tumbler of fiery armagnac spirit, light an old stogie, and, pulling up a roaring armchair, fold my legs under me and, like the good doctor (Johnson), have out my discourse with an assembly of like-minded cronies and crones.

Tweet, tweet! Wake up!

“Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it”. Ain’t that the truth? Well we can all be poets after the fashion. Look at those metaphorical waving daffodils.

And from The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
The poet is unable to truly comprehend the beauty and importance of the experience until he is resting afterward, and he is able to reconstruct the event in his mind. This remembrance brings him a wave of emotion, and it is out of this second flood of feeling that the poem is born. In Wordsworth’s poetry, these ebbs of emotion are spurred on by his interaction with Nature. In “Tintern Abbey” he writes that “Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her” (139). Indeed, Wordsworth is continually inspired and led into transcendent moments by his experiences in Nature. These experiences bring to his mind a wide variety of contemplations and considerations that can only be expressed, as he writes in “Expostulation and Reply,” in “a wise passiveness.”

Tweet!
Contemplation and consideration are not words one would associate with the current mania for twittering. This is as dreary and unrevealing a method of so-called communication that was ever concocted and seemingly has hooked, lined and sinkered all sorts of intelligent people who should know a helluva lot better. Where’s the poetry?

Who’s following me?
Stephen Fry recently took offence when a follower commented that his tweets were boring. And so they were. Whereas short may be sweet; the haiku, for example, can be a gorgeous miniature art form, these innumerable snippets and snapshots are a kind of relentless, undifferentiated logorrhoea. Working within such a limited palette invariably yields observations of monumental banality borne of effortless egotism. There is no need to fill a vacuum with execrable bombinations but people do.

I’m getting into a taxi.
I am not saying that there aren’t shiny nuggets amongst the piffle. But what a lot of verbiage to sift through.

An idea shared is something beautiful.
A detailed description of something seen that impels one to conjure and shape one’s impressions, is both understandable and desirable, but fleeting-tweeting sat nav up-dates just clog the system with ephemera. Soon one won’t even bother to download the mails, texts and tweets because they are so insubstantial that they don’t require a response.

Let not the geek inherit the earth
What is happening? Rather than experiencing life with all our senses we view the world through a lens. We spend so much time mediating our experiences that we don’t focus on what is happening. Determined to register events for posterity we are scarcely in the moment; like the recording angel we are solely in the business of chronicling evidence.

Writing, even letter writing, is an art. The frowning effort of composition, the desire not to have to scratch out or rewrite, means that we turn over our thoughts like a plough turns over soil to expose it to the air. Each word assumes greater value because it is more highly wrought. It is the message not the medium that counts. But letters have been replaced by the e-mail and mimsy texting, where abbrevn reigns and abounds grammatical chaos.

I am not denying the usefulness and efficiency of being in touch. As a basic means of reminding people of your existence the various modern modes of communication have good grunt value. And, of course, we can all network on them to the nth degree.

Everything about twitter makes me feel like a salted snail. The name itself is suggestive of gossipy twits. A tweet is a sound-snack not a meal and definitely not a song. Nothing seems too trivial or too vacuous to share with a thousand comparative strangers. By so generalising the process we further disengage from the raw actuality of communication and simply flutter around in the etho-sphere of airy babbling.

One of EM Forster’s characters says in Howard’s End: “Only connect… live in fragments no longer”.

Let’s do that.