No, it's probably not worthy of being considered a mode for delivering "prophecy," as Geoffrey Philps' poem suggests here, but its promise of a succinct, timely message relayed between friends, (and enemies), networkers, netidlers, and all other kinds of purposeful or purposempty folk, is probably why Twitter is so seductive to many. I have been all those types in my year or so now on Twitter. Today, I squeezed two lines from Jamaica Kincaid's "At the Bottom of the River" into two tweets. I didn't quite feel like a prophet or prophetess, or as if I were repeating the words of one, but something in them . . . the comfort in one, and the wisdom in the other (I felt) was worth sharing.
I see myself as I was as a child. How much I was loved and how much I loved.
Each moment is not as fragile and fleeting as I once thought. Each moment is hard and lasting and so holds much that I must mourn for.
And Twitter's brevity (though brevity is successfully defeated by those who tweet all day long) may present the problem of interpretation... From knowing friend to knowing friend, the message and tone may be clear, but to others... Can you ever be sure of how to read the clipped writing of a stranger? Literary interpretation is not really useful on Twitter, by the way. Getting the tone wrong can cost you a follower or two. After all, we're not birds. We may participate in a common mode of communication, but we don't all speak the same language. Half the time we don't even speak the same English. What's natural to birds is certainly not natural to us.
When Kincaid wrote the following lines, twittering was just for birds, but (here's where literary interpretation can work) the lines bear some relevance to the Twitter experience no?
And the twittering bird twitters away, and that bears a special irritation, though not the irritation of the sting of the evening fly, and that special irritation is mostly ignored, and what could be more natural than that?
(Or maybe it's just me and my Twitter experiences.)
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Coming Friday: My review of Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River.
