We Need More Living Birds

RIP Twitter

A watercolor by Albrecht Dürer

Twitters is dead. We need more living birds.

As Elon’s ominous X slid into view I began to give more thought to birds. Across traditions, birds have been seen as representatives of spiritual realities. The poet is often associated with birds. In his A Defense of Poetry, Shelley writes that “A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” Anyone with a passing knowledge of poetry can bring to mind a few bird poems. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, Hopkins’ The Windhover, and Poe’s The Raven are all poems I love.

So when it was announced that the ending of Twitter had begun I felt torn. I’d been hoping for its demise for some time (full transparency: I have a Twitter/X account), but felt strangely sad at the death of this digital bird.

As it is now, ZombieTwitter/X is a giant crap show. It is all about NOW and btw we needed that yesterday so HURRY UP you freaking IDIOT. That’s been it’s business model for over fifteen years. If we can say Twitter emodied any spiritual reality, it is wrath.

How or if that will change remains to be seen. Elon wants to make X into the “everything app” which I believe will fail, and pray it will, although one shouldn’t write off Mr. Musk too quickly.

I agree with Noah Smith that the internet wants to be fragmented.

By contrast, Substack strikes a good balance between centralization and decentralization. There are mechanisms in place for making contact with other Substackers but it require far more attention and tact than on Twitter or Instagram.

The Birdapp, as it is referred to with both love and derision, is an awful platform for sharing and exploring poetry. It just is. I mean was! was. RIP.

Birds prefer the open air to sing their songs, and a roomful of shrieking grownups having anxiety attacks just isn’t going to cut it.

Substack, at its best, is a letter in the (e)mail from a good friend you haven’t met yet.

It’s quiet.

You can hear the birds sing.

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Thank you for your time and attention. I typically save my poems for Wednesdays but if you stay with me a little longer I’m tacking on this little guy at the end because, heck, why not. And it has a bird in it.

TO WAKE UP EARLY WITH A ROBIN

To wake up early with a robin
At my window was my fate
For months, a week, or was it just a day?
It's Song I love, it's Time I hate.

Now the years crowd out my darkling bed
With ash, grey tablets made of stone––
But the door, or is it dawn? is breaking.
And Spirit sings into the bone.

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I also wanted to give a quick shoutout to

Duncan Reyburn

’s great piece Typographical Banality and the Univocal Mind which I came across on, you guessed it, Twitter/X:

The “blanding” of design and typography as we see in the move towards sans serif was meant to promote a neutrality, a false neutrality it turns out, that lends itself to compulsive consumption:

User experience designers, and arguably also their audiences, want things to work intuitively, which is to say compulsively. The person, when confronted with the seemingly obvious, should not be given time to pause and think but should rather simply react. The banal becomes a way to further entrench people in what Edmund Husserl called the natural attitude—without the possibility of reflective awareness. Ornamentation, or any aesthetic difference on display, functions too negatively to allow such compulsive reactivity.

This was of particular interest to me because of The Symbolic World magazine project I had mentioned in last Saturday’s post.

I can drop another tidbit this week and say that as poetry editor I have been working with a team of illustrators to take the work of our poets and fashion them into a finished article that would not be out of place in a medieval monastery.

Ciao!