I’ve been tweeting again. I thought I’d given up on this years ago. I’d noticed my tweets had started looking like glimpses of a darker world than I really believed in. Reading them, there was a sense of falling off the edge, a lot of bleating on about the price of petrol, road tax and the unreliability of my car, which I’d Christened “old grumpy”.
Old grumpy had become a proxy for my perceived trials and tribulations in a world that was forever breaking down. In my tweets I read the story of a man caught between a rock and a hard place, facing the obliteration of his future economic security to say nothing of the ruin of his dreams, and whether any of that was true or not, in the end I just I didn’t like the sound of my own voice any more, so I shut up.
A few of my tweets however, seemed to capture something else, something more enduring and more faithful to the kind of vision I once saw reflected in the world, a vision that had become clouded by the darker stuff, and my path lost. They might not have meant anything to anyone else, but they managed to puncture the hard shell of my day to day, and let bleed out a flavour of something much sweeter, something I could still taste. So I let them be, and deleted all the rest.
Of course there’s something of the Haiku about the Tweet – this is the ancient short-form Japanese poetic style, associated with Zen. Its 
limit on the means of creative expression forces you to say more with less, and right now, for me, I think that’s important:
Above the moor, not attached to anything, a skylark singing.
(Matsuo Basho 1644-1694)
Ten words, descriptive of a moment, and a profound insight.
We can’t all be Matsuo Basho, but if we choose our words carefully, we can achieve a resonance of sorts, allowing the universe to take over and tell its own story, one that swells from the seed we provide. It’s hard of course, getting those words right, setting up that initial resonance, but well worth meditating upon and of course very satisfying when you pull it off. Our bell may not ring as loud and clear as Basho’s, but we still know it when we hear it.
In the sad old pre-internet days of chasing magazine publication, I was always up against a word limit. Back then Ireland’s Own, a  traditional Irish family magazine, was kind enough to take some of my stuff on a fairly regular basis, so I found myself coming up with all sorts of story ideas and having to tell them in about 2000 words. That’s not easy. It teaches you efficiency with words and style, but also ways of saying things, not just with words but also with the words you leave out – like Ernest Hemingway’s famously ingenious six word short story: For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
When you begin writing, your worry is being able to write enough to meet the target. The problem goes back to our schooldays and having to come up with two thousand word essays on topics that don’t inspire us much. But once you find your muse and she’s set you alight, you realise the danger then is in writing too much, while paradoxically saying too little of what you, or your muse, really mean. You wonder how you can ever twist and chop and trim your tale into so measly an allowance of column inches as the commercial magazine allows.
My story “Dovetails” is indicative of the kind of thing I was writing for Ireland’s Own, though by the time I’d finished it, I’d been seduced by sci fi and fantasy magazines like Interzone and The Third Alternative. They allowed me to bend my world into more speculative realms, and explore them within a limit of up to 6500 words. But is more any better?
None of those 6500 word stories were ever published, and you’ll find them all on Feedbooks now for free. Likewise, the self published novels – which allow me a theoretically unlimited number of words to tell my tales. Lately though, I’ve begun to wonder about the novel. Is there a danger in writing 100,000 words yet paradoxically saying nothing at all?
Can we say, or see, or feel much more, with less?
For now, I’m back to tweeting, back to feeling the moments in time, and attempting to express them in 140 characters. This is not to say I’ll be wasting characters bleating on about the price of petrol again, or the annual shock of road tax for old grumpy, because these are not momentary glimpses of satori. They’re more the dull bludgeon of the unreal world that can so easily waylay us. They are the chatter in our monkey-minds when we are trying to meditate.
So.
Evil grey-green dawn. Cold rain falls in stair-rods, snow-spits inbetween. An old car at blurry lights. Prefers this kind of weather.
Slightly sinister, but that was how I saw it “in the moment” this morning.
And, on a cosier note:
Light leaks early now to winter’s night. Psyche turns inward as Luna passes full. Home, a haven of soft light, old books, and bed.
Goodnight all.
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