Image: Chapel of the Upper Room, College House, Christchurch Ōtautahi
These
flourishes of signature ending written letters, transcending the mere guesswork
of the blessed receiver with a positive name and perchance kisses, today are tied
in ribbon in Shoebox 2021-2023. Now there’s talk today of mail deliveries every
other day, as electronic correspondence supersedes copperplate, or scrawl even,
its metallic signoff the best we will get, and a hard keyboard kiss. X,
formerly known as Twitter. These emptied woodland spaces subdivided for appliance-friendly
maisonettes on the plan render no regrowth for insects and peripheral birdlife.
Scrub is laid low and removed, scenery turns into density suburb, the soil a
polished surface crisscrossed with tyre prints. X, formerly known as Twitter. These
day markets where need is met and connection is made in raucous birdlike
conviviality and the smells of ripe fruit and vegetables, find the checkouts a
warble of ‘cash or card?’, and bellbird scanners chiming with timing. Yet too
soon come the legions of self-help gnomes, reducing transactions to the power
of 1, converting the buyer and their need into a franchise’s slave and a
password at a blinking screen. X, formerly known as Twitter. These skyways
where migration catches everyone unaware, winging it again for dear life from
here to the neural landing pad the far end of a transcontinental ocean, formally
known as eggs. Byways trailed over by great surfeit weights of jet plane,
satellites Leonardo-like networking the ancient star patterns way over the top,
before turning to space junk in a comedy of comets, falling to Earth where they
mark the exacting exact spot. X, formerly known as Twitter. These brave village
habitations turned bravura by nature that today are one megacity upon another,
talk the talk of unending expansion, their millions needing food, their fossil masters
buying up fuel. Such megabooms and megatrends blow the megaminds of myriad visitors
to megastores, crossing one wire with another for the latest fix. X, formerly
known as Twitter. These sizable bytes of English, set out as if lapidary from a
reader’s distance, borrow certain ringtones, certain prosodic methods familiar
to Quiller-Couch Edwardians, as if in the belief the common reader had the patience
to listen to this someone emulating at some level the birdsong cadences of the uncaged
ages, sent from their iPhone. Whereas meantime the grammar of machine, a
compliant regurgitator of unimagined humourlessness, compiles empty empires of
text, turning them into a running nose of prose, sans rhyme, sans assonance,
sans performance, sans experience. X, formerly known as Twitter.
