100 Tweets

Initially, ‘100 Tweets’ aimed to develop a text-based equivalent to Instagram. They were published on the social-media platform Twitter, between February 11, 2019 and August 6, 2021. To this end, the posts were composed — using prose, poetry, and anything in-between — in the moment, without planning or forethought, relatively quickly, and with little amendment. Very often, the compositions spent the full 280-character limit permitted for a tweet. The posts almost always arose from an inner compulsion. As time went on, they enabled me to comprehend those issues of life that would otherwise have remained imponderable and unreconcilable. The tweets were not intended to have any significance for anyone other than for myself and, in some cases, a known and an unnamed reader. Collectively, the tweets represent an incomplete and intermittent dairy of personal experiences, as opposed to a record of day-by-day incidents. The compositions were first posted on Twitter, and afterwards embedded into the pages of my online diary.

The tweets couch the deeply personal in the mundane. Their themes include conservations with myself, and with others who are absent — because they are either elsewhere, or irretrievably consigned to my past, or else dead. Some posts are prayers, wranglings with God, ruminations of the soul, ponderings on providence and right action, and exultant benedictions.

Other posts try to capture fleeting feelings and my emotional memory of places, things, and people. Yet others are an attempt to explain myself to myself, resolve quandaries, and compel myself to perceive the importance of things that might otherwise go unnoticed and unrecorded. Some of the posts are memorials to shared moments, loses, departures, and farewells. Others celebrate experiences of profound joy and fulfilment, predict endings, anticipate beginnings, and recognise the necessity of prolonged periods of silence and abstinence. Conspicuously, many tweets respond to landscape. This is dealt with as not only a subject as such but also a site of metaphor and evocation, summoning analogies between the temporal and the eternal, the earthly and the heavenly, and the geographical and the bodily.

The tweets are a way of preserving in words and images more than a photograph can alone. The photographs that accompany the texts are variously either illustrative of, or obliquely referential to, the tweets’ themes, or else serve as a mood-setter.