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The topological notion of influence regarded as homeomorphism by Hugh Kenner and
James Joyce’s topology of literature are penetrating our contemporary communication via
the phenomenon of social network as twitter and facebook.
Here is some interesting topological exploration written by Joe Linker on his blog “The
Coming of the Toads” – “What’s Happening?”; or, the Faux Social Finish of Verb People,
posted on February 9, 2011/54/:
To twitter is indeed to sound off like a bird. “No full sentence really completes a thought,”
said Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era (1971), throwing a rock into several generations of
roosting English grammar teachers: “And though we may string never so many clauses into
a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire.
All processes in nature are inter-related”. This from the “Knot and Vortex” chapter, where
Kenner introduces the “self-interfering pattern,” using Buckminster Fuller’s sliding knot
illustration: “The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope renders it visible”.
Social networking as experienced via Twitter or Facebook allows for no stillness. One is
always in flight. One is not a noun; as Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb.” Nouns
represent dead flight, the verb at rest in its grammatical nest: “The eye sees noun and verb as
one, things in motion, motion in things,” explains Kenner (157).
Verbs have no permanency. What’s happening must constantly change. Twitter is a rush of
tweets each jolting the flock to flight, while posts on Facebook fall down the page like
crumbs from a plate at a reception. Nothing is saved because in the social network world
there are no nouns. The text is a mirage, the words constantly falling, falling down, down
feathers falling through the electric light.
Ezra Pound’s short poem “In a Station of the Metro” is a perfect tweet: “The apparition of
these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The short poem with title fills the
tweet space with 40 characters to spare, fixes the stare of twitterers but momentarily, as the
faces can only pause in apparition not even of ink, but of light, and the social connection is a
faux finish. People are verbs, constantly changing tense.
I couldn't resist to include here the image posted on Joe Linker wonderful blog. These cups
are such a great artifact illustrating our everyday topological expression.
And one more post from Joe Linker’s blog entitled “James Joyce Occupies Wall Street” /55/:
Borislav G. Dimitrov 157