Carol Ann Duffy - Text, message and text messaging.

I'm not good at texting. It's one of the aspects of my personal development that needs additional support and encouragement. If I ask why I'm so slow at becoming a skilled texter, allowing for laziness, technophobia, latent luddite syndrome - I become aware of an unexplained but persistent ambivalence I feel bout text-message communication. It's something to do with the medium, the hardware and the software, my feeling that the actual process gets in the way of the human spontaneity that makes communication personal; or maybe it's the way texting mangles language to make the text message carry the maximum message with the minimum words or even letters.

The poem below is a playfully serious piece of contemplation on the benefits and limitations of texting. It is one of the responsibilities of the poet to articulate the human and social consequences of cultural change, perhaps especially as they impinge on our uses and abuse of language - to gently warn us when we are being seduced into thinking that something that is good and useful has no down side. The poet is in love - and in the absence of the beloved the main source of relational sustenance is texting. At several key points in this poem, Duffy drops broad hints about the inadequacy of texting as a way of keeping love alive. And the last line pinpoints one of my own hesitations. It is precisely this ability of the poet to see and feel the impact of culturally celebrated technological arefacts on our humanity, and on language, one of the main arteries of cultural expression and human exchange. Which is why I think theology and poetry (theologians and poets) need to talk more to each other.
   
         Text
I tend the mobile now
like  an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture (London: Picador, 2005), page 2.