So I'm reading a local newspaper, and I come upon a letter from an earnest young person, and said letter does begin its beguine in this way:

This food safety issue is perhaps the single most important challenge of our generation.

And I immediately think two things:

First, "single most" should in most, or at least many, instances, be one word: "singlemost." Back in the day, I used to nearly fight actual bloody duels, with stone-minded robotic Chicago Manual Of Style copy-editor retroverts, over this one.

Because the "most" following the "single" flares absolute urgency: there is no "most," other than this "single": the two words are therefore actually sexually yearning, to join together.

But I could rarely make the rock-minded copy-editors understand this.

It has always been my opinion that copy-editors are low-serving mouth-breathing knuckledragging denizens of Hell. Except when I myself have served as copy-editor.

Second, it's pretty much amazing, these days, how many "singlemost important challenges" there are.

For, but hours before encountering the earnest food-safety young person, I had happened upon this fellow, who has volubly ejaculated all over the tubes that Getting The Word Out, about the extraterrestrials among us, and the downpressers in the guv'mint downpressing this info from Us, "is the most important issue in the world."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eO8dvJ3bEo]

Anyway. The earnest young food-safety person then scattered a couple more sentences, before ululating:

Am I the only one who sees this? Am I the only one who's angry and ready to do something about it? What if Cesar Chavez were here and had the tools we do, like Facebook. What would he do?

Now. I am such an ancient mariner, such a Benjamin of a Wandering Jew, that I was actually alive and kicking, when Cesar Chavez did roam the Earth. And I am still, in these days, in congress with farmworkers. And they do not do Facebook. Nor are they of Twitter. They may watch a televison. They may gaze in amused and loving fondness at their children, as those children, tentatively, on little cat feet, seek to climb aboard a tube. But other than that, they are not of pixels. They are of the actual, real, physical world.

Cesar Chavez was about union-organizing farmworkers. And you do not union-organize farmworkers through 0s and 1s. You do it by pressing their flesh. In the real world. You do it by meeting face-to-face. In the actual, physical, world.

Chavez was about marches. And one cannot march in pixels. Marches involve actually hitting the road. And you do not want your march, there on the road, cabined just to "updates" to whom on Twitter or Facebook is "following" you. You want to lure out the pasty-faced white reporters. With cameras. Especially, in case, as in those days they were wont to do, the Teamsters arrive, to commence The Beating.

Chavez was about hunger strikes. If you so strike, and send out twits all the live-long day, and all of the night, about what you're going through, no one but anyone in your karass will much hear about it. You want to lay suffering, and in silence. Lure in the pasty-faced white reporters. With the cameras. To send into the outer world. Your story.

Also, anyone who has ever fasted knows that after but three days one's mind begins to drift loose of its moorings. The last thing one then wants at hand is some instant-communication device that will send out into the world whatever gibbering bizarreness streaks through your cranium because you fucking need to eat.

If Chavez had had a Twitter tool during his many fasts, by week three we might have received such shivering embarassments as:

@cesarchavez

Fresh bedsheets this morning. They smell so good. Maybe just a little bite?

@cesarchavez

When Yasiel came in today, at first I thought he was a big ham. When I realized he wasn't, I wept.

@cesarchavez

Dolores arrived to talk strategy. Had to cut meeting short. Couldn't concentrate. All I wanted to do was eat her.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYVgvfy89rk]

I'm flipping through the flash-cards of my mind here, trying to settle on some historical figure who'd actually score on Twitter.

I'm coming up empty.

Moses—@burningbush—it wouldn't be enough for him to just twit: "Hey Pharoah! Next time it's frogs!" To make it work, he'd actually have to climb out of the tube and deliver the frogs.

And I don't even want to think about Van Gogh—@starrystarrymind—on Twitter: "Gauguin = merde a la mode. Drinking paint is fun. Decided to cut off my ear."

Let's look, for example, at a twitface Jesus.

In the early years, we'd get something like this:

@therealJesusChrist

Wow. Found out my dad isn't really my dad!

@therealJesusChrist

Went into the desert. Met the Devil. He offered me the world. I said fuck that, keep the thing.

@therealJesusChrist

Gonna bathe with a dude named John. Kinky.

Then, in the time of the Teachings, would come something like this:

@therealJesusChrist

Busy morning. Shoved some demons into pigs; healed a leper, raised a stinking dead guy. Gonna get pizza now.

@therealJesusChrist

Tried to turn some loaves into fish. Didn't work. Kinda mealy.

@therealJesusChrist

Fuckin' disciples got all scared in the storm, so I had to walk on water. Now they're all prune-like, my feet.

@therealJesusChrist

Takin' some down time. Me and Mary goin' to Paradise. (wink-wink)

Then there'd be—"trending"—@TheFinalDays:

@therealJesusChrist

So I was like, "dude, can we leave off the dying part? I mean, Jesus!"

@therealJesusChrist

This trial is BULLSHIT!

@therealJesusChrist

Okay. "Field of Skulls." I've had better gigs.

@therealJesusChrist

You will know I am the Lord your God, because I am fucking tweeting with a big-ass nail hammered through my wrist!

The account then goes silent for three days. After which we get this:

@therealJesusChrist

Hey. Back now. Tried to take pictures in Hell, but they didn't turn out. Sorry!

@therealJesusChrist

Hung with the homies for a couple days. Bored. Going to America now. Fuckin' stoked to eat buffalo jerky and touch Indians! Stay cool.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBW6Zv72GEc]

Of course, twitfeeds would have been a real boon to historians. Say, from the morning of the third day of Gettysburg:

@James"Eeyore"Longstreet

General, for a final time, I implore you: call off this charge. It is a really bad idea!

@therealRobertELee

Fuck you! I am in command! Do what I tell you to do!

@James"Eeyore"Longstreet

But Pickett is drunk again!

@therealRobertELee

So what! Grant's a drunk, and he's taken the whole of the West! Strap Pickett to his horse, like El Cid, and get to it!

Then, also, and from but a mile or two away, but in a secured, private, Twitter bunker:

@maybetherealGeorgeMeade

To all field commanders: the jackasses are discussing battle plans on Twitter again. Disport yourselves accordingly.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UumU9_20pVU]

Twitter was invented by people who will be hung upside down and flayed by history.

It allows expressions of but 140 characters—and a space counts as a character—and there are but two humans I can think of who regularly expressed themselves fully in 140 characters or less. Lao-Tze, and Heraclitus. And those people have been dead for 2500 years.

Oh. And Shakespeare. In full nonsense mode.

Let floods o'erswell, and fiends for food howl on

(Orwell: "Evidently, pieces of resounding nonsense were constantly appearing in Shakespeare's mind of their own accord, and a half-lunatic character had to be invented to use them up.")

I don't even know if Pound's "In A Station Of The Metro" can make the twitterbe grade. Let's see. For I have open, throughout the creation of this piece, a tube that will character-count for me, and thereby let me know, if what I wish, I can twit.

And yes! Pound scores! But 103 characters!

Problem is, though, that you get no title, or line, divides, when twitting. And thus. all the artistry is lost.

Wait! I remember now the reason I started writing this thing! It was about the GOoPers going to war with one another in twits! I don't actually recall all the ins and outs now, of the twit steel-cage match, and I can't easily retrieve the links, because my Mac was apparently so outraged it refused to bookmark them when I told it to.

But, as I recall, in genesis, a high-powered Republican consultant, Rick Wilson, noted, correctly, that the people—primarily uneducated white men—who would vote for Donald Trump, are like those unfortunate babies who are born with their brains entirely outside their heads.

Then some shit-lips from the Weekly World News-style tabloid-tube Breitbart bansheed over to unload a squishy dump on Wilson.

Then John Podhoretz, from the tight-assed rightist doof-rag Commentary, decreed Breitbart was a fart-hole.

At which time some goon from Breitbart, in twit, referred to Podhoretz as "Son of Someone," basically equating him thereby with the howlingly insane serial-killer Son of Sam.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THh1pPWEoWs]

Then Wilson screeched across the twitosphere that Brietbart people were threatening to rape his daughter.

The sekeletal meth-monkey Ann Coulter then twitted: "Hilarious public meltdown. They're threatening to rape my daughter!"

To which Wilson responded, to Coulter: "Does Trump pay you more for anal?"

I don't know. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they are not—at least not yet—howling publicly about raping one another's daughters, and/or receiving anal treats from Hillary Clinton and/or Bernie Sanders.

And what this dust-up does prove, is that while twits are not fashioned to advance consciousness, they surely are adept in de-evolving it.

That was my hook to get into this piece—"politics"—but probably I should have left it out, because, in the sense of this piece, it's like tying ninety pounds of chain-mail round your waist, before running a race.

So we'll just forget all about it. And go here. To this song, below. Where the only sung lines are the last two, and they—those words—they would fit into a twit.

But it not possible to know those lines, without hearing all of what has come before. And, only once you've heard all of what has come before, will you know what those lines mean. But can never, in words, explain. Which is the highest sort of words of all.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWm4Imd72Kg]

Let's just get rid of the words all together. And go to a concerto composed by a cat.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoT66v4EHg]

Maybe some people were brought to this music through twits. And, in that, the platform is redeemed.

That music has as its aching soul the same aching soul as the music below. Because—animal, mineral, vegetable, down to the ground, into the great wide open—we are all, aching souls, the same.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXpZsxQVscI]

I have stage fright when I face you.

I do not do this every day.

But I will improve before tomorrow. If I live that long.

The most important problem for me is the continual lack of time. We are always in an awful hurry and still we waste an incredible amount of time, for instance in front of the TV or in a car. While I do like some aspects of our "fast" civilization—I am fascinated with cosmic adventures, trips to the moon or Mars—and we do live in astounding times, still, here, in this music, we have to surrender ourselves to this other dimension of time. We have to slow down. Only then the sonority will be fantastic: the higher the music will go, the more distinctly it will sound. I dream of writing such tranquil music.

I do not want to compose anything that echoes the modern "rush"—the cell phones, the telephones and faxes. It has to be calm.

Life is too beautiful to be wasted in this way, by rushing things so much.

How should I explain it to you? Perhaps you should think about an elevator: you leave behind the basement of everyday life, filled with noises, distractions and anxieties, and you take the elevator up to the tenth floor, or even into the sky of timelessness. When you are in this music, time slows down, it is as if you were in heaven, it is like eternity.

Do you understand what I want to achieve here?

Total calm.

I do not usually engage in conducting and I do not know how to enchant you with my hand movements, but music carries me away and I may at some spots—and please forgive me if I do—make a wrong movement at a certain time.

But you know the score, and could play on.

So then do not look at me, at what I am doing.

But listen to each other.

Listen to what happens around you.

I am sorry for these mistakes.

But I think that we will be able to communicate soon.