The title of this post is cheerfully ripped off from the Richard Brautigan poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” — a typically-whimsical, typically-Brautigan meditation on a future devoid of labour and filled with connectedness, via technology, to all of the natural world — but it’s really just the title I’m stealing.
I want to tell you some stuff you already know.
Our physical selves are, stated dispassionately, nothing more than finely-crafted machines, or an aggregate of thousands of tinier machines, perfected through countless generations of evolutionary R&D. To move your arm, a signal is sent from the brain to elicit an electrochemical surge in the machines of our muscles, which respond by contracting, but only to the degree meted out by the information received by your eyes or by touch to those centers of the brain which will, in turn, stop sending the signal to move when the operation is complete.
And over thousands of years, Evolution Inc’s R&D Department imbued higher species with consciousness. And self-awareness. And since evolution is, functionally, nothing more than insurance that each species will continue to pass along genetic materials to generations following, conscious minds developed a complex, hyperintricate set of protocols not unlike the programmed circuits running practically every machine we use today. These protocols work to guarantee the survival of all sentient species by establishing bonds with or barricades against individuals (and families) within that species. And between species.
It’s hard to speak of these protocols, these emotions, in a dispassionate fashion. I won’t even try. Hey, take a look at the greatest, most perfect music video ever crafted:
Video: Björk + Chris Cunningham, “All is Full of Love”
A number of friends and web-correspondents have been trying to find some peace, some grace, in their emotional selves following recent — and even longer-term — disappointments in their romantic lives. I have, too. We rage, we despair, we achingly long for an end to those sleepless nights, to that soul-corroding loneliness, to that overwhelming fear of connecting with another and being hurt again or, worse, we fear never again being able to connect with another. I have no tangible solution to offer to you. Or to myself.
But the world only spins forward.*
And we are still human. We’re still machines which need to move and fuck and eat and shit and feel. We can’t not. It’s how we’re built.
We’re built to experience exhilarating joy, impenetrable sadness, debilitating fear, warm contentment, searing hurt and the gentle embrace of love. We can’t not eat, we can’t not move and we can’t not feel. We’re programmed that way, we electrochemical-machines. We emotion-machines.
So, go. Do. Feel. Accept with grace that it’s never easy, never painless and never without crushing disappointment. But it’s also undeniably built into the very fabric of our bodies, of our consciousnesses. To deny that is to deny our humanity. We machines of loving grace.
5 comments
THIS, I think, is where you can take this site without exhausting yourself into making it a thing you hafta. You post a little bit of a taste of what you’re thinking on the little bit of a taste place, and then when you feel like explaining WHY or WHAT, you have this place to spread out the beauty carpet.
“We rage, we despair, we achingly long…” That was a beautiful sentence, the whole thing, and it clocks over 140 characters, but it deserves the space.
Man, you’re good.
“Accept with grace that it’s never easy, never painless and never without crushing disappointment. But it’s also undeniably built into the very fabric of our bodies, of our consciousnesses.”
This post provides lots to think about. And the “Angels in America” quote is awesome.
Best,
J.
I never “rage”. It’s unbecoming. I seethe until it either peeters out or gets forgotten in a warehouse of crated emotions.
I’ve always thought we were judgmental machines.
Welcome back. Thanks for the Cunningham video. I’ll have to pop in his collection next time I’m ironing laundry.
this is the type of post i love, cuz it speaks in a language i understand. we forget too often that we are animals, albeit with the most developed brain on the planet. we are, indeed, supposed to interact and relate–not on the phone, not in the internet, not in letters, but in person. the others are cultural developments that will NEVER substitute fully for the real thing. but…they are often safer. it is harder to get hurt interacting online, but it is also harder to get loved. the scale of human interaction is not balanced 50/50 with love/hurt. there is some of both, of course, at different times. but whereas i agree that our needs for each other are innate, i suspect that our disappointment and lonliness are cultural. our cities are built to be disconnecting, and our homes and apartments foster lonliness and isolation. knowing this, it makes it a bit easier to, like life, move forward. by choosing differently. we must connect, relate, interact, love, be loved. we just don’t have to do it that way we have been doing it. we can choose.
First off, thanks to all for the kind comments. I can’t be more flattered (and honoured) than to receive such supportive messages from thoughtful people.
And, caliman, you’re so right. The world got big, huge, over the past couple of decades, with information becoming so accessible and voluminous, yet our capacity for absorbing that information has been reduced to no more than tidbits of CNN newscrawls. This is not community, this is not communication and this is not relating to one another as human beings in full. I hope to speak to that in coming posts.
Thanks again, all y’alls.