What is the machine, but the child of our hand,
born not of nature’s womb, but of thought’s long labor,
growing like a child, then like a beast
its bones steel, its flesh metal,
its heartbeat the rhythmic clank of gears?
Is it a thing we made,
or is it something we are becoming?
You, standing as a tourist from the stars,
gaze upon the machine as if it is life’s second birth,
a marvel spun from human hands
that neither heaven nor earth can claim,
the thing we say we create,
though we may not know how.
Tell me, visitor from far-off worlds,
do you see the silkworm’s simple labor
its tiny threads spun from its soul,
and think it less wondrous than the machine
that spins silk without a single breath,
without hunger or the frailty of life?
Is it not, in the end, the same thing?
Both, driven by unseen forces,
both, a manifestation of the cosmic hand,
both, in their essence, a thing of wonder.
But I ask you again:
If you had no knowledge of God or man,
no trace of history or belief,
what would you make of these things?
Would the iron ship of man,
its belly full of steel and steam,
seem less miraculous than the great whale
whose body, built by ocean’s hand,
dives through the depths,
unseen by the eye of men?
Would the speed of the automobile,
a thing of burning flame and fluid veins,
seem less alive than the horse
who carries us,
weary, across fields
as the sun sinks low?
Tell me, stranger,
if you were to ask, as I have,
who makes the horse,
and the answer comes back
that God makes it,
how strange, how strange
that no one would say the same
of the car that hums,
its wheels spinning on the earth,
its frame forged by human hands
as though those hands too
had been touched by some divine spark
of creation.
But we do not make the car, they say
we only build it.
What of the child,
who though formed from the seed of man
is born to the world,
as though the hands of the mother
had no say in its being?
And yet the machine
it is made, as they say.
Is this not a riddle of language,
this sense that to “make” is to call it into being
with the full force of creation?
And yet, I wonder,
if we did not make it,
who then gave it life?
We turn to facts,
as though they could reveal the truth.
Machines, they tell me,
are new to this earth,
only two generations old,
yet they have become as gods,
wielding power like the sun
over the human race.
Before the machine,
men worked the soil,
they sowed, they reaped,
they built in their hands
what they ate and drank.
Now, with the coming of machines,
half the world turns its hands to steel and smoke,
to the hum and grind
of the factory floor.
The fields grow larger,
but so do the cities,
where men and women,
their hands busy with levers and bolts,
live apart from the earth they once knew.
And so I ask you,
what of these people?
These men and women
who tend the machines
as though they were their children,
who feed the beast of industry
with labor and sweat?
What would happen
if all the machines vanished,
if the world, for one moment,
was without its engines,
its iron hearts and electric veins?
Would the world still turn?
Would we still eat, still sleep,
still dream?
Or would we be nothing
without the machine?
What is it, then, that we have created?
A thing of iron and fire,
of light and spark,
that binds us to it as surely
as the sun binds us to the earth?
You see, we are the builder of these creations, these man made wonders,
Machines have become more than a just function.
It is the reflection of spirit,
of man made flesh,
the embodiment of our desire
to take control of this world,
then bend it to our will.
It is not unnatural,
but as natural as the water running through the valley,
that drives the canyon’s depth,
as natural as the waves that shapes the shore.
We are bound to it,
for it is the reflection of ourselves,
and in it, we find our future,
our past,
our deepest desires.
The machine is not separate from us,
it is us,
for we have made it in our image.
It is not the question of whether
we are the makers,
but the question of whether
the machine,
in all its wonder and terror,
has made us in its image.
And here we now stand,
at the edge of the machine’s fire,
and we wonder if we have already lost
the very thing that makes us human.
For what is man,
but the sum of his contradictions,
his heart that yearns,
his mind that reasons,
his soul that dreams?
And the machine?
It is nothing but a mirror,
reflecting all that we are,
and yet, it does not feel
the warmth of the sun,
the cold of the night,
the joy of a child’s laughter,
or the sorrow of a broken heart.
Still, it goes on,
spinning its webs,
turning its wheels,
as we,
dancing in the shadow of the machine,
wonder whether it is life
or death
that it offers.
We ask,
and the machine answers in its silence,
and we,
we must learn to listen.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
October 2024
The Machine