The Ghost in the Machine

I've been thinking hard and heavy on the importance of the mother/child symbolism in Deus Ex Machina by Andrew Foster Altschul (the December book for Rumpus Book Club). It was something that completely escaped my notice until a fellow Rumpuser brought it to my attention during an online discussion. What does the mother/child connection represent? The truest form of love? Connection, in the sense we've talked about before? Acceptance? Potential? If we assume that the parent/infant relationship is a proxy for love (Love??) then what of:

• The Producer and his wife - conceiving love but unable to bear it into the world, expelled by the body before it can survive, not even still-born, but early abortion of a never fully formed thing. Who/what is at fault when the body cannot sustain it's creation?

• Patel and his wife and child - when Patel's wife says, "I see you." the intimacy of her voice "stabs the Producer near his solar plexus" (p 74) and he literally begins to crawl away on all fours, away from the tableau of father, mother, Baby. But there is something wrong with the girl. "Her face is blank and strangely slack, her eyes dull and drowsy; she's being held by someone off-camera..." Even when love is born into the world, you can't control what it will look like, how it will behave, if it will absorb all you have to give without giving back. The Producer watches the interaction from the shadows, and the interaction is not happening in front of him in the flesh, it is happening over 1000s of miles, remote, "flattened by the camera". He leaves the control room and thinks of the cave, the invisible but real thing in the cave and then Gloria Hamm and his concern for her.

• And then - the native woman and child - "In her arms she holds a tiny black bundle: the Producer can make out a wizened scalp, a lumped face with no eyes, a small mouth frozen into a cry." (p. 190) An eyeless black bundle (eyes and windows and souls), mouth open. A love that is not love. A child that should not have been born into the world and was punished. A connection the result of a rape, of abuse, of avarice. "A stark figure of accusation, of fear, shame." And Gloria doesn't look away and she eventually takes the dead child out of the mother's hands. Miley squeezes the Producer's hand. Shaneequio collapses into Alejandra's arms. Paco doesn't slaughter the goats. Connection, Connection, Connection.

So perhaps, DEM is a book about love and connection, defined by their absence? Our connection isn’t that we were all brought into this world covered in blood. Our connection is that we have all somehow forgotten. We have forgotten that we were vulnerable to the tender mercies someone gifted us. Covered, as we were, in blood and shit and urine, someone washed us, pulled the plugs out of our nostrils and unblocked our mouth so that we could pull that first great suck of wind deep down into the well of our throats and release our guttural cry into the world.


We have lost the memory of our base sameness. We have come to believe- to the point of truth- that we are somehow different, better than or worse than each other. We put on our fine clothes, our hard-soled shoes, run a blunt-edged nail around the corner of a business card and think it means something real.


We ignore those of us who live on the shadow-side of the street. We beat each other with a measuring stick we call beauty. We bare our teeth and call it a smile. We pass judgment and we are found wanting. We are so closely watching each other we never notice the ant mill until we die of exhaustion.


We are a special kind of insane.


Our connection begins at birth in blood and chaos and ends at death. Between the alpha and the omega, we navigate our contemporary inferno with love and sorrow, but no cheap pity or promise of ultimate happiness. Our human task is to suffer, shudder, and struggle courageously in the face of relentless self-criticism, inescapable fallibilism, and inevitable death. And to talk about love.