                            "I moved to the machine because I guessed that  
DAYS IN THE MACHINE         the Tower of Babel was not a myth.  I moved    
                            there to witness the end of days, to see and to
Chaim Bertman               know a different kind of dirt. I moved to the  
                            machine to see my country have a heart attack."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I MOVED TO THE MACHINE BECAUSE I WAS MOVED BY ITS ANIMAL ASSERTION AND ruthlessness, its conscienceless grace, and its mean, clever, stupid noise of being. 

The machine has nerves and therefore disturbances; it has skin, hair, flesh, hunger, the other things; and its blood flows when it is cut. It sleeps and sometimes cries like an infant; it has a mother and a father; it has bones and it can break an arm; it has legs and kidneys, a liver, and all of the minor organs. The machine has a nice face, dark eyes with deep lines from grinning, a kind enough, pouty mouth, thick, clumsy, warm fingers, all of these kinds of things. 

The machine has blood that pumps through its organs; it has a center, but no heart. And if one looks closely, it is clear that it has a mouth but no lips; it has a bladder and intestines, etc., but it can do away with any of these parts; it has animal calculations but not necessarily a mind; its skin and hair lie loosely on its surface, and like the damp moss coating coastal rocks, they are torn easily from the corpus; it respirates, but even its respirations are not vital. The machine emits a sweet, pungent smell particular to it. It is a moist amalgamation, made up of the skins and flesh of countless animals, insects, fish and birds. It has a center, but one that is arbitrary and ever-changing. It has center and a form, but no boundaries, as far as I can tell. I moved to the machine, because it was almost an animal, a beautiful, hilarious creature, cruel and fast. But whatever bestial in the machine caught sick and quickly died, and I soon found myself living in the droning, complaining machine of gears and work. 

I moved to the machine because I guessed that the Tower of Babel was not a myth. I moved there to witness the end of days, to see and to know a different kind of dirt. I moved to the machine to see my country have a heart attack. 

At first, things were lively and careless. We danced almost until dawn in basement bedrooms and music lofts; we gorged upon cheap clams on the boardwalk and sickened on them happily and without complaints. We often stayed up the night talking, my friends and I, in a tiny, poorly lit cafe with narrow walls and a floor as filthy as an ashtray. The machine was freewheeling and wild in those days. People were doing it on the trains after hours, there was constant, miserable, and abandoned lovemaking going on underneath the tracks, in the coal cellars, under the streetlamps' orange glow past midnight. There was revolution on everybody's mind, like water on the brain. It seemed to everyone that only the most elemental things were worth preserving. It meant nothing to see a man shot in the face outside the three-flat. We spoke about freedom and justice, then changed the subject quickly, ashamed of our own cynicism and tired, dour tongues. 

Sometime during that first Winter, I found I hadn't moved for weeks. I had been sitting at the window, as the snow rose and the streets turned white, the cars no longer rolling by; sitting, without sleeping, for weeks, no eating, skin and bones. The lightening storms of December took on a man-made glow. Thunder roared indistinguishably from the rumbling and whistling tumbling of the trains, always trains outside. The machine was alive and electrified with death, ceaselessness, agony and lead poisoning. People began to say that Nero had come back to life, and he was ready to raze the machine to the ground, to twist and crack its springs and stop up its gears with torn up human flesh; that Nero came back again and he liked to play the electric guitar through a hundred amp machine. 

Birds came to the machine, but only the thickest, most bloated, crawing scavengers stayed more than a hungry week or two. Starved rats and trashy back alley animals battled over crumbs. The ravaged, bug-eaten remains of cockroaches and beetles ended up on every counter and floor. Beneath the Earth, according to the Almanac, most of the animal life resided; and there, in the dark earth, confused and completely blind, these creatures lived short, nervous years; and many generations of creatures passed beneath the city in the lifetime of a single human being, generations knowing nothing but the ever-pounding and turning sounds of the machine above the Earth. 

At the time, I myself lived in the basement of the Greyhound Bus Depot. I knew a man named Claytar who lived underneath the Police Station--and he hated cops. There were pigeons everywhere in these low dwellings; the floors flooded daily, and strangers tried to break in several times a month. 

There was nothing going on at all. No one worked and we were all sick. The man named Claytar kept us alive with his beautiful voice and his songs about all of this. He never smiled and he made no promises. He had lost two fingers on his left hand, but despite this he had mastered the five string guitar. We sat at his feet and knew he knew something. He knew it and knew it and strummed it on the sidewalk: 

"What did you have, my darling true, what did you have when you were there? 

"We had nothing, and nothing, and nothing but rocks... 

"You had rocks, my one true love? You had rocks? We dreamed of rocks... 

"You had dreams? We murdered for dreams." 

Claytar spoke about coming to the machine: 

"I came to the machine with a guitar on my back. The minute I got off the train, `started to walk; looking around to find out where I was, and a police car saw me and he slowed down. Now, I had no case to carry this guitar and I wasn't wearing nothing fancy to make it seem like I could own me such a fine instrument; `cause this guitar was studded with rhinestone inlays, and the frets and knobs were fresh polished, shining like the belly of a rotted oyster. But come on, man! They slowed down `cause I was carrying a guitar? The car went around the corner and ditched me, me and my guitar, but they circled the block back around. 

"There was two `a them and the young one starts combing back his sandy brown curls. He rolls down the windows real cool and slumberly. 

"`Is that yer guitar?' he asks. 

The other one is off staring straight ahead, like a dead herd of oxen. 

"`Yeah, sure is,' I said, though actually it's my brother's. 

"`You play it?' 

"`Of course...' 

"`Well, would ya play something for us then?' 

"Now, at this point I was deeply offended. 

"`What?' I ask him, `You think I stole it?' 

"`No, no,' said the young cop laughing, chewing and cracking gum, still combing back his sandy locks. `I used to play the guitar in high school. I just wanna hear you.' 

"I don't know if it was a request or a demand. But I played as badly as I could, just hitting the strings around, jumping up and down the frets, all out of order. I tried to make it as unclear as possible, whether or not I'd ever touched a guitar before. They've got to know that a guy doesn't legally have to know how to play the guitar that good. 

"After banging around a few seconds, I stopped playing, saying, `I don't write lyrics, you see, just melodies.' I went back to the atonal strumming. When I finished, the cop nodded his head, `said, `Tasty guy, tasty! Thanks...' He and his tombstone-faced partner shoved on up the street." 

Claytar never ate and he didn't drink water, and in this way he escaped the poisons that have made cripples of the rest of us. Still, he did go blind in his left eye and he caught a wet cough that stuck with him and became part of him. He lost track of time; and he lost his balance, so he couldn't stand up. He spoke and we listened, but he began to speak only in generalities: 

"Living in the machine is like losing your sense of humor. Not seasons, but the changing complaints mark time; time, the enemy. Living in the machine is like losing your mind. Ears are stuffed with human voices, mouths gorge on human nonsense, human forms, humans smelling humans--therefore, there is no escape from imitation. The machine is fully human inside. Humans living too close to humans, knowing nothing else, human upon human, they become cannibals or excrement-eaters or humanist critics. Photographs, automobiles, movie houses--ask a dying person if they want to be remembered that way, as a stereotype, as something that can be extracted, abstracted and duplicated, an Earthly spirit trapped as a fleshy gear in the works of the machine. The most complicated tragedy of fate is not recognized; just its utensils and paraphernalia are noted, its bottles in a paper bag, its criminal sneers and fake gestures, Oedipus at Colonus drunk, staggering in a dumpster-diving lunatic freakout. There is nothing unique in the sound of a human voice, as heard through the machine. Only higher volume and discord distinguish one instrument from another in this bastard orchestra. Living in the machine is like having your wallet stolen." 

I started to write down Claytar's words in the Spring. He took it badly and screamed out something about the oral tradition, saying, "What about the death of the written word?" 

"It'll come back," I said. 

Claytar was shot in the head on Easter Sunday, and I lost my faith. 

Claytar had screamed, "What about the raging libraries--for three hundred years, we could stand to stop writing and relearn to read." 

"But what about medical technology," someone surfaced saying. 

"Yeah, and what about the changing of the human head?" 

Claytar mumbled something bitterly: "Soon the human race will have two stomachs and no heart. One day, the human creature will lose its hands. Then they shall invent history. The Tower was completed at Babel--what do you think this is?" 

Palsied with anger, Claytar twisted and seemed ready to spit. I put down my pencil and he smiled. Let it permeate your bones, I told myself. Let Claytar be alive, and tell it when he ain't. Claytar stopped trembling long enough to tell us about Winter and love and about being alone in it, singing us a blue song: 

Nobody ever tells you all the things you really want: 

Hog jelly, a dusty rifle, rifling around for these things after its dark. 

No Casanova, no monkey girl, will ever steal these things from my heart: 

My motorcycle, my toothy dingo, the broken window in my cold three flat. 

Nobody will ever sell you anything you really want... 

No Spanish Honkey, no Mandingo, no nobody, ever tells you truely--to your face at least. 

After Claytar was shot, there wasn't much to say. We all pretty much broke up. I spent the days, unemployed, cross-eyed, wandering through the machine. The machine buzzed along hovering above me, speaking to me softly; it tried to take me in, string me along, but I refused to listen. Women and men are born and die in the machine, the machine eats their lives and their labor. I wouldn't mind so much if it didn't hum so constantly, clear its throat disgustingly, whistle like a drunkard or a postman, and go on like that. 

I entered the machine of my own volition, and it occurred to me finally to leave it that simply. So I took a walk, trying to find the edge of the machine. After many years of rambling, it occurred to me what could never be proven, merely intuited: That the machine was a globe without a center and without boundary; I found its parts, metal clutches and windings, wooden handles, concrete and glass floorboards; but I never found a single part without which it simply could not operate, and try as I might, I could not discover the whereabouts of its edges. 

I began my exit. I left behind the city and towns, the farms, and eventually all traces of humanity, but the Machine continued. I encountered limitless forms within the machine, all suspended in a medium at times gaseous, at times liquid or solid, at times something quite different. I wept and punched my face and tore at my clothes--why did I ever come to the machine? I stamped the exasperated ground, secretly hoping that it would open up like a face and devour me. The machine proved more clever and heartless than I could have imagined. It has permeated me, undetectable to the eye, but so thoroughly that I too no longer have a heart, just a center; and my own blood and bones are temporary and almost useless; and I can be destroyed in part but not in whole, bent but not ruined, even under a surgeon's cold scalpel, even pinched by the thumb and forefinger of death, even mixed up with the acids of creation in the boundless stomach of God, even in the cruel, unceasing logic of the Machine.

