Deus Ex Machina

I have an uneasy truce with the machines. This may date from an astonishingly low grade on a mechanical aptitude test I took in high school or from the description of a war against the machines in the Sixties Bible, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf: “(They) praised machinery as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid, men would be equal to the gods.”

I have been nudged and bullied into dealing with machines. I had to learn to drive at age 40 because there was no school activities bus to where we lived in the country, and the kids wanted to play football. I can drive if there aren’t too many left turns, but my present car has so many mysterious computerized functions that even the dealer can’t tell why the alarm goes off at random.

In fact, the whole darned house is computerized: The coffee maker, the kitchen range, the television and its remote, the sewing machine, telephones, stereo, alarm clock, answering machine, calculator and camera. Ed gave me a Global Positioning thing after we kept getting lost, and once I get more confidence about left turns, I have every intention of using it.

The turntable which was going to turn all my vinyl records into compact discs, however, I donated to a choir auction. The box had never been opened. Sometimes you have to flat-out acknowledge defeat. I can make compact discs from audio tapes, however, which is a dubious skill since everyone else deals with iPods now instead of compact discs. I have a machine which is supposed to make JPGs from old slides, but I haven’t yet taken it out of the box.

I got my first computer because I wanted e-mail. It took a week to get up the courage to open the box. When I plugged the thing in, it didn’t work, and I phoned up a friend and cried. The problem proved to be the plug, not the computer, and so I have had the usual computer snags and problems ever since.

The newest machine is an iPhone I actually requested for my birthday. To activate it, one had to have the latest version of iTunes on the computer, and to support that, one had to have a more recent operating system than I have. This is what I mean by being nudged and bullied. Meanwhile, I am just using the iPhone as a telephone, and it works just fine.

The phrase “deus ex machina” or “god from the machine”, by the way, comes from Horace, who deplored the Greek tragedians’ use of cranes (machina) which were used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage, where they would neatly wrap up a rambling drama.