Charlie Chaplin captured the flag of my attention as a boy. His Little Tramp persona is what did me in–the duck walk, bowler hat, narrow mustache, and cane. A bunch of daffy shticks that accented the physicality of his cerebral comedy. So winsome were his antics, I pinned a poster of Mr. Chaplin to my bedroom wall (an oddball move, I admit). When I showed my daughter a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) last week she fell into a flurry of giggle fits. It was the iconic scene when Chaplin is working on the factory line. In the clip he is frantically tightening bolts on the widgets moving across the factory conveyor belt before getting sucked into the gears of the machine himself.
Charlie Chaplin’s film pecked at the American post-Depression mechanical system. It was designed with a disordered priority set–efficiency of production at the cost of human alienation and dignity. Chaplin released Modern Times nearly a century ago and I think he raised a pertinent question that holds up in our own fleeting modern times: what machine does your life support?
I ask this question in the spirit of agnostic neutrality. Your response to this question draws from the unique embodied life that you shimmy within each day. I cast my side-eye at machines that devalue life (both human and non-human communities) by coldly evaluating their monetary usefulness while extracting their energy as quickly as possible without care or forethought for the well-being of the local flora and fauna in the near and long term. I am not throwing stones at a big, bad, ambiguous metaphor (just run-on sentences). Rather than fetching the bolt cutters I oil the gears of this machine^. Each time I engage in an economic exchange that fuels one of these death machines, it winks at me. It brings me no pleasure to recognize that I am the Little Tramp in such moments. A mechanic at large for the hidden machine at hand. Am I innocent because I am forgetful about my complicity in my daily dalliances with the machine age? I think not, it is a reality of incarnate life in modern times.
The machine age pleasures itself by creating a mania by presenting dozing dualities. Consumption and hunger. Rest and speed. Lust and purity. Justice and entertainment. Machine propaganda comes in all stripes, creeds, waist sizes, and political rants. It is a shapeshifting machine. I have my preferences, but what is a contemplative of the tall trees to do? Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa offers this, “The idea is not to regard the spiritual path as something very luxurious and pleasurable but to see it as just facing the facts of life.”** Duly noted, Trungpa, and much obliged.
I see machines aplenty that run on the fumes of disordered agendas. Pillaging people, land, time, and resources for its own inane continuation. The telltale signs of machine impact, whether it is funded by Rich Uncle Pennybags or serving drunken ideologies, is that it splits embodied lives into inner and outer to avoid facing the facts of life^^.
An awakened life ain’t easy. It is neither for nor against the grain. It is the grain itself.
Read the rest of the June NonRequired Reading List here.
^While I am also busy being a part of the Body of Christ, methinks I’m a patella or perhaps a heart valve. Wait, no, both of those can be replaced by a machine. Dammit.
*Trungpa, Chogyam. Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala, 2002. Page 104.
^^Not to be confused with the unremarkable NBC TV show The Facts of Life which went on for eight glorious seasons in the 1980s.