Vox Meditantis

What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?

THE COST OF THE LIVING

You want to know what technology I think will exist in twenty years.

Right. Sit down then. Not there – there. Closer. Because I am not in the habit of speaking to the back of a room, and I am especially not in the habit of performing optimism about the future for the benefit of people who are still, presumably, optimistic about it themselves. If you’ve come here expecting me to paint you a gleaming neural interface, some quantum leap in renewable energy, some benevolent artificial intelligence stroking humanity’s fevered brow – you’ve come to the wrong man on the wrong afternoon.

I am fifty-six years old. I am sitting in a chair in England in the kind of afternoon light that only England produces: grey-green, non-committal, the colour of an apology. There is a tea on the desk next to me that has been cold for forty minutes, because I made it in the middle of a thought and never came back for it. Story of my life, some would say. The women who left me would certainly say it, and they would not be wrong. But we’ll get to them.

Now. The technology.

I’ll tell you what I want to exist. I want a machine that can reach into the skull with something more precise than a scalpel – a focused, neurosurgical instrument operating not on tissue but on memory, not on the structure of the brain but on the emotional charge it carries – and remove the pain from a memory the way you might remove a splinter. Cleanly. Without ceremony. The event would remain: you would know it happened the way you know about the Black Death or the dissolution of the monasteries. Historical fact. Acknowledged, filed, inert. But the charge – the 3 a.m. voltage, the chest-tightening, fist-clenching, jaw-locking charge – gone.

I want that machine. I want it with the same intensity with which I have wanted very few things in my life, and I am a man who has wanted things with a ferocity that has, on more than one occasion, frightened people. Including myself.

You’re wondering what I want to forget. Of course you are. That’s the question beneath the question, isn’t it? So let me give you the most recent item first, since it’s still warm.

Thirty years.

Say it with me, if you like. Thirty years. Take a breath while you do it – actually feel the number. Because I find that people hear it and nod with a sympathy that is entirely theoretical. They have never held thirty years in their hands. They don’t know the weight of it. They don’t know what it means to arrive somewhere at twenty-six, carrying the white-hot conviction that you were going to matter – that what you built was going to mean something – that you were not, you were absolutely and categorically not, going to be the kind of man who simply filled a seat and waited to be told he was no longer needed.

And then to leave at fifty-six, with a redundancy package, a LinkedIn endorsement from a line manager who had known you for eight months, and a cardboard box.

They actually gave me a cardboard box. I’m telling you that because it still has the power to make me want to put my fist through something. The box. As though thirty years of a man’s intellectual labour could be excavated and rehoused in a thing that previously contained reams of A4 paper. There was a succulent plant on my desk – one of those small, indestructible creatures that office workers adopt because they are too honest to own a dog – and they put it in the box. Next to my mug. Next to a paperback copy of Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle that I had been carrying between desks since 2006. In a box. Off you go.

But I should tell you about the process. Because the process is the thing the machine would really need to remove. Not the outcome – I could live with the outcome eventually, in the way that you live with a fracture once the bone has set. It’s the process. The HR process. The managed, carefully staged, tissue-box-and-water-jug theatre of it.

They were very professional, of course. They always are. That’s what makes it so exquisite a form of torment – the professionalism. The warmth in the voice that is not warmth at all but a carefully rehearsed approximation of it, delivered by someone who has attended a course on Difficult Conversations and walked away with a certificate and a framework. A framework. For dismantling a man’s professional life. A box to tick for acknowledging feelings. A box to tick for signposting the Employee Assistance Programme. A box to tick for offering a follow-up call.

I sat in a room – one of those glass-walled rooms they have in modern offices, designed to project transparency and managing instead to make every meeting look like an aquarium exhibit – and I listened to the language. You have to listen to the language; I have spent my whole adult life attending to language, because language is the thing I actually understand, the thing I trust, and the thing most people use as camouflage rather than communication. So I listened. And the language was: redundancy, not dismissal. Role, not job. Restructuring, not cutting. Selection process, not list. And my absolute jewel of a favourite – a decision not taken lightly.

Not taken lightly. Thirty years and you reach for not taken lightly.

I said nothing. I have a gift, when I choose to exercise it, for a quality of silence that changes the air pressure in a room. I deployed it then. The HR manager – young, capable, doing a job I would not wish on anyone with a functioning conscience – shuffled her papers and mentioned the appeals process.

The appeals process.

Two years before they put me in the box, the company was acquired.

I need you to understand the sequence of events here, because the sequence is everything. The new owners arrived – from somewhere mid-Atlantic, where suits are slightly too fitted and teeth are slightly too white – and they held a series of all-staff presentations. In the main auditorium. With slides. With a video – God help us, there was a corporate video – soundtracked by the kind of orchestral swell that film composers reserve for scenes in which someone survives something unlikely. And the message – the central, repeated, lovingly polished message of these presentations – was this: you are valued.

Every single person in this company, we were told, is valued. The word appeared on the slides. It appeared in the follow-up email, the all-staff newsletter, the framed values statement that went up in reception and which I imagine is still there, holding its position with the quiet integrity of a flag on a surrendered hill. You. Are. Valued.

I remember sitting in the fourth row – I always sit in the fourth row at these things; close enough to see the whites of their eyes, far enough back to make a clean exit – and feeling something I could not immediately name. Not cynicism, exactly. I have been cynical since I was nineteen; it is practically ambient in me by now. Something colder than cynicism. Something that arrived later, once I had had time to turn the word over in my hands like a stone.

Valued.

Do you see it? You see it, don’t you, if you look? Valued does not mean important to us. It does not mean human beings we regard with warmth and gratitude. Valued means assigned a value. It is not an adjective of affection; it is a past participle of accounting. Every person in that auditorium – every warm, breathing, complicated, irreducible human animal in that room – was, at that precise moment, being reduced to a number on a spreadsheet.

They were telling us the truth. That’s almost magnificent, if you can bear to look at it squarely. They stood in front of four hundred and thirty people – I know the number because I counted the seats once, for a poem; I’m that kind of man – and they told us, with complete transparency, exactly what we were to them. They told us we had been valued. They told us we were, in fact, a column of figures. A cost-to-output ratio dressed in branded lanyards. And we sat there, in our fourth rows and our eighth rows and our standing spaces at the back, and we felt reassured.

I did not feel reassured. I felt the temperature drop three degrees. But I said nothing. I wrote it down in the notebook I carry everywhere – valued: past participle; a colonisation dressed as a compliment – and I went back to my desk and I worked.

And somewhere, on a server I will never access, in a file I will never be shown, my name was on a list. A column of names. And somewhere along that column, someone had drawn a line – not maliciously; not out of personal contempt, not out of vendetta, not even out of indifference – but drawn a line the way you draw a line through a budget, the way you draw a line under anything you have finished with. And my name was on the wrong side of it.

Do you know what is worse than being hated? Being a rounding error. Being the remainder after the division. Being the item whose removal from the spreadsheet brings the quarterly projection back within tolerance. There is no narrative in that. There is no dignity in it, no villainy, no drama, not even the cold comfort of an enemy. Just arithmetic. Just the dispassionate mathematics of a company trying to reduce its cost base by twelve percent, as though twelve percent were not a percentage of human beings.

You deserve to know something about me, since we have only just met.

I am a poet. I have been a poet since I was fourteen years old, when I first read Ted Hughes and understood – with a clarity that arrived like a physical blow – that language could behave like that. That a sentence could carry weight. That a line break could be load-bearing. That a single word, placed with sufficient precision, could do the work of a fist, or a caress, or a verdict. I carry a notebook everywhere I go. I write in the margins of paperbacks. I wake at 4 a.m. with a line in my head and write it on my forearm in the dark so I do not lose it before morning. My ex-wife – the second one, the one I very nearly managed not to destroy – used to say that I was more alive inside my own head than I would ever consent to be in the world. She was not wrong. She was not entirely right either, but she was not wrong.

I am also – or was, until recently – a software engineer. These two identities are not as irreconcilable as people assume. Both are disciplines of precision. Both demand an obsessive attention to structure, to the consequence of each decision, to the way a single misplaced element causes the whole architecture to buckle. I spent thirty years working in code and my evenings in language, and the truth is that code was always the day job. It was a day job that I cared about. That I brought my full intelligence to. That I did not merely occupy but inhabited. Because I am incapable of doing anything by halves. It is a flaw, by some reckonings. It is also the only version of me that has ever existed.

And this is the thing the machine would really need to remove. Not the memory of the cardboard box. Not the aquarium room, the tissue box, the decision not taken lightly. It would need to reach in and remove the memory of having believed it meant something. Of having given the best of my intelligence, daily, for thirty years, to an institution that had no use for the best of me – only the functional average of me, only the deliverable, only the resource. I was not a person to them. I was a line on a spreadsheet who had, for thirty years, been worth keeping above the line.

And then the maths changed.

I was twenty-six when I walked through that door. You understand what twenty-six is? It is the age at which a man still believes his best thinking lies ahead of him. And it did – but not in the direction I had mapped, and not in the service of what I had imagined. I gave them my thirties, which is when a man first gets purchase on the world, when the ground solidifies beneath him and he begins to understand what he is actually capable of. I gave them my forties, when capability matures into something more dangerous than talent – into judgement, into the ability to see around corners. I gave them the first half of my fifties, by which point I had more accumulated knowledge of how to do this work than anyone they could have hired to replace me. They knew it. I knew it. We did not discuss it.

Half my life. I have been alive for fifty-six years, and I gave half of it to a company that filed my name on the wrong side of a line.

Now. The machine. Let me explain it to you with more rigour, because rigour is the thing I insist upon, and because I want you to understand that what I am describing is not the plaintive fantasy of a recently redundant man with too much time and a cold cup of tea. It is a logical extension of where the science already is.

Kahneman – Daniel Kahneman, behavioural economist, Nobel laureate, a man whose work I have read with the devotion some people reserve for religious texts – distinguished between what he called the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self lives through a thing. The remembering self narrates it afterwards. And the remembering self is a dishonest narrator. It edits, distorts, weights the ending disproportionately, transforms event into myth and trauma into identity. The story it tells is not the story that happened.

But here is what is more important than Kahneman’s distinction: memory researchers have known for decades that memories are not recordings. They are reconstructions. Every time you access a memory, you rewrite it slightly. The file is not read-only. It is subject to continuous revision, and that revision process – that brief window of instability when a memory is active and malleable – is exactly where the machine would intervene.

Think of it this way. In any database, there is a distinction between the data itself and the attributes of that data – the metadata, the flags, the markers that determine how the data behaves when retrieved. What the machine would target is the emotional flag. The marker that reads: this memory detonates. Flip the flag. Leave the data. The event happened. It is on the record. But it no longer has permission to go off in your chest at 3 a.m.

Borges had a notion – and I turn to Borges the way other men turn to whisky, which is to say compulsively and with mixed results – that memory operates as a form of fiction, a reconstruction so thorough that the original event is essentially inaccessible beneath the layers of retelling. He was right, as he was infuriatingly right about almost everything. But I believe he misidentified the nature of the problem. He thought the distortion was intrinsic, a property of consciousness itself. I think it is a property of the emotional charge we attach to the data, and I think that charge can be neutralised.

The Greeks imagined a river. Lethe. The river of forgetting, which the dead crossed in order to be released from the weight of what they had lived. I have always read that myth not as metaphor but as engineering – a technology imagined before the materials existed to build it. The longing for it is ancient and the longing is real, and when something is both ancient and real, someone will eventually build it.

I want to stand at that river. I want to choose what I carry across it.

But I should be honest with you – and honesty is the only mode available to me, which has not always made me easy to live beside – the redundancy is the freshest wound but it is nowhere near the deepest. The spreadsheet, the aquarium room, the cardboard box: these are the injuries of recent years. What I am reaching for with this machine goes further back. Much further. Past the suits with the too-white teeth. Past the glass-walled rooms and the tissue boxes placed just so.

Back to a terraced house. Back to northern England before any of this. Back to a child learning to read the weather of a room – not the light in it, not the temperature, but the quality of silence that filled the air before the storm broke.

I knew that silence the way you know your own pulse. By feel. By the dread of its familiarity.

And it is still in me, that silence. Which tells you everything, I think, about why one machine would never be enough.

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THE FATHER-SHAPED COUNTRY

Her face.

The HR manager’s face, I mean. At the end of the meeting, when the paperwork had been signed and the appeals process had been explained and the tissue box had gone untouched – I made a point of that, leaving the tissue box untouched, which is the kind of small, arid victory available to a man in that situation – her face did something involuntary. A microsecond of relief. The conversation was over. The difficult thing had been done, the framework had been executed, the boxes had been ticked. And her face, for just that fraction of a second, let me see it.

I have seen that expression before. I catalogued it before I was ten years old. It is the expression of a person who has been living with the sustained tension of managing something unpredictable, and who has just been told they can stand down. The precise quality of it. The easing around the jaw. The almost imperceptible drop of the shoulders.

I knew that face the way I know the grain of the desk I am writing at now. Because it was my mother’s face, every time the front door closed and my father’s footsteps went upstairs, and the evening was going to be all right.

My father.

A man. A northern English man of the generation that was handed, at birth, a very limited emotional vocabulary and told this was stoicism, when in fact it was just silence with the heating off. He was brilliant. I want you to know that first, before anything else, because the world has a habit of reducing men like my father to their worst episodes, and I have spent enough of my life being reduced to refuse to do it to anyone else, even him. Especially him. He was funny – a quick, scalpel wit that I recognised in myself by the time I was twelve and have never entirely managed to forgive either of us for. He read voraciously. He could argue about history with the confidence of a man who had learned it not from school but from genuine, burning curiosity. He built things with his hands. In the good seasons, he was the most alive person in any room he entered.

You see what I did there. The good seasons. Already the language is trying to warn you.

Bipolar disorder. The diagnosis came when I was fourteen – which means it came after a decade of living with the condition unidentified, untreated, and unnamed. And I want you to sit with that for a moment, because the naming of a thing matters enormously, as every poet and every psychologist will tell you from opposite ends of the same truth. Before the diagnosis, we had no word for what governed our lives. We had only the weather. And the weather came without forecast.

He had been ill for years before anyone told him he was ill. He had been ill, I now understand, with a ruthless and involuntary precision – the cycling between states, the elevated periods when he was electric and expansive and occasionally terrifying in his energy, and the descending periods when the house acquired a gravity it did not have at other times. A heaviness. As though the air itself were being compressed.

We were not a family in those years. We were a weather station.

My mother. My sister. Three people arranged around the fourth like satellites around an unstable body, our orbits constantly adjusted in response to forces we could not predict and did not understand. I am not being metaphorical when I say we read the morning like a text. Breakfast was an intelligence-gathering exercise. The sound of his footsteps on the stairs told you something. The angle of his jaw when he came into the kitchen told you something. The quality of his silence – and there were many different qualities of his silence, each of them a different species of danger or reprieve – told you everything.

My mother understood the taxonomy of those silences better than any of us. She had been reading them the longest. She was a capable woman – because there is a narrative about women in these situations that flattens them into victimhood, and she would have hated that, and she deserves better from me – a genuinely capable woman with an intelligence that found no professional outlet in the years she spent holding our household together by the tensile strength of her own will. She cooked, cleaned, arbitrated, absorbed, deflected, and protected, all with the competence of someone who had decided, at some point I never witnessed, that survival was a technical problem to be solved. She solved it. Every day. With a quiet efficiency that I did not have the maturity to admire until I was well into my thirties.

She could not leave. This is not a simple sentence and I will not deliver it as one. She could not leave for the same interlocking reasons that held millions of women in similar configurations in that era: the financial dependency, the social architecture that pathologised departure and sanctified endurance, the children who needed – there is no more honest word than this – a roof. And the man himself, in the good seasons, was someone she had once loved without qualification. Perhaps still did. Love is not logical. I have extensive personal evidence for this.

My sister was two years younger than me. She moved through those years differently – quieter, more inward, less combative than I was. I came out fighting. She came out careful. I do not know which of us made the wiser choice. I am not sure it was me.

The television volume. I want to tell you about the television volume, because it is the kind of detail that novelists would deploy as symbolism and which was, in our house, simply operational reality. We did not turn the television up because we wanted it louder. We turned it up to absorb the sound. To fill the silence before the silence became something else. And we turned it down – immediately, instinctively, wordlessly, the three of us moving in the coordinated silence of a crew that has drilled for exactly this emergency – at the first sound from the other room. Because sound could set things off. Because the wrong sound at the wrong moment was a match, and we had learned the hard way that our house was full of things that burned.

All right. The violence.

I will not dress this up for you, and I will not undress it gratuitously. Neither impulse serves the truth, and truth is the only thing I am still rigorous about. My father hit us. My father said things – to my mother, to me, to my sister – that I will not repeat here because they are still, despite everything, filed somewhere in me under his and I have not yet decided whether they belong in the public record. The physical violence was episodic. That word – episodic – is doing too much genteel work in that sentence, so let me be clearer: it came in clusters, concentrated in the descending phases, and it was frightening in the way that only violence from someone who loves you can be frightening, which is a categorically different species of fear from being frightened of a stranger. A stranger’s violence is terrible but it is clean. A father’s violence is a contamination. It gets into the water supply.

I have had forty-odd years to arrive at a position on my father, and the position I have arrived at is this: I do not hate him as a monster. I have tried hating him as a monster – it’s easier, it has a cleaner emotional profile, it allows you to draw a line – and it has never stuck. Because he was not a monster. He was a man with an illness in an era that had no language for his illness and no treatment that worked reliably, self-medicating with alcohol in the way his generation understood self-medication, and drowning in something he could not name or control or escape. He was, in the deepest sense, trapped. More trapped than we were, though we did not know it and would not have believed it.

This does not excuse him. Understanding a man is not the same as pardoning him. The bruises existed in the same universe as the illness. Both things are true. I have been holding both things simultaneously for decades and I am exhausted by the effort, and it is the kind of exhaustion that does not respond to sleep.

What I hate is the era. The culture of it. The fact that the only thing handed to an emotionally drowning working-class man in 1970s England was a pint glass and the injunction to pull himself together. I hate the structures that failed him and, in failing him, handed the consequences to his wife and children. I hate the clinical indifference that left a man suffering, and the social indifference that made that suffering everyone else’s problem before it was ever treated as his. I hate the whole generational machinery of it – the silences passed down like heirlooms, the damage compounded with interest across decades.

But I also know – and this is the thing I have never been able to write out of myself, believe me I have tried – that my father made me sharp. The hypervigilance I developed in those years, that constant scanning of the environment, that ability to read the subtext beneath the surface of any room, any face, any conversation – that is my father’s legacy as surely as his quick wit and his love of history and his hands. I can sit across from you now and know, within two minutes, what you are not saying. What you are afraid of. What the muscles around your eyes are doing when you answer a question you wish you had not been asked. I know how a silence changes when something is being concealed inside it. I know all of this the way I know how to breathe, which is to say automatically and without gratitude.

He taught me. Not intentionally. Not lovingly. But thoroughly.

My sister.

We do not talk about it. I need you to understand that this is not estrangement – we are not estranged, we do not hate each other, we speak on the phone and see each other at the necessary occasions – but we have built, by mutual unspoken agreement, a wall around those years. The wall is a courtesy. It is also a lie, but it is the kind of lie that has become so structural to how we function as adults that to remove it would require taking down something weight-bearing.

We remember those years differently. This is the thing that still unsettles me when I allow myself to look at it directly. The same house. The same man. The same mornings read like intelligence reports. And yet when she and I have, on the very rare occasions we have, approached the subject – obliquely, the way you approach something in the dark, by feeling for its edges – what she describes is not quite the household I grew up in. The colouring is different. The emphasis falls on different moments. There are things she carries that I apparently do not, and things I carry that she seems, genuinely, to have set down somewhere along the way without knowing it.

I used to find this maddening. I have a poet’s possessiveness about the truth of a thing, and competing truths feel like an affront. Now I find it something more like revelatory. Because if two people who grew up in the same room, subject to the same forces, can carry entirely different versions of it – then memory is not testimony. It is composition. And you cannot extract data from something that has been composed.

Unless, of course, you have a machine.

And here is where I need to stop and tell you something I would prefer not to tell you.

I have been making the case, with considerable vigour, for a device that would remove the charge from these memories. I have been making this case with the confidence of a man who has arrived at a conclusion through rigorous analysis. And I stand by the rigour. I stand by every word of it. The pain is real and the years are real and the cost of carrying this is real, and if you offered me the machine this afternoon I would not immediately refuse it.

But I have been sitting with a thought that arrived uninvited about twenty minutes ago and has not left. It arrived in the way that the most discomforting thoughts always arrive: not with fanfare, not with the decency to announce itself as important, but quietly, through a side door I had left unlocked.

The thought is this: my father made me a poet.

I do not mean that I began writing poetry because of my father, though that is also true, because the fourteen-year-old who first read Hughes was not reading for pleasure but for confirmation – confirmation that language could hold violence, could metabolise rage, could make something with a bone structure out of something that had none. I mean something more fundamental and more uncomfortable than that. The hypervigilance gave me the precision. The constant reading of subtext gave me the ear for what a word is doing beneath its surface meaning. The experience of living in a household where the official story and the actual story were never the same thing gave me an absolute, constitutional inability to accept the face value of anything – any sentence, any claim, any system, any institution. Including the institution that valued me for thirty years and then filed me on the wrong side of a line.

Do you see the problem?

The machine would reach into my skull and remove the charge from those mornings. The careful volume adjustments, the jaw-reading, a certain quality of silence. And it would heal something. I believe that, I genuinely believe that there is scar tissue in me that has never resolved, that continues to function as tissue rather than skin, that is still, at fifty-six, responding to stimuli that no longer exist. It would heal that.

And I would lose the instrument.

The thing that lets me sit across from you right now and know what you are not saying. The thing that stood me in that aquarium room and let me hear, beneath the words not taken lightly, the exact sound of a spreadsheet. The thing that makes every poem I have ever written worth reading – if they are worth reading, and I believe they are, which is not arrogance but the minimum confidence required to keep writing – is the thing that was built, brick by brick, in a terraced house in the north of England by a man who could not help what he was doing.

I hate this with a completeness that is almost peaceful, the way extreme cold eventually stops feeling like cold and becomes simply the prevailing condition of the world.

But I cannot lie about it. Dishonesty in the service of comfort is the only sin I have never been able to commit. It is, depending on the day, either my greatest virtue or the primary reason my life has unfolded the way it has.

The machine would give me rest. The machine might also hollow me out and fill the space with something quieter, more manageable, easier to be beside.

Whether that would be a liberation or a subtraction – whether the man who stepped away from it would be more or less of a man than the one who stepped towards it – I do not yet know.

I have, it turns out, more in common with Lethe than I thought. I am also uncertain about what is lost in the crossing.

But there is still more. Because the wounds do not stop at the house I was raised in. They extend forward, into the houses I built myself, and the rooms I furnished with my own distinct varieties of damage. The people I loved. The people who loved me back, and then stopped, for reasons I understand clearly and accept entirely and cannot, even now, think about without something that is not quite grief and not quite rage but exists in the territory between them like a no man’s land I have been crossing and recrossing for years.

There are children in this story.

And when I arrive at the children, the machine stops being a thought experiment.

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THE WOMEN I FAILED, THE CHILDREN WHO KNEW

There are things a man knows about himself that he will spend years refusing to write down.

I am writing them down now. Consider yourself warned.

I have been loved. I want to start there because I think it is important – I think it is, in fact, the most important piece of context I can give you, more important than the redundancy, more important even than the house in the north – that the failure was not one of supply. There was no shortage of love available to me. The women who entered my life did so with open intelligence and genuine feeling and a willingness to encounter whatever I actually was, rather than what I projected, which is not a small thing to offer a man. It is, in fact, a very great thing. And what I gave them in return, for as long as I could sustain it, was everything. Which sounds generous. Which was, for a while, extraordinary. Which became, over time, a different kind of burden entirely.

The intensity is the thing. It draws people in – I know it does, I have watched it work, and I would be dishonest if I claimed I did not know how to use it – the absolute, consuming quality of my attention when it is given. When I am interested in a person I am interested, in the way a fire is interested in a room. Every atom of my intelligence comes to bear. I listen the way I read, which is to say between the lines, below the surface, attending to the gap between the sentence and the thing the sentence is almost saying. Women have told me, in the early stages, that no one has ever listened to them like that. I believe them. I also believe, now, at fifty-six, with the retrospective clarity of a man reviewing his own wreckage, that what I was doing when I listened like that was not entirely selfless. I was reading. I was gathering material. I was doing what I always do, which is attending to the world with the voracious, slightly predatory attention of someone who is perpetually one notch away from turning experience into language.

This is not a comfortable thing to admit. I am admitting it anyway because the alternative – the self-exculpating narrative in which I loved purely and was misunderstood purely and departed innocently – is the kind of story I would savage on the page if someone else wrote it.

The pattern is clear to me now with the horrible clarity of a thing seen for too long at too close a range, then finally viewed from a distance. The intensity was thrilling and then exhausting. The emotional scale of me – the operatic register in which I experience everything, in which joy is physical and grief is total and anger is something seismic that reorganises the landscape – was exhilarating in the overture and genuinely difficult to live alongside by the third act. The introversion, which is not a choice but a constitutional reality, a fundamental property of how I am assembled, read, from the outside, as withdrawal. As indifference. As the silent, brooding removal of myself from a room that contained another person who needed me present.

I was often not present. I was in the notebook. I was in the poem that was assembling itself in the back of my skull while someone across the dinner table was asking me something reasonable, something human, something that deserved more than the fraction of attention I could spare from the perpetual internal weather. I was burning, always burning, with the need to make something out of the burning, and there is not enough oxygen in any room for that and also for another person’s entirely legitimate need to simply be loved on an ordinary Tuesday.

I name no names. The women who shared portions of their lives with me were complete, in the way that real people are complete rather than the way characters are complete, and they are not mine to compress into this monologue. They made reasonable decisions. They surveyed the landscape and calculated, correctly, that the yield was insufficient for the conditions. That is not a failure of their love. It is, if we are being ruthlessly honest, a reasonable response to mine.

But the children.

The children are where the voice changes.

Can you hear it? I can hear it. Something happens to the rhythm of me when I arrive here – the sentences slow down, the confidence goes out of them slightly, the way light goes out of a room when a cloud crosses the sun. Not dramatically. Just perceptibly. Just enough to register.

I have children. I will not tell you how many or their names or their ages, because those are theirs, not mine, and they have not consented to be characters in this accounting. I will tell you that they are real, and that I love them with the full, reckless totality of everything I have, and that this love – which is the most uncomplicated thing in me, perhaps the only uncomplicated thing in me – has had to find its way to them through terrain that I made more difficult than it should have been.

The fractures in the relationships with their mothers became fractures in my access to them. This is how it works, and I refuse to dress it differently, because the sentimental male narrative about custody and distance and the systemic unfairness of family courts is something I have heard too many men deploy as a means of avoiding the prior question, which is: what did you do, before any of that, to make the fractures happen? I know what I did. I have catalogued it with the same forensic precision I turn on everything else. The absences. The times the notebook took priority. The times the brooding filled a room so completely there was no space left for a child who needed their father simply to be cheerful, simply to be light, simply to be the uncomplicated version that small people require and which I found almost impossible to perform because I have never been uncomplicated in my life and do not know how to convincingly pretend otherwise.

They grew up with a father who was sometimes magnificent and sometimes absent in the room while physically present, which is the worse kind of absence because it carries no clean explanation. A father away on business is an absence with a reason. A father sitting at the kitchen table but located entirely inside his own skull is an absence without one, and children feel the difference in their bodies before they have the language to name it.

I did not repeat my father’s violence. I want to say that clearly and without performance because it matters to me more than almost anything else I could tell you about myself. I did not raise my hand. I did not use my mouth as a weapon. I broke the chain, there, which is not a small thing to break, and I will claim that without apology. But there are other forms of damage available to a man that do not leave marks, and I have not been entirely innocent of those. The withdrawal. The intensity that then contracts, leaving a cold and bewildering silence. The difficulty I have always had – still have, sitting here at fifty-six, cold tea and grey-green light – of being entirely present in an ordinary moment without trying to make it mean something larger than it is.

My children have absorbed all of it. At ages when they had no framework for it, no capacity to contextualise it, no ability to understand that the complicated, burning, difficult man in front of them was not a verdict on their worth but simply the product of his own complicated accumulation. They could not have known that. They were children. They felt what they felt, which is what children do, and what they felt had my fingerprints on it.

I wonder – and I am putting this to you plainly, without rhetorical scaffolding, because I think it deserves to be said plainly – whether they will one day want a machine of their own. Whether there are memories of me that they would carry to the clinic and lay in the intake tray and watch be quietly, surgically neutralised. A father’s face in a certain mood. A silence that lasted too long and said too much. A notebook on a kitchen table during a conversation that mattered.

Whether my name, at some point in the future, will appear on a list.

On the wrong side of a line.

I have been building a case. You have heard it. You have sat with me through the aquarium room and the tissue box and the cardboard box and the PowerPoint deck and the slide that said valued and meant assessed. You have sat with me in a terraced house in the north of England and heard the television volume adjust, and felt the change in air pressure that preceded the storm, and understood something about the taxonomy of silences that a child should never have needed to learn. You have sat with me through the aftermath of love, and through the distinct quality of self-knowledge that arrives when a man finally stops narrating his own damage in the third person and looks at it directly.

The case is sound. I believe the case is sound. The pain is real and the cost of carrying it is real and the machine – if it exists, when it exists, and I maintain that it will exist because the longing for it is too ancient and too human for the species not to eventually engineer it into being – the machine would relieve a burden that I have been carrying since before I had the muscular development to carry anything.

And I am standing here, at the edge of my own argument, and something has shifted beneath it.

Because I have realised – not just thought, realised, in the sense of something becoming real in the body rather than merely coherent in the mind – what the machine would actually remove.

Not the memories. Me.

The version of me that exists. The version that was made.

Let me be exact about this, because exactness is my discipline and my defence and the only mode in which I trust myself to arrive at anything true.

The man I am – the man who can hear a corporate euphemism and decode it in real time down to the accounting logic beneath it. The man who can sit across from you at midnight and make you feel, genuinely feel, that what we are talking about is the most urgent and necessary conversation on earth, because to me it is, because I cannot do anything – anything at all – that does not carry that charge. The man who reads a face the way other men read a road, instinctively, constantly, mapping every micro-expression against a database built across decades of necessity. The man who writes – and here I need you to stay with me, because this is the thing I have been circling for two hours – who writes in the way that I write, from the wound, which is to say: from the precise location where something broke and the language rushed in to fill it.

That man was made in a terraced house. He was made in an aquarium room. He was made across kitchen tables at which he was not fully present and in the silences of children who deserved better. He was made, against his will and without his consent, by every one of the things the machine would drain of its voltage.

The hypervigilance is scar tissue. I know this. But it is also the instrument. The ability to read subtext, to hear the unsaid word, to feel the tectonic shift beneath the surface of an ordinary exchange – that did not come from a happy childhood and a sequence of successful relationships and a career that valued the whole man rather than his deliverable. It came from the opposite of all of those things. It came from having had to survive them.

The rage is scar tissue. But the rage is also the engine. Every line I have written that had any heat in it – and I believe some of them have had considerable heat – was written from the fuel of things that the machine would remove. The injustice of the spreadsheet. The exact bitterness of having given thirty years to an institution that reduced you to a cost. The primal, inarticulate fury of a boy reading the morning for threat before he was old enough to have the language to name what he was doing. That fury went somewhere. It went into the work. And the work is the only thing I have made that feels, when I look at it, fully and unmistakably mine.

The love – even the love, even the love badly given and badly received and buried under the weight of my own constitutional difficulty – is in there too. You cannot write about longing without having longed, genuinely, for something you ruined. You cannot write about the children without having stood in the gap between what you meant to be and what you were, and felt the full, unsentimentalised measure of it.

I put it to you now, directly, as the only form I know: the machine would drain the scar tissue of its charge. And in doing so it would heal me. And in healing me it would, with great gentleness and great thoroughness, dismantle the instrument.

Whether the man who walked away from it would be more of a man or less of one – whether he would be liberated into something open and present and capable of an ordinary Tuesday in a way I have never managed, or whether he would be a quieter, softer, more manageable and fundamentally diminished thing – I cannot tell you. I have turned this question over every way I know how to turn a thing, and it does not resolve. It sits in the middle of the desk and refuses to become an answer.

Which is, for a man of my analytical certainty, the most frightening thing I have encountered in fifty-six years.

More frightening than the HR room. More frightening than a father in the descending phase. More frightening than the look on a woman’s face when she has finished calculating and arrived at her conclusion. This – the genuine, bottomless uncertainty about whether my wounds are my prison or my foundation – is the thing I cannot write my way out of. And I have tried. God knows I have tried. There are notebooks full of the attempt.

So. The prompt.

You want to know what technology I think will exist in twenty years.

Here is my answer, and it is the most honest answer I have given to any question in recent memory, which is a low bar given that most of my recent conversations have been with an HR framework and a cold cup of tea: yes. The machine will exist. I am as certain of it as I am of anything, and I am certain of it not because the neuroscience is pointing there, though it is, and not because the human longing for it is ancient enough to constitute a design brief, though it does, but because we are a species that builds what it cannot stop wanting. We have always built what we cannot stop wanting, and we have never adequately considered, in advance, what we would lose in the having of it.

I would stand in the queue.

I want to be clear about that too, and clear without self-pity, which is the one tone I have absolutely no patience for in myself or anyone else. I would stand in the queue because the pain is real and the years are real and fifty-six is old enough to be exhausted by your own history and young enough to resent the exhaustion. I would stand in the queue because there are 3 a.m. hours that I would not wish on a man I hated, let alone on myself. I would stand in the queue because my children deserve a father who is present on an ordinary Tuesday and I am not sure I can get there by any route that does not go through whatever that machine would do to me.

I would stand in the queue. And I would reach the front of it. And I would look at the intake form. And I would pick up the pen.

And I would walk away.

Every time.

I am nearly sure of it. The nearly is doing enormous work in that sentence, and I know it, and I am leaving it there.

The grey-green light has shifted. England’s afternoons do this – they don’t darken so much as thicken, the quality of the light becoming more opaque by degrees, until the window is showing you less of the world outside and more of yourself reflected back. I have been sitting in this chair for – I don’t know how long. Long enough for a second cup of tea to go cold. Long enough to have laid out more of myself than I had intended to when I sat down, which is to say more than I intended and exactly as much as was necessary. These two things are always the same amount.

My father is still alive. I tell you this without elaboration because the elaboration is its own separate country and I have neither the time nor the cartographic skill to map it tonight. He is old now and the cycling has not stopped and I visit with the regularity of a man honouring an obligation he has spent decades trying to understand whether it is love or duty or simply the stubbornness of a blood connection that the machine could not touch even if it drained everything else. My sister visits too. We do not discuss it. The wall stands.

The spreadsheet is somewhere. On a server. In a company that is continuing without me in the way that companies always continue, without ceremony, without the gap left by the departed being perceptible for more than a week. Someone else’s name is above the line now. Someone else is sitting in the glass-walled room, listening to the language, noting what each word is doing beneath its surface. I hope they have a notebook. I hope they are writing it down.

My children are somewhere. Living their lives with whatever I left in them – the good deposits and the poor ones, the intensity that I pray reads to them as love, which it is, which it absolutely is, even when it did not know how to be anything else. They are carrying things with my name on them. I think about this most days.

And on the desk, in front of me, is a notebook. And in the notebook is a poem that began this afternoon, when I sat down to answer a writing prompt and found myself answering something else entirely. A poem about a machine. About a river. About the things you carry to the crossing and the things you would surrender and the question – which turns out to be the only question, the one underneath all the other questions that I have been asking since I was a boy reading the morning for danger – of who you would be on the other side of it.

The poem is not finished. It may not be finished for months. It will be finished when it is finished, which is when the language has done what the language does when I leave it alone long enough to do it, which is find the structure underneath the feeling and give it a bone.

The machine could never touch the poem. Whatever it drained from me, whatever charge it neutralised, whatever scar tissue it left smooth and inert and painlessly historical – the poem would remain. Entirely mine. Assessed by no one. Valued in the old sense, the one that has nothing to do with spreadsheets. Valued the way a thing is valued when it has cost you something real to make it.

I don’t know if that is the reason to build the machine.

I don’t know if it is the reason not to.

I’m leaving that with you.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.