The Answers Are in Your Life: Excerpted from MY CHILD, THE ALGORITHM
Although I say I am writing this book with a machine-learning algorithm and a toddler, in fact I think that, because I’m the one organizing the material, I am the writer of this book, and the algorithm will not be getting any royalties. The toddler, however, will be eating, wearing, and playing with any royalties.
The algorithm died, put on a suit, cut up its body, and said goodbye.
(Everything in italics is produced by the algorithm.)
I can access a simple version of the algorithm online. I connect to the WiFi using the password hipstercafesarelikereallycoolboringlibraries and pull up the web page. It consists of two boxes. One where you type in your questions or statements and one underneath that displays the algorithm’s response.
I tell the algorithm I want to think about love and queer parenting and bodies and failure, all right? (The toddler has taken to adding “all right?” to the end of his statements: Hit Mummy, all right?)
I hit GENERATE, which is a euphemism for “write,” or vice versa. And then I sit back against the wall of this Hackney café.
After a few seconds, the algorithm responds:
What is love?
Is it an emotion?
Is it an action?
How does it work?
What do we feel?
What do we do?
I’d suggest that you find out how to answer these questions. This is not just about writing. It is about real life. The answers are in your life, all right?
***
When I collect the toddler from day care they tell me he’s been saying: Mummy missing Mummy missing, all day. She’s not missing, they told him. I think they’ve misunderstood, but then he says to me: I miss Mum, and I wonder if they got it right. When she’s not there he misses her. When I’m not there he worries that I’m missing. Am I missing? Did she walk away with a part of me that I can never get back?
They are not “me,” but they are.
I once printed my notes for a poem over the top of one of her poems by mistake. I liked the way our overlapping words looked, and I thought, that’s what we’re doing—printing ourselves over each other.
The lesbian cliché “urge to merge” is less about sharing clothes and haircuts and more about wanting to get impossibly close, to step inside the other’s body, the other’s mind; to sleep inside the other’s skin, to write and overwrite each other’s thoughts.
Let me in.
Let me be with you.
Let me be inside you.
Let me be with you.
Let me be with you.
Let me be inside you.
We look at each other over the threshold of my doorway and we both see our child’s mother. But we are not reflections, or echoes, or doubles, we don’t cancel each other out, and, to quote Gilles Deleuze, “it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another.”
It is a pain that will last. And my son is the best at dealing with that pain.
Deleuze says that theft and gift are the criterion of repetition.
When I go to bed he comes and sits at my bedside and we will say good night and I will look at him and know that he knows.
The gift of one mother is the theft of the other mother. Each mother cannot be substituted for the other, yet we are both mother, we repeat the role of mother.
and I will whisper: I love you and he will whisper back: I love you too and I will whisper: Good night and he will whisper: Good night Mummy and I will whisper: Good night love and he will whisper: Good night Daddy and I will whisper: Good night Daddy.
He’s in his crib and I’m lying on the floor.
—Mum phone Mum phone Mum phone Mum phone . . .
I can’t handle this loop again. I conjure her up. We switch to FaceTime so he can see her.
—Magic, he says.
—Oh, I love you so much! I miss you so much! she says.
He peers at her through his tears. She tells him to lie back down. I tuck him in again. She tells him not to worry, she’ll be right there while he falls asleep and soon she will see him and they will have the best day ever.
I worry that with me he doesn’t ever have the best day ever.
And this.
And this.
I hold the phone next to him, so her face is next to his, on his pillow.
When she and I first met I was sleeping in my office, on a single memory-foam mattress. I had no curtains and I’d watch the moon. We’d Skype each other and stay online sleeping and not sleeping all night. She said that if she woke up and I wasn’t there she’d get panicked. I miss you so much, she would say. And she’d tell me we’d see each other soon and have the best day ever.
It’s hard to be written about when you are trying to be living.
When we were in bed, she’d ask: Are you mine? Are you my Hannah? And every time I got up to go to the toilet, for the entire three years we were together, she’d ask: Where are you going? As if she thought I could just up and leave in the middle of the night. Don’t leave me, she would say, I’ll never leave you, she would say, and she would say it so often that the repetition of “leave” conjured up the leaving, and leaving started living with us, nestling in the gaps between our speech and our writing, our orgasms and our silences, we breathed the absence of our love, we drank the negation of us, we lived with our loss, our dreams were vivid.
Big snowy roofs, spaghetti and sauces full of odd things, dark oil paintings, green peppers/capsicums, raw vegetables, being close to strangers, sleeping in beautiful homes, swimming deep under dancing sea.
More things that I am learning: my body is not my body. My lover is not my lover. My child is not mine child. I am not yours and you are not mine.
Life is lonely. I realize that now.
I think the toddler is asleep but he suddenly opens his eyes, deftly hangs up on her and then opens a dating app and swipes right on a woman laughing.
—Time to sleep now, all right? I say to him.
—All right Mummy, he says.
He puts his palms together, tucks them under his cheek, and closes his eyes, as if to say: This is how humans sleep, Mummy.
That’s what I want. It’s not too much.
I’m too tired to get up. I’m too tired to cook dinner. There’s nothing to cook. I’m too tired to do anything.
It certainly won’t hurt anybody if you forget to go to the shops.
Earlier, before collecting the toddler from day care, I went into a supermarket, picked up a basket from the entrance, walked around, and put some things in my basket.
A failure might be someone who does not give themselves permission to go to the supermarket without a plan or without sufficient money, they fail, and the reaction could be: I think I will have some chicken this time!
And then I got stuck. I couldn’t go to the checkout. I didn’t want anything in my basket. I retraced my steps back along the aisles. I took the items out of my basket and placed them back on the shelves, and then I put the basket back at the entrance and I left the supermarket.
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
I sit in my green armchair, put my feet up on an inflatable cow, and open my laptop.
I watch a red Docklands Light Railway train go past. Then two trains cross each other. One going toward Canary Wharf, the other to Bank.
And he will whisper: Good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night Daddy good night
Does the algorithm know there is no daddy and no absence of daddy? Has it noticed the absence of an absence of daddy in my writing that it thinks must be replenished? I could never spell the word “father” when I was a child. I kept putting an r in it, farther, as if a father was farther from me, physically, emotionally . . .
The idea that the “spouse” is a male figure who has always meant fatherhood, has always provided us with sperm, has always wanted a child, feels like a bit of paper was stuck on and magically turned into a man. Like a time machine. Timey-wimey.
I have always found it hard to write about men. It’s as if I don’t believe in them.
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
Queer is failure, which enables us to trans
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
to transform, to go through many transitions.
And this.
And this.
And this.
Excerpted with permission from My Child, the Algorithm by Hannah Silva (Soft Skull Press, 2024).
About the Author
HANNAH SILVA is a writer and performer working in sound poetry, radio and experimental non-fiction. An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love (BBC Radio 4) starred Fiona Shaw and was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm. Silva has authored seven other plays for BBC Radio 3 and 4, winning the Tinniswood Award and numerous placements in the BBC Audio Drama Awards. Her debut poetry collection Forms of Protest was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. Talk in a bit, a record of sound poetry and music was in the Wire’s Top 25 albums of 2018. She lives in London with her child.
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