He makes me a better person.
I talk to my car. Doing so makes me a better person.
I also talk to my cooker, paintbrushes and washing machine.
Sometimes I talk to the gravel on the drive, but I admit I worry the neighbours might hear.
My relationship with things I talk to is real.
I used to shout at my car. When I drove badly, or the traffic was bad, I’d shout and sometimes slap the steering wheel. If he (my car is a ‘he’ called ‘Cody’) was not running well, I’d accuse him of stupidity, of being useless, a bag of crap.
I’d become incensed, outraged and convinced of my own superiority to this machine I so relied on.
What a pathetic inadequacy — to make myself feel good by hurling insults and violence at something unable to respond.
Yet I did it. My mental state and blood pressure reflected my angry separation from the world.
You see my car is made of plastics and metals. These are remnants of living things, of natural processes. Though far removed, my car is of the earth.
My car deserves gratitude and gentle respect, not the violence of an inadequate human who can’t control his temper in the face of the pressures of the world.
Everything is a facet of the natural world. Everything, ultimately, is a product of the sun that, half an hour ago, rose above the distant hills to spend another day gifting us life-giving warmth.
I treat my car with a gentle good humour and friendliness, as I do the robin who waits for me in the morning or the mouse who lives in my compost heap.
I say hello to Cody when I walk past him. I sympathise with his infirmities now he’s aging and, like me, carries a few scars from his years of service.
I speak gently when I get in, and thank him when we reach our destination.
If he’s unwell I promise him I’ll do everything I can to make him better.
Talking to my car, washing machine, paintbrushes, is talking to the world. It’s acknowledging the world is not there to serve me, but to connect with.
I am interconnected. I serve the world and it serves me.
As James Bridle writes in ‘Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence’:
“Speaking presumes hearing: by speaking, we acknowledge and animate the personhood of the listener. We make each other into persons: we transform things into beings. Speaking to others, then, is how we begin to make a more-than-human world.”
In talking to my car, I connect and grow.
Does he reply?
Yes.
But only when I listen outside the obvious.
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