Frankenstein

I keep coming back to Frankenstein.  It seems to be my icon, my standard.

To me, Victor Frankenstein is a hero.  A tragic hero, yet a hero nonetheless.  He is the exemplar of virtue taken to its ultimate and necessary conclusion.  If he is a villain, he is the necessary villain - his character is not something to be avoided, but to which we can and must aspire.  He is the creator, the worker, the humble servant of the ars magna.  To create, to make, to do, to live, is have one’s creation misunderstood and misunderstood, again and again, hated, until it is a contemptible, pitiable mess, a hodge-podge of this and that, a mismatched melange, a palimpsestuous pastiche, a collage of good and evil. 

We all create life.  Life is something that is created.  All of our lives are creation.  We are all creating our lives, this moment, together.  But how creative are we?  How creative dare we be?  Dare we take responsibility for creating life?  Or shall we pretend not to be creators, pretend to have no imagination, imagine that life is something given, unchanging and unchangeable, act like we don’t know that we know that we are acting?

The great question is: can we make something living out of what is dead?  The answer is yes, but we must die for it.

What is tragedy but a Nietzschean affirmation of the totality of being - all the consequences, good and bad, of every choice, so that choice becomes no choice at all - an amor fati, love of fate, which is equally love of history, and might simply be named the love of time?  I like to imagine that if Victor Frankenstein were given the chance to live his life over again, he would say, like Trotsky just before his assassination, that he would live it over again exactly as he had already lived it, changing nothing.  Yes, the life he created hated him, with a perfect ressentiment.  Yes, it rose up against him.  And so what?  Such is the price of a great act, a great creation.  One might even say that such is the value of a great act.

I have seen it attributed to Charles Bukowski (or was it Kinky Friedman, or someone else?): “My dear, find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.”

To create is to be destroyed.

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