The Modern Prometheus
We are all modern Prometheans now; rewriting our bodies, identities, and mythologies without fully grasping the sparks we steal.
World building is an art form, a collage of the senses.
Some folks simply let life happen like a snowball rolling downhill. They accumulate a personality from whatever sticks as they tumble down the road of life. Others take an active role in discernment, setting forth an alchemical intention to turn base metals into golden enlightenment. These persons write novels, create fine art, compose symphonies, and more. They seek the light and remain persistent despite the pain of repeated failure.
Once you are dead and gone, it is only your ideas that might live on.
Some paint dark and foreboding visions like Willem de Kooning or Francis Bacon. Others like Sylvia Plath, capture trauma in poetry, agony in drunken ecstasy like Bukowski. Author Mary Shelley was only 18 years old when she began to write the story of Frankenstein. She published the first edition anonymously when she was only 20 in London on January 1, 1818. Three years later, the second edition was published under her name in Paris. If you have never read the original novel, you are being deprived of what she actually intended to say.
The first thing missed is Shelley’s complete title, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The original novel has suffered repeated injury at the hands of Hollywood screenwriters. In the untouched story, our sympathies inevitable rest with the “monster,” a biological composite of stolen body parts, electrically reanimated by a mad young scientist who unintentionally gives birth to a very sentient being, a new kind of person. Wandering the countryside as a lost soul, the creature decides that having a mate created like himself will soothe his pain. When Victor breaks his promise to build a female companion, loss turns to rage.
Mary’s story resonates with the current debate over what is culturally and legally considered to be the norm. Do you believe in the powers of science to alter, regenerate, and transform human flesh? Lots of folks in Tinseltown do. Feminists and pols are split over what makes a woman.
Kate Stimpson coined the terms "minimizers" and "maximizers" to describe the divide within feminism. "Minimizers" want to undermine the category "woman" to minimize the meaning of sex difference, while "maximizers" want to keep the category, but change its meaning, to reclaim and elaborate the social being "woman."
Fractures have emerged within the vast 2SLGBTQIA+ umbrella concept. The LGB Alliance doesn’t believe in the concept of “gender identity.“ They say biological sex matters, that same-sex attraction is real, and claim that the trans community is actually “bio-phobic.”
Must a lesbian woman who does not want to date a trans woman with a penis have to be branded “transphobic?” The LGB Alliance strongly opposes providing children with gender-affirming, fertility-destroying treatment; puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and surgeries. Alliance members feel robbed of their own gay heritage by the trans community and affirm their right to be gender-nonconforming without having to accept or undergo transition.
But let us now speak in metaphor, the language of myth…
Victor as God simply fails the test to make a man, his tragic quest. He believes in a personal truth, one that says he can fill any shoes and impersonate the Source of Life. He challenges the Master at his very own game. As lightning strikes, “It’s alive!” he exclaims. Here the reader must beg the question. What is a body, and what is a soul? A replicant made from old spare parts, plus the bricks and mortar of a broken heart? Wizards build castles to live within, nests made of sticks, some thick, some thin, woven with relentless care into a flimsy fantasy of hot air and opinions that matter much more than actually being there. Download the lingo, paste in your thoughts. Carry them round like a bag of stiff knots. Each one done becomes a lock. When the task has run, and all knots set, a ball of reflexes soon to forget the triage of gates marked this or that. When logical analysis is put to rest, Victor as God simply fails the test to make a man, his tragic quest.
“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.” - Galatians 6:7-8
If we are to build new beings (or remake ourselves), we must also remake the soul that animates them. In our age of engineered bodies and digitized identities, we are once again flirting with divine power. The question is not only what we can become, but who we are willing to be.