Frankissstein: A Love Story

by Jeanette Winterson

Reality is water-soluble.

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself. And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.

Here I am, in my inadequate skin, goose-fleshed and shivering. A poor specimen of a creature, with no nose of a dog, and no speed of a horse, and no wings like the invisible buzzards whose cries I hear above me like lost souls, and no fins or

even a mermaid’s tail for this wrung-out weather. I am not as well-found as that dormouse disappearing into a crack in the rock. I am a poor specimen of a creature, except that I can think.

London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future.

What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Such was the notoriety of the households that an hotel on the farther shore of the lake set up a telescope for their guests to watch the antics of the supposed Satanists and Sexualists who held their women in common.

Shelley is fascinated by moonlit nights and the sudden sight of ruins. He believes that every building carries an imprint of the past, like a memory, or memories, and that these can be released if the time is right. But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past – yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.

Do you believe that if every person had enough money, enough work, enough leisure, enough learning, that if they were not oppressed by those above them, or fearful of those below them, humankind would be perfected? Byron asked this in his negative drawl, sure of the response, and so I set out to disaffect him. I do! I said. I do not! said Byron. The human race seeks its own death. We hasten towards what we fear most. I shook my head. I was on firm ground now in this ark of ours. I said, It is men who seek death. If a single one of you carried a life in his womb for nine months, only to see that child perish as a baby, or in infancy, or through want, disease, or, thereafter, war, you would not seek death in the way that you do. Yet death is heroic, said Byron. And life is not.

I never knew my mother. She was dead as I was born and the loss of her was so complete I did not feel it. It was not a loss outside of me – as it is when we lose someone we know. There are two people then. One who is you and one who is not you. But in childbirth there is no me/not me. The loss was inside of me as I had been inside of her. I lost something of myself.

how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world – is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit. I considered this and replied, If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body, by galvanism or some method yet undiscovered, would the spirit return? I do not believe so, said Shelley. The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house.

Our first child died when he was born. Cold and tiny I held him in my arms. Soon after I dreamed that he was not dead, and that we rubbed him with brandy and set him by the fire and he returned to life. It was his little body I wanted to touch. I would have given him my own blood to restore his life; he had been of my blood, a feeding vampyre, for nine dark months in his hiding place. The Dead. The Undead. Oh, I am used to death and I hate it.

He has violated life, I thought, then and now. But what is life? The body killed? The mind destroyed? The ruin of Nature? Death is natural. Decay inevitable. There is no new life without death. There can be no death unless there is life.

It was not a happy marriage. He wrote of his wife, Harriet: I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion.

used to wonder about her in her coffin below. And I never thought of her as rotted, but as alive as she is in the pencil drawings of her, and more alive yet in her writings. Even so, I wanted to be near to her body. Her poor body no use to her now. And I felt, and I am certain that Shelley felt it too, that we were there all three of us, at the grave.

In dissecting theatres all over London there are bodies of mothers, bodies of husbands, bodies of children, like mine, taken for liver and spleen, to crush the skull, saw the bones, unwind the secret miles of intestine.

The deadness of the dead, said Polidori, is not what we fear. Rather we fear that they are not dead when we lay them in that last chamber. That they awake to darkness, and suffocation, and so die in agony. I have seen such agony in the faces of some new-buried and brought in for dissection.

Story: a series of connected events, real or imagined. Imagined or real. Imagined And Real

But for now we are still human, all too human (strange phrase, that, when you think about it), and eighty per cent of internet traffic is pornography. The first non-biological life forms sharing our homes won’t be waiters with tomato-recognition issues, or cute little ETs for the kids. Let’s start at the very beginning: a very good place to start. Sex.

pneumatic.

Personally, as a woman, even though I’m not, I’d hate it if some random bloke wanted to cum anywhere except the usual place, but I’m a fussy eater. Don’t like yoghurt or custard, or that French one, crème brûlée, or tapioca or white sauce or suet. I don’t really like banana smoothies and I hate almond milk. God, almond milk. Why??? For fuck’s sake! My doctor tried to get me on it. Cholesterol. I said, mate, I’d rather have the heart attack.

There’s no jobs in Wales, Ryan, not since Brexit. They voted Wales for the Welsh, like everyone in the world was just killing themselves to get over the border and open a new coalmine. All the money in Wales came from some euro-fund anyway, but there’s a lot of inbreeding in Wales. I think it would be good to have a bit of immigration – all that inbreeding affects the brain. Brexit! Jesus! Might as well have built a wall made out of leeks right round the place.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

he said; I believe it is each man’s task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute. And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron. That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

I watched him, sardonic, cynical. A great poet, truly, yet unkind. The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.

For the sake of my story I have my own desire to contemplate what it is about Man that distinguishes us from the rest of biology. And what distinguishes us from machines?

I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.

For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?

Italy is full of statues of beautiful men. Men who ripple and stand. To kiss one? To bring it to life?

He asked me to bathe naked with him in the river. I was too shy. Instead I watched his body, white and slender and sculpted. There is something unworldly about his form. An approximation – as though his body has been put on hastily, so that his spirit might walk in the world.

The alchemists sought three things, said Shelley: the secret of turning lead into gold, the secret of the Elixir of Eternal Life, the homunculus. What is an homunculus? I asked. A creature not born of woman, he answered. A made thing, unholy and malign. A kind of goblin, misshapen and sly, infused with dark power.

In the oppressive twilight of our winding walk back to the inn I thought of that thing; that fully-formed being not born of woman. And now that form has returned. And it is not small. No goblin.

The timeless serenity of the past that we British do so well is an implanted memory – you could call it a fake memory. What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball. In any case, the Royal Society only moved here in 1967. History is what you make it.

She says, We know already that machine learning is deeply sexist in outcomes. Amazon had to stop using machines to sift through job application CVs because the machines chose men over women time after time. There is nothing neutral about AI.

To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world. Albert Camus. You may not have read him, but perhaps you should. In any case, you all know, however vaguely, the Bible story of the Garden of Eden, and that Adam’s task was to name his world. If you believe, as I do, that religious texts – like myths – are texts we create to mirror the deeper structures of the human psyche, then yes, naming is still our primary task. Poets and philosophers know this – perhaps science has confused naming with taxonomy. Perhaps, in our early efforts to distance ourselves from the alchemists who came before us, we forgot that naming is power. I cannot conjure spirits, but I can tell you that calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.

He comes forward to the front of the platform, the toes of his boots right on the edge, and he says, The world I imagine, the world that AI will make possible, will not be a world of labels – and that includes binaries like male and female, black and white, rich and poor. There will not be a division between head and heart, between what I feel and what I think. The future will not be a version of Blade Runner, where replicants long to be named – like humans – and therefore to be known – like humans. What I am proposing is far bigger. As we develop true artificial intelligence, what are we doing? We are summoning a vision. (He steps back. Pause. Wait. Hold. Go.) Even if, even if the first superintelligence is the worst possible iteration of what you might call the white male autistic default programme, the first upgrade by the intelligence itself will begin to correct such errors. And why? Because we humans will only programme the future once. After that, the intelligence we create will manage itself.

Ron is regarding me; reluctantly he holds out his hand. Well, good to see you again, Ryan. It’s Ry. Just Ry. Not short for Ryan? Ry is short for Mary. Ron falls silent while he processes this fact. The thing about humans is that we process information at different speeds, depending on the human, depending on the information. In some ways machines are easier to deal with. If I had just told machine intelligence that I am now a man, although I was born a woman, it wouldn’t slow up its processing speed. You’re a woman, then? says Ron. No, Ron. I am a hybrid. My name is Ry. You’re a bloke, then? says Ron. I’m trans. Like, transhuman? Transgender.

You look like a bloke, says Ron. Not a serious bloke, but a bloke. I wouldn’t have given you that interview at the Sexpo if you was a girl. I’m trans, I say again.

I can’t decide with you, Ry, whether you are a Puritan or a Romantic. I am a human being. And what if you were one of the millions of human beings who will have no place in the automated life that will soon be reality? Cars, trucks, buses, trains will drive themselves. Stores and supermarkets will use smart tracking for your purchases. Your home will use repair diagnostics. Your fridge will order its own food. Bots will take care of the housework and entertain your children. What will you do all day? That’s not how you sold it in your lecture. And that is not how it will be for those of us able to be part of the new world. For us, life will be unlimited. DO YOU ENJOY YOUR JOB? says Claire. For the rest, says Victor, there must be diversions and soporifics. Sex-dolls can provide both. Not for women, it seems, I said as we looked across at the crowd, now shaped into two groups, male and female, the men laughing and joking with Ron, the women talking to each other in low voices of despair or disbelief. I agree, says Victor. Women are harder to please.

Vitrification.

The invitation was a mistake. I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. That isn’t surprising; we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body. Transhuman means different things to different people; smart implants, genetic modification, prosthetic enhancement, even the chance to live forever as a brain emulation. So, out of ordinary semantic confusion – the kind that humans live with every day – came the invitation to be a White Knight of Life. The Black Knight is Death. Here I am, charging to the rescue. There isn’t much time after the heart stops to halt the disintegration of the cells, systems, tissues of the body.

In some sense, if you are dedicated to the preservation of life, then you are, by definition, not dedicated to the inevitability of death. It is my job to extend life. Alcor hopes to extend life indefinitely.

Isn’t content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn’t free-floating; it’s enmeshed.

It is easy to be controlled by someone who is controlling and charming. And, outside of my job, I dislike decisions. I’ll go with the flow on this – in any case, I’ve just spent the day at a recycling centre for dead bodies. Food, drink and a madman are a good distraction.

Could my creature create another like itself, if it had a mate? I am repelled by the notion. I will sit my revulsion inside Victor Frankenstein and he shall, at first, commence the awful task of creating a companion for his monster, and at last be convinced that he must destroy such a thing. We destroy out of hatred. We destroy out of love.

Last night Byron declared Prometheus to be a serpent story – by which he suggests a reach for knowledge that must be punished, as it is in the story of the Garden of Eden: Eve eats the apple from the forbidden tree. And what about Pandora and her bloody box? said Polidori. Another woman who wouldn’t do as she was told.

Perhaps, I said, it is women who bring knowledge into the world quite as much as men do. Eve ate the apple. Pandora opened the box. Had they not done so humankind is what? Automata. Bovine. Contented pig.

Are not these new inventions the disrupting force? I said. Is there not violence in forcing men to work for lower wages in order to compete with a machine?

She said, Machines that mimic a mind! Oh! Suppose such a thing should happen one day! Yes! Yes! Imagine, gentlemen, how you will feel when someone invents a LOOM that writes poetry! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Her laughter overtook her. Her bare shoulders shook. Her curls swirled. Her breasts in her dress were jellies of mirth. She could not contain it. A POETICAL loom! An abacus of words. A rote poet. The poem I rote … HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Shelley and Byron were staring at her in the utmost horror. A hand risen from the grave through the floor of the villa could not have turned their countenances into the waxy disbelief and rage I saw as Claire Clairmont remade the noblest calling, yes, the art of poetry, into something like the product of a knitting machine.

perspicaciousness,