Frankissstein: A Love Story

by Jeanette Winterson

He said, Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antoinette with no cake.

What disgusts us about vampires, said Victor, is not that they live forever, but that they feed on those who do not. How did you know what I was thinking? I said. He didn’t answer that. He said, Vampires are like coal-fired power stations. My version of eternal life uses clean energy.

I meant that we are freaks according to the behaviour of the world. We’re loners – that’s an anti-evolutionary position. Homo sapiens needed the group. Humans are group animals. Families, clubs, societies, workplaces, schools, the military, institutions of every kind, including the church. We even manage illness in groups. It’s called a hospital. You work in one.

One of the things that love is, is lasting, I say to him. He laughs. So it is. And I will always love you, even when we are no longer together. When people part, they usually hate each other, I say. Or one hates the other. That is the conventional way, he says. There are other ways. The point I’m making, Ry, is simple. If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.

Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.

Our earlier building at Moorfields crumbled and collapsed from the moment its topcoat of plaster was applied. Some said it was the mephitic vapours seeping from the lunaticks themselves that damped and rotted the walls and oozed water through the floors.

And yet, and I do believe it, the mad give off some spirit of their own, and their unreason is oft-times most reasonable if not judged by the standards of daily application.

We seek to care and to console. We do not seek to cure. Madness cannot be cured; it is a disease of the soul.

My story is a strange one. Sir! That is the nature of a story. Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces – sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

Is his story the result of his madness or its cause?

There was a pencil drawing folded inside the journal. The template for this drawing was Leonardo’s The Vitruvian Man; man the measure of all things, beautiful, proportioned, rational in his beauty. Yet this drawing shared none of the attributes of the original. There were measurements, certainly, and beyond the scale of any human frame; the length of the arms, the width of the face. The drawing was scribbled over many times with marks nearer to scratchings than writings, and across the page were innumerable rubbings out, and twice the thick paper had been pierced by the pencil point, whether in excitement or despair I do not know.

Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

The English are serial racists – one group gets accepted, another group becomes the scapegoat.

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track – the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on. Mary Wollstonecraft

The mind is a curious condition. An invention. An invention? she said. I do believe it, I said. By consent, the majority of us live and die as though the world around us is solid, even though each day disappears without trace. Our actions have consequences that rebound through time, yet each day disappears and a new day takes its place. The mad do not share our world. Their own is equally vivid. More so. The mad are actors on a different stage.

Max shows Ron the dewars where the pets live. Do they keep their fur? asks Ron. Max knows that fur is an important part of a pet, so he is able to reassure Ron. He also suggests cloning. Is that expensive, Max? Very. I can afford it, says Ron. Actually I was about to say, you can’t take it with you, but maybe you should! You drop dead. All the relatives spend your money, then bingo! You’re back! Then what? I have to say that at this moment I look at Ron with new respect. Who exactly is thinking about the nitty-gritty of the future, except Ron Lord?

What is your substance, whereof are you made?

Florence. We have returned to Italy because we cannot live in England. Small-minded, smug, self-righteous, unjust, a country that hates the stranger, whether that stranger be a foreigner or an atheist, or a poet, or a thinker, or a radical, or a woman. For women are strange to men.

When I dream I dream of dead children. Monsters. What have I created that I have killed?

The Victor with no victory. Was it a coincidence that I wrote only of loss and failure?

Would there were no babies, no bodies; only minds to contemplate beauty and truth. If we were not bound to our bodies we should not suffer so. Shelley says that he wishes he could imprint his soul on a rock, or a cloud, or some non-human form, and when we were young I felt despair that his body would disappear, even though he remained. But now all I see is the fragility of bodies; these caravans of tissue and bone.

A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man becomes the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

crispbread.

pupik

Here I am, indifferent to life, and three months pregnant – again. With what? Another death? God knows, I have staked my life on life.

How many ‘great’ artists? How many dead/mad/disused/forgotten/blamed and fallen women?

Shelley does not go whoring. No. He falls in love with every new female dream that seems to offer him freedom. He stays with me at the same time as leaving me. And I allow it. And I turn away from him. And every dead baby makes it harder to turn back to him again. And even now, carrying this child, I avert my eyes and my embrace is cold. We have separate rooms. I hear him stealthily down the corridor at night, padding towards Jane’s room like a summoned dog. Does she enjoy that thin white body that moves as if it were an imprint from another world?

People make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case. The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly. You could ask, ‘what should I ask Larry?’ And it would tell you. Larry Page, Google co-founder

Pleroma.

Our thoughts have substance, and especially so if you are a deity – even the youngest deity – like Sophia. She succeeds in creating the earth, but finds herself trapped in materiality – something she hates. She’s rescued, of course, a motif we find in many stories ever after, but in the meantime she leaves Planet Earth in the care of a dim-witted demiurge called – among other names – Jehovah. Jehovah has a few successes in real estate early in his managerial career on planet Earth and soon becomes the delusional tyrant-god we meet in the Jewish Old Testament. He insists that he is the only god, that he created everything, and that unquestioning worship is his due. Jehovah is insecure, and so both curiosity and criticism are severely punished

Sophia has done her best to counter this craziness by giving humankind a special gift – a divine spark – a sense of their true nature as beings of light.

In the haul, there was also a revised and annotated copy of Plato’s Republic. Plato’s theory in Republic is that somewhere else there is a world of Ideal Forms. Our world is a poor and smudged copy of the perfect forms. Instinctively we know this – and we know there is nothing we can do about it.

And I recalled our locked-in days on Lake Geneva, impounded by rain, and Byron and Polidori explaining to me why the male principle is more active than the female principle. Neither man seemed to consider that being refused an education, being legally the property of a male relative, whether father, husband or brother, having no rights to vote, and no money of her own once married, and being barred from every profession except governess or nurse, and refused every employment except mother, wife or skivvy, and wearing a costume that makes walking or riding impossible, might limit the active principle of a female.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.

This story is an invention that sits inside another invention – reality itself. Alcor is a real place. So is Manchester. So was Bedlam. The tunnels under Manchester are there – but not quite as I have described them. Some characters in this story existed, or still do. Others are fictions. None of the conversations took place in the way that they appear here – or perhaps at all. I hope I have caused no offence to the living or to the dead. This is a story.