“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I just finished a very pleasurable read by Roseanne Montillo titled The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece. As promised, this darkly alluring tour of the grotesqueries of
eighteenth and nineteenth century European popular and scientific culture is a thrilling
jaunt through a horrific yet fascinating history of grave robbing, alchemy,
artistic scientists, scientific artists, and everything in between. Equal parts
biography, travelogue and campfire tale, Montillo’s book features a skillful
interweaving of intriguing facts and fantastic speculation, all brought to life
by way of the author’s captivating narrative style.
What Montillo's book also brought to mind is the strange depravity that appears to be synonymous with human nature regardless of time period or geographical location. We think that we are gods, harnessing the elements, sparking our monstrous, soulless creations into life just because we can. Yet our visions of divinity merely twist us into the very monsters we work so hard to destroy, a strange and self-destructive dance with the devil in all its many forms. In a way, we are all mad scientists, obsessing over our creations until they awake and turn on us, revisiting upon our own heads the nightmares to which we have subjected our Others.
Our job then becomes not to destroy, but to acknowledge and accept, to educate ourselves and mediate the damage so that in becoming, we channel the danger into more constructive pathways, feeding that divine spark within until it overcomes the monster without.
Thus gentle monsters, we may be;
Alive with possibility.
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