The Task Enjoined by Heaven (with reflections on Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein')

[matt cardin]

If you fancy seeing me talk about "a heady cognitive-emotional state of intensified synchronistic sensitivity that is typical of encounters with the numinous guidance that lies behind and beneath the veil of the individual ego mind," and if you also feel like reading something resembling a poem that somehow came through the patent non-poet known as me, as accompanied by thematically connected reflections on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with its archetypal story of a creative process gone awry and turned monstrous because of the creator's refusal to acknowledge his fundamental oneness with his creation -- then, yeah, read this.

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“If you bring forth what is within you,” says one popular translation of saying 70 in the Gospel of Thomas, “what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” In an interesting variation on the combined promise and warning of this ancient wisdom, Victor brought forth what was within him, but it destroyed them both, because he found himself unable to own or accept it. As someone who has endured a sometimes troubled relationship to his own creativity, and who has found a rich vein of gold in exploring the personification of creativity in the concept (and the vivid experience) of an accompanying muse/daemon/genius, I find the Frankenstein story to be extraordinarily insightful, and also disturbingly cautionary, not only and not even primarily in the ways that have been called out by the legions of readers and commentators who have analyzed the story ad nauseam as a tale of scientific hubris and the Promethean dangers of "playing God." To me, Frankenstein, which Brian Aldiss once astutely characterized as “the first great myth of the industrial age,” approaches the status of a master archetype whose meanings can be mined for deep psychological and spiritual application.

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