Frankenstein's Mother
6/7/96
FRANKENSTEIN'S MOTHER
It's so weird, really. I am a man. But I was once part of a woman. That is to say, I was an egg in my mother's ovary. And I was also once part of my dad. I was a sperm in his balls. Jesus Christ! I used to be in two pieces. And one of the pieces, which looked and wriggled like an ittybitty tadpole, lived in my dad's balls, for Christ's sake! Was it the left ball or the right ball?
Then the pollywog half of me that came from Pop joined up with the ovoid half that came from Mom and started to split and multiply in my mother's uterus, of all places. Oh, did I mention that my father literally had to insert his erect penis in my mother's vagina and move it in and out a bunch of times before shooting sperm into her? And that they probably both enjoyed doing this?
For Christ's sake! It's unbelievable, just unbelievable. It probably didn't happen that way in my case. I believe I was the exception. I'm probably the result of artificial insemination. Did they HAVE articial insemination in 1947? Who the hell knows? I'll bet they artificially inseminated farm animals----cattle, race horses, that sort of thing---so who's to say they didn't have the technology to articially inseminate my mother?
Because Mom would never have permitted my dad to do a crazy thing such as I just described. Maybe they had intercourse to make my BROTHER; he's just weird enough, bloody minded enough, to have resulted from such an ungodly act. But I couldn't possibly have resulted from intercourse. I must have been the first test tube baby. Yes, that's it! Long before anyone thought it possible, I was conceived in a test tube by a mad scientist who kept his methods secret!
Or maybe he assembled me from parts dug up in a graveyard, and then tied me down on his laboratory and hooked me up to electrodes so that when the next lightning storm blew over, I took a bolt right in the heart and came alive! This must have happened very early. I deduce I was assembled from baby parts because I have seen photos of myself as a very young baby in my mother's arms.
So what probably happened was, the villagers angrily attacked Dr. Frankenstein's castle, and just before they set it on fire, Dr. Frankenstein UPS'd me to my foster parents, those people who raised me and claim to be my genetic forebears.
A skeptic might wonder, if I were truly Frankenstein's monster, why don't I have big bolts in my neck, and where are the seams where my extremities were sewn onto my torso? But the Frankenstein's Monsters we see in the movies are from the early 19th Century. Mad scientists' technology, including cosmetic surgery, was very crude then---about what you can expect from a Cub Scout vying for a leathercraft merit badge.
A mad scientist from the mid-20th Century probably could stick the head on the neck without those big bolts. And he can sew mico-sutures invisible to the unaided human eye. He can rip off a fly's wings and doublestitch 'em back on so they're twice as secure as God made them.
In sum, I've pretty well established, to my own satisfaction, that I'm made of other people's parts. That would explain a lot. But it also raises a few questions. How long was my brain sitting underground before those body snatchers dug it up and delivered it to my Maker, the good doctor? And whose brain WAS it? And how much of it died before doc got some blood pumping through it? All of it? Is that why I didn't make National Merit Scholar?
I've always felt like a mess of illfitting parts of unknown origin, and now I know why. I've always felt like a guest in my own family. I knew and loved these people, yet I was alien to them, and them to me.
More questions: Are there other Frankenstein's Monsters out there? And if there are, should I be trying to get in touch with them? If I walked into a Las Vegas convention for Frankenstein's Monsters, would I suddenly feel at home? Would I suddenly understand why I am the way I am, and why the world looks the way it does to me? Would I feel powerful sibling bonds with the other monsters, and would I meet and fall for a pretty lady monster? ARE there any pretty lady monsters? Do I deserve no better mate than a nob-necked monstrosity because that's all I am?
A further reflection: Even if I was conceived, heaven forfend!, in the traditional fashion in which 1947 babies were conceived, which is to say, gulp!, through the sexual congress of my putative parents, aren't I still, in that case, a kind of Frankenstein's Monster?
After all, if I am indeed the consequence of intercourse, the result of the joining of a sperm-part from my dad with an egg-part from my mom, then I, like the literary Monster, was manufactured from the separate body parts of other people. I also have something in common with Venus flytraps, chrysanthemums, and God and the Devil only know what other plants, because I am the product of pollination.
So I am not only a Frankenstein's Monster, with my parents collaborating as Frankenstein, I am also a Swamp Thing. I'm a big ol' tree with hair for leaves, torso for trunk, arms for branches, and legs for roots.
So my parents are not only Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, they are also a honey bee and a daisy, a pollinator and a blossom, a pistil and a stamen. What does that make me? Confused? Or merely a vegetable?
Another grotesquerie in my life: After my conception, I was a zygote, splitting and resplitting, my cells growing at an exponential rate. My mother was kind enough to share her nutrients and oxygen with me, or I never would have made it. So that means I'm impossibly obligated, umbilically ligated, to her. How can I possibly thank her enough for the very breath that kept me alive while I was underwater for 9 months, squirming around in that amniotic sea?
It's as if everyone who was ever of woman born was issued a huge student loan at the moment of conception, of matriculation, a loan so great it's impossible to pay it off. But I've got to give moms, or at least gentile moms, credit. They're rather big about the whole thing. They don't always hammer their offspring for re-payment of the unpayable.
I can imagine one way for female hatchlings to pay off this obligation. They can have babies themselves. That way, by themselves playing the role of mother, they can pump oxygen and nutrients into little their tadpoles, or zygotes, or fetuses, or monsters, and pass the obligation on to them! But how can males pay off their maternal loans? Even if they get sex change operations, they can't conceive. At least, I've never heard of a pregnant transexual.
There's another, more convenient, way to look at this gift-of-life conumdrum. That is, Mom and Dad conceive, gestate, and nurture Baby, and that's just the way it is. Baby doesn't owe them a thing. It's Mom and Dad's business if they want to have and raise kids, and there's no obligation incurred on the part of their offspring and no need to repay them.
It's easy to say that. And Mom and Dad may be magnanimous enough not to exploit their child's sense of obligation or gratitude for the gift of life. But the fact remains that Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein made and raised the Monster. And a part of every monster's make-up is to be aware that he got the gift of life from something outside himself.
You get a gift, somebody's nice enough to give you a gift, and you thank them for it. Isn't that the way it goes? So must you thank and thank and thank your parents, every moment of your life, even when they're fucking with your mind? Must you even thank your parents for their mindfucks? Or do you make a distinction between the bad stuff they gave you and the good stuff? Do you thank them and appreciate them only for the good stuff? What if you can't remember all the things, good and bad, that they gave you?
What if Dr. or Mrs. Frankenstein violated you when you were three months old, and you can't remember it but you're carrying the damage around in your unconscious? Are you supposed to be grateful for that? How do you sort it out from the good stuff, when it's part of what you are? What if part of your genetic inheritance is a tendency toward acute rheumatoid arthritis, including crippling pain and dreadful deformity? Should you be grateful for that?
What if one of your parents teaches you to be a musician, and you go to Julliard, and you find that you've inherited just enough talent to be bested by the very best, and there's nothing you can do to overcome that, but you've also inherited a character which won't allow you to settle for anything less than the best and so you kill yourself? Do you thank Mom and Pop Frankenstein for that heritage just before blowing your brains all over your dorm room wall?
And there are all the Frankensteins that came before your mommy and daddy Frankensteins. There are grandpappy Frankensteins, and great great grandmammy Frankensteins, stretching back untold thousands of years and generations to the original Eve Frankenstein, who, we are are told by genetic researchers, was a woman living in Africa 200,000 years ago. We are assembled from body parts from a boneyard as big as the globe. We inherit a genetic and cultural legacy, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do we die, from all those thousands and millions of mothers and motherfuckers. Are we obligated to them all? Should we resent them all for the parts of the inheritance that went sour?
And what if you have inherited some goddawful genetic mutation, such as growing an index finger out of the middle of our forehead, which is the result of a cosmic ray zapping one of the sperms, YOUR sperm, in your dad's left ball. Suppose this cosmic ray came from the sun. Should you therefore resent the hell out of the sun for making you look like a goddamn unicorn for the rest of your life?
Maybe you get tired of trying to figure out which of your forebears you ought to be kicking in the ass for your genetic and cultural inheritance. Maybe you begin to realize that your cultural inheritance is even more complicated and mysterious than your genetic legacy. Maybe you realize that you are influenced by the history of all nations and tribes, by music written by a half-mad German in Vienna in 1805, by scripture written by religious fanatics in the Sinai Desert 3000 years ago, by the way a slaveowner laid the lash on his slave's back in the Louisiana Delta in 1737. Maybe you're influenced by the way a Mongol sewed his yurt. Maybe you're in the death grip, or life grip, of the influence of some genius cave painter, some guy who made Picasso look like a piker, some guy who lived in the Rift Valley of East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. You finally come to admit you don't really know who to be mad at or grateful to, or how it is you came to be so wonderful, and so fucked up.
So you take a shortcut. You say, "Sure, Ma and Pa Frankenstein made me, conceived me with the act of darkness and love, raised me, for better or worse, in the only way they knew how, trying hard or hardly trying. But I'm cutting through all the bullshit and I'm viewing my life as a gift from God. He or She or It, not Mom and Dad, is my real maker and inventor."
Then you can blame or thank God for how you're doing, how sick or healthy you are, how poor or rich you are, how sad or happy you are. And if you're sick and sad one day, you resent the heck out of God that day. And if the next day you win the lottery and recover from the flu, then you fall down on your knees and thank He/She/It.
Sooner or later though, that vexed question comes around again. "How did God make me? Tinkering in a garage? Mixing spare body parts and a lightning storm? Or did he, just for laughs, cause Dad to jump Mom's bones so that I might be conceived. And what if this union was an act of darkness as well as an act of light? Does that mean that God and the Devil conspired together to conceive me?"
Suppose God and the Devil were one entity, one Dr. Frankenstein, and you were the monster they made, through the instrument of your parents? Suppose you, Frankenstein's Monster, roamed the Earth, gibbering and moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, blunderingly murthering innocent tykes, being loved only by those too blind to see who you really were.
Would you get yourself a nice wardrobe and try to pose as a human? Would you wear a high collar to hide your neck nobs? Would you seek employment and hope nobody looked too hard at your claptrap-filled resume? Would you find yourself a lady Frankenstein's Monster, and would the two of you get married and pass your legacy onto the next generation of monstrosities?
Or would you habor a savage grudge for being the way you were, and would you go looking for revenge? Would you track down your Maker, your God-and-Devil, your own private Dr. Frankenstein, in his castle and kick his skinny ass? Would you fry him in his lightning bolt machine and take him apart limb from limb and take those parts to the nearest boneyard and bury them in separate graves? Would you, if you could, undo all that had been done to you? Or will you, Frankenstein, just pass the buck on down the line?
--FIN--
FRANKENSTEIN'S MOTHER
It's so weird, really. I am a man. But I was once part of a woman. That is to say, I was an egg in my mother's ovary. And I was also once part of my dad. I was a sperm in his balls. Jesus Christ! I used to be in two pieces. And one of the pieces, which looked and wriggled like an ittybitty tadpole, lived in my dad's balls, for Christ's sake! Was it the left ball or the right ball?
Then the pollywog half of me that came from Pop joined up with the ovoid half that came from Mom and started to split and multiply in my mother's uterus, of all places. Oh, did I mention that my father literally had to insert his erect penis in my mother's vagina and move it in and out a bunch of times before shooting sperm into her? And that they probably both enjoyed doing this?
For Christ's sake! It's unbelievable, just unbelievable. It probably didn't happen that way in my case. I believe I was the exception. I'm probably the result of artificial insemination. Did they HAVE articial insemination in 1947? Who the hell knows? I'll bet they artificially inseminated farm animals----cattle, race horses, that sort of thing---so who's to say they didn't have the technology to articially inseminate my mother?
Because Mom would never have permitted my dad to do a crazy thing such as I just described. Maybe they had intercourse to make my BROTHER; he's just weird enough, bloody minded enough, to have resulted from such an ungodly act. But I couldn't possibly have resulted from intercourse. I must have been the first test tube baby. Yes, that's it! Long before anyone thought it possible, I was conceived in a test tube by a mad scientist who kept his methods secret!
Or maybe he assembled me from parts dug up in a graveyard, and then tied me down on his laboratory and hooked me up to electrodes so that when the next lightning storm blew over, I took a bolt right in the heart and came alive! This must have happened very early. I deduce I was assembled from baby parts because I have seen photos of myself as a very young baby in my mother's arms.
So what probably happened was, the villagers angrily attacked Dr. Frankenstein's castle, and just before they set it on fire, Dr. Frankenstein UPS'd me to my foster parents, those people who raised me and claim to be my genetic forebears.
A skeptic might wonder, if I were truly Frankenstein's monster, why don't I have big bolts in my neck, and where are the seams where my extremities were sewn onto my torso? But the Frankenstein's Monsters we see in the movies are from the early 19th Century. Mad scientists' technology, including cosmetic surgery, was very crude then---about what you can expect from a Cub Scout vying for a leathercraft merit badge.
A mad scientist from the mid-20th Century probably could stick the head on the neck without those big bolts. And he can sew mico-sutures invisible to the unaided human eye. He can rip off a fly's wings and doublestitch 'em back on so they're twice as secure as God made them.
In sum, I've pretty well established, to my own satisfaction, that I'm made of other people's parts. That would explain a lot. But it also raises a few questions. How long was my brain sitting underground before those body snatchers dug it up and delivered it to my Maker, the good doctor? And whose brain WAS it? And how much of it died before doc got some blood pumping through it? All of it? Is that why I didn't make National Merit Scholar?
I've always felt like a mess of illfitting parts of unknown origin, and now I know why. I've always felt like a guest in my own family. I knew and loved these people, yet I was alien to them, and them to me.
More questions: Are there other Frankenstein's Monsters out there? And if there are, should I be trying to get in touch with them? If I walked into a Las Vegas convention for Frankenstein's Monsters, would I suddenly feel at home? Would I suddenly understand why I am the way I am, and why the world looks the way it does to me? Would I feel powerful sibling bonds with the other monsters, and would I meet and fall for a pretty lady monster? ARE there any pretty lady monsters? Do I deserve no better mate than a nob-necked monstrosity because that's all I am?
A further reflection: Even if I was conceived, heaven forfend!, in the traditional fashion in which 1947 babies were conceived, which is to say, gulp!, through the sexual congress of my putative parents, aren't I still, in that case, a kind of Frankenstein's Monster?
After all, if I am indeed the consequence of intercourse, the result of the joining of a sperm-part from my dad with an egg-part from my mom, then I, like the literary Monster, was manufactured from the separate body parts of other people. I also have something in common with Venus flytraps, chrysanthemums, and God and the Devil only know what other plants, because I am the product of pollination.
So I am not only a Frankenstein's Monster, with my parents collaborating as Frankenstein, I am also a Swamp Thing. I'm a big ol' tree with hair for leaves, torso for trunk, arms for branches, and legs for roots.
So my parents are not only Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, they are also a honey bee and a daisy, a pollinator and a blossom, a pistil and a stamen. What does that make me? Confused? Or merely a vegetable?
Another grotesquerie in my life: After my conception, I was a zygote, splitting and resplitting, my cells growing at an exponential rate. My mother was kind enough to share her nutrients and oxygen with me, or I never would have made it. So that means I'm impossibly obligated, umbilically ligated, to her. How can I possibly thank her enough for the very breath that kept me alive while I was underwater for 9 months, squirming around in that amniotic sea?
It's as if everyone who was ever of woman born was issued a huge student loan at the moment of conception, of matriculation, a loan so great it's impossible to pay it off. But I've got to give moms, or at least gentile moms, credit. They're rather big about the whole thing. They don't always hammer their offspring for re-payment of the unpayable.
I can imagine one way for female hatchlings to pay off this obligation. They can have babies themselves. That way, by themselves playing the role of mother, they can pump oxygen and nutrients into little their tadpoles, or zygotes, or fetuses, or monsters, and pass the obligation on to them! But how can males pay off their maternal loans? Even if they get sex change operations, they can't conceive. At least, I've never heard of a pregnant transexual.
There's another, more convenient, way to look at this gift-of-life conumdrum. That is, Mom and Dad conceive, gestate, and nurture Baby, and that's just the way it is. Baby doesn't owe them a thing. It's Mom and Dad's business if they want to have and raise kids, and there's no obligation incurred on the part of their offspring and no need to repay them.
It's easy to say that. And Mom and Dad may be magnanimous enough not to exploit their child's sense of obligation or gratitude for the gift of life. But the fact remains that Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein made and raised the Monster. And a part of every monster's make-up is to be aware that he got the gift of life from something outside himself.
You get a gift, somebody's nice enough to give you a gift, and you thank them for it. Isn't that the way it goes? So must you thank and thank and thank your parents, every moment of your life, even when they're fucking with your mind? Must you even thank your parents for their mindfucks? Or do you make a distinction between the bad stuff they gave you and the good stuff? Do you thank them and appreciate them only for the good stuff? What if you can't remember all the things, good and bad, that they gave you?
What if Dr. or Mrs. Frankenstein violated you when you were three months old, and you can't remember it but you're carrying the damage around in your unconscious? Are you supposed to be grateful for that? How do you sort it out from the good stuff, when it's part of what you are? What if part of your genetic inheritance is a tendency toward acute rheumatoid arthritis, including crippling pain and dreadful deformity? Should you be grateful for that?
What if one of your parents teaches you to be a musician, and you go to Julliard, and you find that you've inherited just enough talent to be bested by the very best, and there's nothing you can do to overcome that, but you've also inherited a character which won't allow you to settle for anything less than the best and so you kill yourself? Do you thank Mom and Pop Frankenstein for that heritage just before blowing your brains all over your dorm room wall?
And there are all the Frankensteins that came before your mommy and daddy Frankensteins. There are grandpappy Frankensteins, and great great grandmammy Frankensteins, stretching back untold thousands of years and generations to the original Eve Frankenstein, who, we are are told by genetic researchers, was a woman living in Africa 200,000 years ago. We are assembled from body parts from a boneyard as big as the globe. We inherit a genetic and cultural legacy, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do we die, from all those thousands and millions of mothers and motherfuckers. Are we obligated to them all? Should we resent them all for the parts of the inheritance that went sour?
And what if you have inherited some goddawful genetic mutation, such as growing an index finger out of the middle of our forehead, which is the result of a cosmic ray zapping one of the sperms, YOUR sperm, in your dad's left ball. Suppose this cosmic ray came from the sun. Should you therefore resent the hell out of the sun for making you look like a goddamn unicorn for the rest of your life?
Maybe you get tired of trying to figure out which of your forebears you ought to be kicking in the ass for your genetic and cultural inheritance. Maybe you begin to realize that your cultural inheritance is even more complicated and mysterious than your genetic legacy. Maybe you realize that you are influenced by the history of all nations and tribes, by music written by a half-mad German in Vienna in 1805, by scripture written by religious fanatics in the Sinai Desert 3000 years ago, by the way a slaveowner laid the lash on his slave's back in the Louisiana Delta in 1737. Maybe you're influenced by the way a Mongol sewed his yurt. Maybe you're in the death grip, or life grip, of the influence of some genius cave painter, some guy who made Picasso look like a piker, some guy who lived in the Rift Valley of East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. You finally come to admit you don't really know who to be mad at or grateful to, or how it is you came to be so wonderful, and so fucked up.
So you take a shortcut. You say, "Sure, Ma and Pa Frankenstein made me, conceived me with the act of darkness and love, raised me, for better or worse, in the only way they knew how, trying hard or hardly trying. But I'm cutting through all the bullshit and I'm viewing my life as a gift from God. He or She or It, not Mom and Dad, is my real maker and inventor."
Then you can blame or thank God for how you're doing, how sick or healthy you are, how poor or rich you are, how sad or happy you are. And if you're sick and sad one day, you resent the heck out of God that day. And if the next day you win the lottery and recover from the flu, then you fall down on your knees and thank He/She/It.
Sooner or later though, that vexed question comes around again. "How did God make me? Tinkering in a garage? Mixing spare body parts and a lightning storm? Or did he, just for laughs, cause Dad to jump Mom's bones so that I might be conceived. And what if this union was an act of darkness as well as an act of light? Does that mean that God and the Devil conspired together to conceive me?"
Suppose God and the Devil were one entity, one Dr. Frankenstein, and you were the monster they made, through the instrument of your parents? Suppose you, Frankenstein's Monster, roamed the Earth, gibbering and moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, blunderingly murthering innocent tykes, being loved only by those too blind to see who you really were.
Would you get yourself a nice wardrobe and try to pose as a human? Would you wear a high collar to hide your neck nobs? Would you seek employment and hope nobody looked too hard at your claptrap-filled resume? Would you find yourself a lady Frankenstein's Monster, and would the two of you get married and pass your legacy onto the next generation of monstrosities?
Or would you habor a savage grudge for being the way you were, and would you go looking for revenge? Would you track down your Maker, your God-and-Devil, your own private Dr. Frankenstein, in his castle and kick his skinny ass? Would you fry him in his lightning bolt machine and take him apart limb from limb and take those parts to the nearest boneyard and bury them in separate graves? Would you, if you could, undo all that had been done to you? Or will you, Frankenstein, just pass the buck on down the line?
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:22 AM
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