Status Updates From Frankissstein

“I could be free… If I could pluck out the memory of him from my heart as easily as his heart was plucked from the fire, I could be free.”

“Here I am. Anonymous, unnoticed, walking through the streets, and I am present and invisible. What I am thinking, what I am feeling, are private Bedlams of my own. I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.”

“I wanted to know you - in the gnostic sense of close experience of what would otherwise be unknown.
You mean you wanted to fuck me?”

“What did you expect? said Victor. When you look closely, life is absurd.”

“To be free from the body completes the human dream.”

“Shelley does not go whoring. No. He falls in love with every new female dream that seems to offer him freedom.”

“No! I don’t want eternal life, I said. This life is trouble enough.
You lack ambition, said Victor. Or perhaps it is courage that you lack.
Maybe I just don’t want to be post-human.”

“What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?”

“Most of the people, most of the time, are in horrible relationships, dreaming about being in a good relationship. And it’s a fantasy. It’s like the beach body you’ll never have”

“Differently disabled - his pessimism about love, my fear of it. Our wounded lives take shelter here. Why can’t we mend ourselves? Why can’t we save each other?”

“I am so uncertain of what I can manage that the certainty of another person is like an oracle. Victor is certain. He takes the weight off me. But what is the weight in himself?”

“What is your story, sir? I said.
That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.”

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

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

“There is a view that love, because it begins so spontaneously, is also simple. Yet if love engages our whole being and affects our whole world, how can it be simple? The day of simple are done - if they ever existed. Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.”

“I don’t say anything because he is the centre of his world. I have affected him and he never wonders how he has affected me. He is in control of what he creates. He hasn’t created me and so he feels uncertain.”

“I love you, he says.
I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don’t want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don’t trust him.”

“A man who wants to be without his body. And I am holding his body in my left head.”

“Is this what I am to you? I said.
A hand? No.
A sex object.
Don’t you like what we do? (He took his penis out of his trousers.)
You know I do. (I spat in my palm.)
Then why deny pleasure?
To avoid pain. (He takes four minutes this way.)”

“I watched him talk. I love to watch him talk. He likes to be watched. He’s a showman.”

“I wish TO KNOW why all that ails mankind must be the fault of womankind?”

“We destroy out of hatred. We destroy out of love.”

“and therefore the monster has no name, for he has no need of one.
What father does not name his child? asked Shelley.
One who is terrified of what he has created, I said.”

“Why are you so easy in your body? he said.
Because it really is my body. I had it made for me.”

“Or we could just go on as we are, I said.
He shook his head. Of the scenarios I have sketched, your alternative is the only one that is impossible.”

“I get the sense, deep down, that Victor Stein is a high-functioning madman.”

“It is easy to be controlled by someone who is controlling and charming.”

“Nationalism is on the rise, I say.
He nods. That is a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”