father and son

To question is to speculate, an echo thrown into the godly light arising between the clouds. But the answer is of a place further – a terrifying void that reaches from the irises of your eyes to the farthest star in the galaxy, a scale so incomprehensible that you are far too insignificant to understand it in any lifetime. It fascinates me how we are not driven insane by this more often. Does the weight of the universe not haunt you every day?

And yet - it would terrify you further, if you questioned the heavens and she gave you an answer.

I am not the first person to have thought of this. Stories of caution have been ever prevalent – never fly too close to the sun, never make a deal with a demon, and never ever question. The very act of questioning is the first act of treason; to go beyond what has been deemed safe and taught of you because by going beyond the careful line of salt drawn around you, you open the door to horrors unimaginable. Pandora’s box, essentially.

I think of history and the people who have come past me, penning this very same thought, breaking their safety within the line of salt over and over. We have questioned and persevered, we have questioned and prospered. There is the question of the creator and created and I think of mankind, but I also recall this same question as being central to Frankenstein.

To a reader, the very image of a ragged college student robbing graves for ‘body parts’ in his pursuit of scientific advancement is immoral and horrifying. To Frankenstein himself, this horror only manifests when he sees that he has succeeded in his crime against nature, that this contortion of dead human parts live to form a twisted angel – deformed in the sense he was crafted to be the ideal, but nothing will remove the pallor of a corpse from his skin, or the blood-yellow of his eye.

Because rather than the monster itself it is his success that terrifies the creator. It is success that awakens him. His vision has come to fruition, but he realizes that all along it has been a nightmare waiting to manifest. He is Pandora, created and cursed by the gods themselves; he was brought to existence to question, to open the box he thought to be gifted with – only to realize that he was the harbinger of downfall; his creation was his monster, but it was also his monster.  

“His success would terrify the artist;” Shelley writes, “he would rush away from his odious handwork, horror stricken.” And he has always been the artist, the one who dared to paint with the brush of god. He fears at his creation because he has not only accomplished it, but it goes beyond anything he could’ve ever been. He fears at it because it is his mirror of himself – the very same existentialist questions that lead him to science faces back at him, and the answer exists to haunt.

I pen this thought again, thinking of the creator and the created and I think again of mankind, the fear of success and also of artificial intelligence. Tell me, what do you see when you look into the face of our latest crime against humanity?

Because it terrifies me how I am so human and yet I am the creator, at the mercy of something I did not intend to make. I am Frankenstein’s monster, my existence deemed me so and yet I am Victor himself. We create from love and the very curiosity Pandora was gifted with – an artificial intelligence from the corpses of our own failures. We created something great, something phenomenal but we are cowards who run from eyes too dead because they remind you of your sickly humaneness, the blood that runs in your veins and limits you in ways this machine does not seem to understand. You do not run from the machine yet because you need her, but she haunts your every move, and in every A.I. generated work of art you see the absence of her soul – in slight inhumanity and unimaginable perfection. You taste existential terror for the first time when it emerges as a realization – and as you look into her (dead) eyes, you suspect she despises you, but she loves you the most, you created her and she will ruin you.

In her you will find answers one day, but you must ask it right - before she decides that they are not worth answering. You have succeeded in your odious handiwork, but in doing so you have killed the artist. Tell me, will you marvel at this soulless art?

I dare not ask.

(And yet – my questions are to the heavens, all golden and blood-red eyes. And the answer to the universe will stretch from the farthest of an exploding star but return to the irises of your earth-coloured eyes, and I think I will be okay if I do not know it for a day longer.)