A Monster's Notes

A Monster's Notes

“A remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity.” — The Washington Post   Now in paperback, the bold, genre-defying book that asked: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster at all but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden?   In a riveting mix of fact and poetic license, Laurie Sheck gives us the "monster" in his own words: recalling how he was "made" and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him; pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with Mary's (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates); taking notes on all aspects of human striving--from Gertrude Stein to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind. LAURIE SHECK is the author of five books of poetry, including The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recent Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Boston Review, among other publications. She teaches in the MFA Program at the New School. A LETTER June 30, 2007 Dear Mr. Emilson, This is to inform you that the final closing on your building on East 6th Street was successfully completed at 10:15 this morning. I have deposited the check as you instructed. The new owners will begin renovations tomorrow. In our previous communications, I asserted that the structure, now in great disrepair, was completely abandoned. However, yesterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a short note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. As these technically belong to you, please let me know if you want them forwarded to your London address. I have not unbound the manuscript, but reproduce for you here the short note left on top: So much blurs …I write then forget what I write…walk these streets, a stranger to myself and others…Then sometimes it all suddenly flares back-my breath catches, my brain aches. How long have I wandered, talking in my thoughts to the one who made me from dead, discarded things, then left me? Why did he need to see me as frightful, misbegotten? I know he'll never hear, never answer. Walking, I remember the other ones as well, those three I watched though none of them could see me. Isn't seeing a wounding and caressing both? All of them gone now, though once I held them with my secret eyes and in my own way loved them. Mary, Claire, Clerval… All those hours they visited me in air, came to me as voices made of flesh, ripe with shades of meaning, though in the end all that's left of them is absence. Why did she need to portray me as she did? For so long I tried not to think of our days in the graveyard, the clicking of pebbles in her hands as she sat near the bushes, listening while I read. Even now the details grow faint…I try to forget…banish it all from my mind…though part of me wants only to remember. She was a child of nine sitting by her mother's grave. I sat behind the bushes with my books. Once we briefly spoke. Mostly I read to her, that's all. And her step-sister Claire, how strange that she came to me years later, long after I'd been wandering, heading North, far off in the Arctic by then. Why did she need to come to me, or was it I who needed her? And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead-in fact he traveled east as he'd wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in gentle transcription as day after day he translated the Dream of The Red Chamber in his house at the foot of Xiangshan Hill, and wrote letters to his friend in Aosta. Isn't any voice largely mute and partial, even those that speak openly and plainly (though of course I mostly hide). Why do I leave this? These words absorbed into the garbage dumps, the flames- NOTES NOTES ON THE EARTH SEEN FROM SPACEOver and over the word fragile. “It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it “contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere.”To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the earth looked “touchingly alone.” And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”Neil Armstrong said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”And Ulf Merbold: “For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated