Bikes and Books, Part 2: Frankenstein

There's very little left of my bike now. At least, there's very little left of my bike that's actually on my bike. There's a lot left of my bike, and it's scattered across the garage: the engine is nestled up next to the deep freeze; the carburetor is hiding behind a few old cans of paint; ziploc bags of more or less accurately labeled nuts and bolts cover every other surface like rusty manna, little sacks of greasy grace.

Of course, it's one thing to disassemble. It's quite another to put it all back together.

This is where Mary Shelley comes in. As an eighteen year old she crafted what could be considered the most famous book on reassembly ever written. Frankenstein is part morality tale, part Gothic romance, part good old fashioned ghost story.

By modern standards it's fairly tame. Victor Frankenstein refuses to go into details concerning the creation of his magnum opus, his patchwork person. He doesn't regale us with tales of crypt robbing or of "resurrection men." There are no gruesome surgeries, no electrodes, no hunchbacks drooling for lightening. In fact, the most tantalizing detail Frankenstein offers is to note that he has to make his creation over-large because his hands are too small to perform the delicate operations needed to attach limb to torso, vessel to vessel.

I know how he feels. My knuckles tell the tale of my attempts to unscrew the clamps holding carburetor to the air box. The Honda corporation either uses very small robots or Oompa-Loompas to put these things together. Or maybe Lilliputians.

Anyhow, the details of Frankenstein's operations are shrouded in mystery and only elucidated by imagination. That's as it should be, though, because the true horror of the tale is lost on most readers today. We look for the blood and the gore, the ooze, the hacking of limbs, the cruel and incessant dehumanization of the victim, what one critic calls "torture porn." The true horror of Frankenstein, though, is the idea of pure science, of science without moral or communal responsibility, of science divorced from any purpose other than self-aggrandizement. Victor Frankenstein builds his monster out of the spare parts of humanity simply because he can.

I'm looking around me now, looking at the bags of parts, looking at the heart of my beast rotting near the freezer, looking at the filters and manifolds of inhalation and exhalation, looking at the pipes and tubing of circulation, the rigid skeleton of the frame, the wires that carry the pulsing current all throughout the body. I, too, am hoping for a spark, hoping that this curious ball of metal and packing grease will become much more than the sum of its parts. Rebuilding a motorcycle is just a little bit like playing God. In this way, I am very much like Victor Frankenstein.

Of course, I very much doubt that my motorcycle will throttle my wife (throttle - Get it? Ha!) if I don't ride it often enough.