The monster is called “monster”
without any particular coherence
and without any reason except
the fact that being a “monster”
arouses the hatred of Baron
Frankenstein (and that of the
reader!). The first instinct of the
creature is that to learn and to
be loved, but since it only
receives hatred from everybody,
in particular from his father
(creator), he learns and
(practises) the meaning of the
word "hate". Therefore it is the
audience that creates the Monster. A
monster which strangely enough has no
name; in fact it is called the “Monster of
Frankenstein”, meaning that it “belongs to
Frankenstein", i.e. Baron Frankenstein who
generated it. Why does it not have a proper name?
Every effort made by the Monster to be accepted is destined to fail, since everything is related to his physical appearance, to his somatic
characteristics and to the inability (on the part of the external world) to recognize the beauty that resides even in an abnormal body. Nobody stops to understand, nobody wants to go deeper, nobody wishes to play a game, the game of getting to know others and realising their qualities. Their only interest is the goal and the person that manages to make a goal, but the goal is only a moment of the game, it does not constitute the game itself.
How many Monsters do we create through our indifference, how many Monsters do we force to go uphill with small or bigger stones, how many Monsters do we create only because we do not succeed in understanding and capturing the value of their inner qualities, the value of the work they do, of their different way of being.
Then we also push a stone uphill, maybe because we think that others do not understand the value of what we do and therefore it is better to push a stone (evening will arrive eventually...) and feel sorry for oneself at the thought that the others see us pushing a stone, thinking that is the only thing we can do, the only thing we are capable of doing! Since basically we feel as beings that were born to push machines forward.
But why do I have to push a stone? Because Sisyphus does? Why do not people ask themselves why they are pushing the stone instead of concentrating merely on the "strain" and "uselessness" of the task?
Sisyphus betrays a pact. With a stratagem, he has managed to convince Zeus to let him return to the world of the living with the pact that he would return to the world of the dead as soon as he completed the task for which he asked and obtained permission to return to earth. He does not respect the pact and therefore her is punished.
Frankenstein, instead, is catapulted among the living, without even having asked for it; how could he have asked for it by the way? His personal agony lasts until he manages to return to the dead.
""He is a real Nowhere man Sitting in his Nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view, Knows not where he's going to, Isn't he a bit like you and me?
(“Nowhere man”, The Beatles)“The knight of eternal youth at the age of fifty, followed the rhythm of his heart. He set off on a fine summer day To conquer beauty, truth, fairness. Before him lay the world With its absurd and degraded giants below him Ronzinante sad and heroic”.
(Nazim Hilkmet)He is a strange kind of hero, Don Quixote: after an intense and violent reading of adventure books full of fighters, he catapults himself in the world of the living (the real world?). Thereafter the heroes of the books: kings, knights, princes and kings disappear and are obscured with all their powers and only he, the king of impotency, only he and two characters that are even more miserable than him: Sancho and Ronzinante, continue the quest. Invincible Don Quixote, though he has won very little: he reminds me both of Dylan Dog (the mystery investigator who almost never solves cases, although his fame does not decrease due to that), and also of the artist Diego Velasquez, who was summoned and received generous amounts to render princes and kings immortal in painting, but who instead absorbed the immortality that were destined to his clients by each portrait he painted, thus becoming increasingly immortal.
Will anyone of us ever come close to the greatness of Don Quixote? More likely, as Erri De Luca underlines, “Sometimes we manage to identify with the Quixote´s horse, Ronzinante. Because we, just like the horse, have been ridden by some Quixote towards a good cause, mounting us and using us, inept for his needs, in order to make us run towards a goal urgent to him, towards his aims. Often, good causes are pursued by using inept people …”. What forces does Don Quixote have? Why does a character like him, who has difficulty in separating reality from imagination, continue to fascinate us so much? Is it his colander-shaped helmet? His rusty armour? What has he to teach us after 400 years? What does this odd character transmit to us?
Let us try and understand by starting from one of his most famous
adventures. Don Quixote assists during a marionette performance: at a certain point he feels an irresistible urge to help the two escaping lovers, protagonists of the pantomime. He takes the sword and slaughters the marionette characters that chase the two lovers. Don Quixote confuses the performance with the objective world, fiction with reality. Practically speaking, our hero does not limit himself to being a spectator. He becomes ridiculous.
Maybe. And we instead? How many times do we witness situations, participate in discussions, tell - emphasizing facts, performing or assisting obviously fictitious scenes - and yet, we remain there firm, immobile to assist? Even words: all too often we interpret performances and shows on TV as real, although they have very little to do with reality. As opposed to the marionette theatre of Cervantes …
“I saw it in TV”: is an undeniable criterion to establish that which is real. There is no day when it does not happen, there is no day when we do notAnd thirty or forty windmills appeared at a distance, since they were present on the countryside; and when Don Quixote saw them, he said to his equerry: «Fortune guides our destiny better than we dare desire. Can you see, my friend Sancho, that thirty or more enormous giants are approaching? I intend to fight with them and after having killed them, bestow upon myself the booty I take from them; this is an honourable war and it pleases God if I extirpate such a bad seed from the face of the earth.
(Miguel De Cervantes)turn our eyes away: “The problem belongs to somebody else; it is not my problem, somebody will think about it, somebody will decide what to do.” Having seen something in TV means that somebody takes care of it or will do so. Somebody intended as somebody else. In short somebody: NOT ME.
This is the lesson we learn from Don Quixote. Not to be spectators.We have not yet seen a TV spectator get up on stage and take part in the action, but there are so many real life characters (so many of us, to put it plainly) that we gradually become spectators of our own life, rooted in the idea of passiveness, and of our own missed opportunities. I prefer the craziness of daily life to the vision of performances of others, punctually and irrevocably in order to criticize: the plot, the interpretation, the characters.
“My bones will give life yet: they will still give blooming grass.
But life has remained in the silent voices
Of those who have lost the fool and mourns him in the hills …”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way”.
(Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities)Change, transformation, synergy, task forces, quality teams and all the rest. Organizations inside organizations. Activities inside other
activities. Horizontal visions, vertical approaches,
multifunctional teams, motivating groups, support
groups; in short a great quantity of fragmentation.
We try to motivate, to make people participate, be involved, turn the work into something positive, make the working place as heavenly as possible, to value professionalism through meritocracy, to bring out talents, to make use of our brains even at work (but we have already talked
about this) and this not only during
our free time. Does it work? I
don't know, maybe
sometimes.
