Prometheus: The Modern Frankenstein

A brilliant, existential terror of a movie, if you haven't seen it. People who don't like it are probably just uncomfortable with the very real implications that it plays with.

   “Yet pause, and plunge

      Into Eternity, where recorded time,

      Even all that we imagine, age on age,

      Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind

      Flags wearily in its unending flight,

      Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;

      Perchance it has not numbered the slow years

      Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?”

                       -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

 

The universe is empty and vast,

Between planets and stars,

Only cold and darkness pass,

And on earth there is a moment,

A fragment when the crust thaws,

And biological matter consumes it,

For a moment

Between the period of intense heat,

And the freeze to which it will return,

Before it is again an inferno,

And rejoins the sun.

And during this time,

Humans will wonder why they are alive.

And during this time they will evolve,

Enough to ask, “Why?”

During this time they may,

Find the last hints of a purpose,

And develop a way of seeking their creators,
And asking “Why?”

 

Half willed, half fated,

We came expecting love,

But out there in the darkness,

There’s another force above.

Darker than the space,

Between the stars and planets,

Darker than the race,

Of men, than the meanest that have ran it.

Their will is like gravity,

Their thoughts are like thunder,

To them, we are a depravity,

That must be struck out under,

The immensity of space and time,

Before we can know why,

Why?

We are a mistake,

We are flawed, distorted.

We are a miscarriage,

We should be aborted.

Our lives are but a point,

In a pointless existence,

In a vast vacuum,

Of coldness and indifference,

Which kills us,

One way or another.

Reviews

[Marie]

This is a very pessimistic poem indeed.