“Artificial Bodies: A Miscellany”

A Miscellany

Your are my creator, but I am your master; Obey! (the monster to Victor Frankenstein) —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1918)

HELENA Radius! Doctor Gall gave you a better brain than the rest, better than ours. You are the only one of the Robots that understands perfectly. That’s why I had you put into the library, so that you could read everything, understand everything, and then, oh, Radius—I wanted you to show the whole world that the Robots are our equals. That’s what I wanted of you. RADIUS I don’t want a master. I want to be master over others. —Karel Čapek, R.U.R (1920)

The liberating word spread throughout the world that man should, on his upward path, come closer to and resemble the Machines , which, due to the universally brilliant progress of technology and science, are the most perfect of all human creation and invention. —Josef Čapek , Artificial Man (1924)

RABBI: Your own desire is nothing. For all your roads, your days and nights have been Decreed for you, decreed for all your deeds. You are created for more than mere life, To work great wonders here in hush and hiding To do your deeds in secrecy and silence. No one shall know about your furtive strength, You'll be a water carrier, a wood chopper.

PHANTOM: A golem

RABBI: A nation’s messenger, a man of might.

PHANTOM: A servant to be ordered, to be ruled.

דער גולם , Der Goylem, The Golem by H. Leivick, 1920 (set in Prague in the seventeenth century). Translation from Yiddish by Joachim Neugroschel, 2006.