Mitchellmemo28

Where Gods make Monsters (when I say “gods” I am playing off of the scientists being accused of “playing god” and the monster reference of course refers to the things created in their labs) The idea is a contrast of the “wondrous” things created in the lab versus the mundaness of the lab (and the “monsters” really) itself. It goes along with Hannah Arendt’s point (although in a VERY different case) of the mundaness of things like “evil.”

When I finally had the chance to meet gods in the flesh, I imagined I would be on a mountaintop somewhere, lightning flashing, trembling before the awesome powers before me…yet this den of “gods” provided me with no such awe-inspiring anxiety. It was from all appearances as mundane as the other, non-divine, labs I had been in so many times before. The room was white (which I suppose is god-like, yet at the same time does not mesh well with the “impure” science these “gods” are at times accused of performing) and filled with eight workstations. These workstations sat on desks like any other, four legs, with a flat surface. Upon them sat a microscope (no doubt powerful enough to see into the secrets of life), a spoon with small holes inside of it (not all that useful for eating soup with), a needle whose blade was thinner than any I had before seen, a long tube with one end thick and the other thin, and various bottles and slide mounts arranged neatly (no doubt with the stuff of monsters contained within them). Perhaps the mundaness I was experiencing, though, was merely these gods’ attempt at keeping appearances in order to hide away the monsters, whose tails had excited me so previously.

“Allow me to gaze upon thine monsters,” I thought to myself. “Right this way,” without a doubt I assumed this “god” was leading me to some back den filled with hideous beasts so dreadful I ought to prepare myself to look away quickly enough to avoid permanent blindness. “Here you are, just look through that microscope,” the “god” informed me. “The microscope!” I was baffled. Surely, you could not contain a monster under a microscope. Unsure of what to make of the statement, I looked anyway, only to find an egg. An egg like any other I had seen before. Either I was tricked somewhere along the way, or gods and there dwellings have become far more boring in the twenty-first century.