FRANKENSTEIN: A SELF-PORTRAIT (PART TWO) WHILE all of my works contain a dash of autobiography (regardless of how subterranean it may appear) this piece is autobiography in it’s most raw and exposed form. When my partner of twenty-five years died after a brief battle with cancer in 2004, a decision had to be made whether to throw in the to-wel and follow him or prove to myself that I’m made of sterner stuff. ¶ Extracting telling quotes on loss and loneliness, desire and self-recrimination, and creativity and destruction from Mary Shelley’s little-read 1819 masterpiece, this work is one of a series of cathartic fragments from an ongoing rebuilding process which moved me away from the lure of death towards fashioning myself as a new creation. FRANKENSTEIN: A SELF-PORTRAIT (PART TWO) is located at the intersection of love and loss, and by adopting the strategy of layering a text from the dawn of the modern industrial age with an image from its dusk somehow captures the essence of romanticism. ¶ While the writing maybe completely over the top and the image/text juxtaposition may be obsessively mad, where is it mandated that eroticism must be fun? A year and a half ago I wanted to die, and now I do not. That is all that truly matters. BRUCE EVES

THE TEXT READS: “It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that [he] whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever – that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My [lover] was dead, but we still have duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.”