I, Homunculus
Feb. 6th, 2004 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe figure of the homunculus is the most famous example of somatosensory mapping: a distorted human figure drawn to reflect the space our body parts occupy on the sensory and motor cortex. The homunculus is a misshapen little man modelled from this brain map. His swollen lips, hands and feet reflect the disproportionately large cortical areas our most sensitive body parts occupy.
I've always been amused and fascinated by the homunculus. I look at him and see a self-portrait. Those fat lips and dangling genitalia! That lascivious expression, the undisguised interest in pleasure! In fact, the only way you could map my pleasure centres better is with a map of Japan. Here's my Hokkaido, here's my Honshu, here's my Kyushu. Chu!
The finger tips are the most sensitive part of any human being. It's there you'll find the highest density of sense receptors: about 2500 per square centimetre. Japan has one of the highest population densities in the world: about 350 people per square kilometre. These facts are not in any way connected. Except in my brain. What a strange place that is!
Writing a story for a magazine last night which contained some Japanese phrases, I made the observation: 'My elementary Japanese swells around the sexual areas, like a homunculus.' I meant that the way my Japanese vocabulary clusters around the topic of sex reveals the fact that my encounters with this country have usually had sensuality at their core. I stay in love hotels the way others stay in business hotels. I learn 'Japanese for Love' the way others learn 'Japanese for Business'. In fact my first Japanese phrase book was Making Out in Japanese. (I lent my copy to Howard Devoto, another man who resembles a homunculus, and never got it back.) If I'm constantly holding up Japan as a positive role model, it's because the idea of Japan has been hard-wired, by constant stimulation, reward and operant conditioning, to the pleasure centres in my brain. Perhaps I have Tokyo at the tips of my fingers and know it like the back of my hand because they have come to resemble each other in my cortical pleasure map. Perhaps the key to the pleasure quarters of my brain is the ukiyo of Edo; the 'floating world'.
It's interesting that the homunculus represents the parts of the body which are most important to non-verbal communication. My relationship to Japan is essentially non-verbal too. I've deliberately refrained from learning too much Japanese (apart from the little knots of words that have clustered around love-making), not only because I've been told that foreigners in Japan experience diminishing returns when they learn the language (they fall, all too often, into that hinterland between 'exotic foreigner' and the insider they will never quite become), but because I want to keep my senses to the fore in my relations with Japan: I want to experience it, above all, as a rush of tastes, smells, sensations, colours, and shapes. I want to walk through Japan naked and selfish as a homunculus.
The figure of the homunculus stalks myth and fiction, close cousin of the golem. The alchemist Paracelsus claims to have created an artificial human with science. Called a homunculus, this creature stands no more than 12 inches tall and does the work usually associated with a golem. The recipe for making one is simple: you'll need a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments and hair from any animal you want it to be a hybrid of. Lay the ingredients on the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point the embryo will form. But watch out: the homunculus is apt to turn on its creator or run away.
The big hit on German cinema screens in 1916 was a sci-fi horror film called Homunculus, a six-part Deutsche Bioscop production directed by Otto Rippert. The film tells of an artificial man created by a scientist who wants to make a perfect creature of pure reason. But the result, Homunculus, resents the fact that he is not a real human being and has no soul; after being driven from country to country he becomes the dictator of a large, unnamed nation and plans to conquer the world. His plans are cut short when he is destroyed, in reel six, by a convenient bolt of lightning.
The homunculus also stalks my own work. In 1996 I made a CD ROM featuring a character called Balbus, homunculus, a skinny naked amoral sensualist rendered by Florence Manlik. You could also argue that some of my songs for Kahimi Karie treated her as a sort of homunculus; a cross between a cute monster and a map of my own appetites.
Here's a nice painting, Blasphemies of the Court Jester, in which artist Michael Helsem portrays himself as a sensual painting homunculus. Are you in touch with the 'misshapen little man' inside?
I've always been amused and fascinated by the homunculus. I look at him and see a self-portrait. Those fat lips and dangling genitalia! That lascivious expression, the undisguised interest in pleasure! In fact, the only way you could map my pleasure centres better is with a map of Japan. Here's my Hokkaido, here's my Honshu, here's my Kyushu. Chu!
The finger tips are the most sensitive part of any human being. It's there you'll find the highest density of sense receptors: about 2500 per square centimetre. Japan has one of the highest population densities in the world: about 350 people per square kilometre. These facts are not in any way connected. Except in my brain. What a strange place that is!
Writing a story for a magazine last night which contained some Japanese phrases, I made the observation: 'My elementary Japanese swells around the sexual areas, like a homunculus.' I meant that the way my Japanese vocabulary clusters around the topic of sex reveals the fact that my encounters with this country have usually had sensuality at their core. I stay in love hotels the way others stay in business hotels. I learn 'Japanese for Love' the way others learn 'Japanese for Business'. In fact my first Japanese phrase book was Making Out in Japanese. (I lent my copy to Howard Devoto, another man who resembles a homunculus, and never got it back.) If I'm constantly holding up Japan as a positive role model, it's because the idea of Japan has been hard-wired, by constant stimulation, reward and operant conditioning, to the pleasure centres in my brain. Perhaps I have Tokyo at the tips of my fingers and know it like the back of my hand because they have come to resemble each other in my cortical pleasure map. Perhaps the key to the pleasure quarters of my brain is the ukiyo of Edo; the 'floating world'.
It's interesting that the homunculus represents the parts of the body which are most important to non-verbal communication. My relationship to Japan is essentially non-verbal too. I've deliberately refrained from learning too much Japanese (apart from the little knots of words that have clustered around love-making), not only because I've been told that foreigners in Japan experience diminishing returns when they learn the language (they fall, all too often, into that hinterland between 'exotic foreigner' and the insider they will never quite become), but because I want to keep my senses to the fore in my relations with Japan: I want to experience it, above all, as a rush of tastes, smells, sensations, colours, and shapes. I want to walk through Japan naked and selfish as a homunculus.
The figure of the homunculus stalks myth and fiction, close cousin of the golem. The alchemist Paracelsus claims to have created an artificial human with science. Called a homunculus, this creature stands no more than 12 inches tall and does the work usually associated with a golem. The recipe for making one is simple: you'll need a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments and hair from any animal you want it to be a hybrid of. Lay the ingredients on the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point the embryo will form. But watch out: the homunculus is apt to turn on its creator or run away.
The big hit on German cinema screens in 1916 was a sci-fi horror film called Homunculus, a six-part Deutsche Bioscop production directed by Otto Rippert. The film tells of an artificial man created by a scientist who wants to make a perfect creature of pure reason. But the result, Homunculus, resents the fact that he is not a real human being and has no soul; after being driven from country to country he becomes the dictator of a large, unnamed nation and plans to conquer the world. His plans are cut short when he is destroyed, in reel six, by a convenient bolt of lightning.
The homunculus also stalks my own work. In 1996 I made a CD ROM featuring a character called Balbus, homunculus, a skinny naked amoral sensualist rendered by Florence Manlik. You could also argue that some of my songs for Kahimi Karie treated her as a sort of homunculus; a cross between a cute monster and a map of my own appetites.
Here's a nice painting, Blasphemies of the Court Jester, in which artist Michael Helsem portrays himself as a sensual painting homunculus. Are you in touch with the 'misshapen little man' inside?
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-06 05:49 am (UTC)