During the age of alchemy in the 16th century, a "
homunculus" was fabled to be a tiny, fully formed re-creation of a man.
Homunculus is used in psychology today as a memory tool to describe the distorted scale model of a human sculpted to reflect the relative space of human body parts.
Nabokov's choice of the word
homunculus may strike one as archaic, but it echoes the opening pages of Tristram Shandy, in which an elaborate set of indirect allusions and convoluted hints combine into the story of the protagonist's conception: Walter Shandy performs two husbandly duties on the first Sunday of every month where he winds the household clock and has sex with his wife (Tristram Shandy 4 4-5).
He links this register of knowledge with the
homunculus. The register is operational early, but becomes subsumed in discourse by the sight-driven apprehension of our body as whole and coherent.
Verite, in the end, will neither be a thriller nor a comedy, but a mashup, just like such current projects as
Homunculus, Jones's antic take on Shelly's Frankenstein-, Straight Up Vampire, an '80s jukebox musical starring the undead; and his new adaptation of a biblical story, Salome of the Moon ("a princess party that goes horribly wrong, set in ancient Judea").
Think Monkey is Sophie's version of what she calls "some agency [that] certainly operates my frontal lobe which is responsible for various higher--or more frontal--mental functions." Sophie references the neurobiologist Christof Koch, the author of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004), who describes the "computational entity" in the "neuronal networks" of the frontal lobe, which, he writes, is responsible for "many complex operations, such as thoughts, concept formations, intentions, and so on." It acts, he says, "to all intents and purposes like a
homunculus," which itself is "nonconscious." Sophie calls this
homunculus Think Monkey.
In a notorious image, Reynolds painted Puck as a precociously knowing
homunculus perched on a toadstool.
Einstein's Little
Homunculus band; caller is David Eisensladter $8; 14 and younger free with an adult.
The model of the
Homunculus Nebula reveals protrusions, trenches, holes and irregularities in its molecular hydrogen emission.
You are pregnant with your second child and husband and I am a
homunculus of print-- The sensual world is inevitable, Strapped upon us like a harness, I never pursued you through our pain I prefer the riddle, the fiddle of ideas that tune, rune the maze of the mind the maze is the mind, the mind the maze, You are the secret Minotaur trapped, your senses, potent, pulsing, ravenous-- I stoked your lust but loathed your coarse vitality I could not fathom your fear-- The best erotic poems are about emotional relationship--the before, during, and afterward of sexual entanglement.
homunculus); Suchil-Vilchis, 1990*; Zamudio-Resendiz, 1998 (also, as D.