Homunculi
We used to think life could be coaxed if you assembled the right materials and watched closely enough.
We used to think life could be coaxed if you assembled the right materials and watched closely enough. Semen in a glass flask. Early menstrual blood. An egg. Sometimes a chicken egg. Sometimes sweat scraped from a mare in heat. The manuals disagreed on specifics but not on structure. Seal it. Warm it. Wait. Something small might begin to move.
The homunculus wasn’t meant to be impressive. Something unfinished but functional, that was the point. A tiny helper. A body without refusal. The ingredients came from kinetic thresholds, things already in motion: heat, discharge, fertility, waste. God didn’t disappear, He hovered. The manuals read like revisions of Genesis with less poetry and more instruction.
The glass mattered. Clear walls, no hiding. Life under chronic possibility of observation. If you could see it from every angle, you could intervene. Correct the temperature. Adjust the timing. Feed it blood. Try again. Failure wasn’t failure. It was iteration. God crossing out a line and rewriting it slightly to the left.
Centuries later, the same logic shows up as architecture. A circular room. A central tower. No one knows when they’re being watched, so everyone behaves as if they are. Observation without touch. Control without force. The homunculus in the flask. The worker in the open room. The subject learning to pre-edit itself. You don’t need a floor manager. You just need glass.
I think about the mare’s sweat when rooms lose their corners. When light spreads evenly and bodies stiffen without instruction. When people speak less and document more. God revises again. Adds guidelines, removes more mystery, calls it order.
Time ferments manuals. Blood darkens and dries, the heat shifts. Something forms that wasn’t planned for. The instructions list ingredients, not consequences. Life doesn’t stay small or obedient. It develops a voice.
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This piece really resonates with me! The way life can't be coaxed into existence through formulas alone - there's something both unsettling and profound about that. The metaphor of the homunculus speaks to our modern obsession with controlling and engineering outcomes, when perhaps what we need is more patience and trust in organic processes.