Madeleine L'Engle is Gone

Just heard that she passed, and had to say something.

I had a mixed relationship with her work. As a kid I loved her Wrinkle In Time Trilogy, then got angry at the fourth book because of the way Meg gets turned into a pregnant housewife despite her brilliance and left home from the adventure (this was when I was a teenager); for awhile I couldn't forgive Ms. L'Engle. After all, hadn't Meg's own mom been a scientist and a mom? But now someone has reminded me about the wonderful song from Wind in the Door, and I had to take it all back. She was a worthy influence; there was a lot of power and beauty in many of her books, and an understanding of relationships, that I admire.

Here you go:

"I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.
I Name you Calvin.
I Name you Mr. Jenkins.
I Name you Proginoskes.
I fill you with Naming.
Be!
Be, butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are,
be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
Be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system,
sing with us,
dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation,
seagulls and seraphim,
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim.
(O cherubim.)
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!"

Plus, who can't love a writer who includes a tired, grumpy, and bureaucratic school principal in the saving of the Universe?

Interesting article by the Times here

Thanks to reader Intertext for this heads' up, and her friend Curtana for the reminder of the quote.

World's Largest Camera Obscura

I was just listening to the BBC on the radio in my car. If you haven't heard about this, you should check it out: the Legacy Photo Project, here in California, did an amazing project last year using an airplane hanger as a camera obscura, or pinhole camera, to produce probably the world's largest photograph, made on specially-ordered German muslin without seams: three stories high by eleven stories long. The place is not beautiful, but it's an amazing piece of engineering and cooperative work, as you can see if you go to the Great Picture link and then click on the Fact Sheet.

I was nosing around the photography websites and seeing complaints of how lame the picture looks, but from what the guy I heard says, as you walk up close, the detail is amazing. If you go to the "gallery" link in "The Great Picture" section, second photo along shows some of the details. And all with a lens-less 1/4" pinhole.

Definitely a curiosity worth storing in the Cabinet - all 1200 pounds of it.

Wunderkammer Alert, again

Covered Uranium Glass Sugar Bowl, England, about 1840–1860. This glass was actually made with uranium, and has a deep yellow glow to it not found in any other kind of glass.

Thanks to Morbid Anatomy for their mention quite recently of the Corning Museum of Glass' Curiosities of Glassmaking show, a purely glass wunderkammer: a real, proper exhibition of curiosities. On looking at the Exhibition Checklist, which sadly does not contain any pictures (sigh), I was blown away by the descriptions, and am nearly ready to buy plane tickets to see the wonderous thing.

Euplectellum Aspergillum, or glass sponge, is also known as Venus' Flower Basket. The skeleton of the sponge is a lattice of silica; a scientific study of its substructure and refractive properties found that the sponge’s silica spicules transmit light in a similar way to the optical fibers used in telecommunications.

Among other things, there are glass fire grenades, a pyrex iron c. 1946, meteoric glass, glass sponges, a Klein bottle, Prince Rupert's Drops, strange glass medical equipment, a collection of glass eyes, and glass eye beads, which are supposed to divert the evil eye (more about these later), not to mention various odd, old scientific glass acoutrements and glass used for reliquaries.

If you are anywhere near upstate New York, I encourage you to go look at what seems like one of the most interesting exhibitions this year.

Curiosities of Glassmaking, an exhibit in the West Bridge Gallery of the Corning Museum of Glass, is up until October 21st, 2007.

Incorruptible and Forever

Highgate Cemetery, in London

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:19)

As I mentioned in my post on reliquaries, some relics are actually whole saints, preserved in a state that is called "incorruptible". This means "the property of a body — usually a human body — that does not decompose after death...
Incorruptibility is seen as distinct from the good preservation of a body, or mummification. Incorruptible bodies are often said to have the Odour of Sanctity, a sweet smell...if a body remains incorruptible after death, this is generally seen to be a sign that the individual is a saint. The converse is not true: not every saint is expected to have an incorruptible corpse." [wiki] And incorruptible bodies, according to the Catholic Church, must be bodies that have not been embalmed or otherwise preserved.

Here's a question, though: "Is decomposition a BAD thing?"

I am always torn about this supposedly miraculous incorruptibility, mostly because so many of them really look mummified. I really want them to be real, because it's such a fascinating and weird addition to the minutae of the world: I mean, what a marvelous concept, to be so outside the physical order of things that you smell like flowers, or keep your dewy complexion, even though you have departed this earthly plane. I suppose it seems glamorous, extraordinary even, to leave behind whatever mystical quality makes your flesh stay and stay, as if you had never left. And yet, there is something creepy, something unnatural about it, too. And so often a dead saint is described as "fresh and sweet as the day they died" - but then when you see pictures of them they don't look much different than some of the mummies in, for example, Guanajuato, Mexico, none of whom are considered saintly in the least.


Incorruptibility has shown up in many different religions, but Catholicism is the place where it really has taken hold. With the belief in relics came a desire to exhume the corpses of people who had been particularly devout or who had caused miracles during their lifetimes. A good number of the bodies thus exhumed were proclaimed incorrupt, which was for a long time a real weight in the argument for someone's beatification.

Theoretically, accidentally preserved corpses are typically discolored, wrinkled, distorted, skeletal looking and lacking in elasticity, whereas a truly incorruptible body doesn't have any of those characteristics: instead, they are moist and flexible, and often retain certain organs intact, such as the liver or heart. Unlike most long-dead corpses, incorruptibles supposedly have a sweet, almost floral, smell; and all this even after years in damp, corrosive places.

The reliquary containing St. Sergius' incorrupt body. St. Sergius of Radonezh died in 1392.

Unfortunately, the really old saints, such as Sergius of Radonezh are kept in very old reliquaries, and are therefore mostly closed from view; it is only since the 1700s or so, when glass became a proper industry, that large reliquaries have been able to incorporate enough glass to make it possible to to get a really good view of the body thus preserved. Thus, the incorruptibles in more recent reliquaries, such as the head of the amazing St. Catherine of Siena, whom the folk at Curious Expeditions went to see, are actually on display. A surprising number of incorruptible saints are quite recent, with a number of them living and dying in the 19th century; and you can actually see photographs of them when you read about them in Wikipedia or elsewhere.


I was impressed and suspicious when I saw the remains of St. Bernadette Soubirous, who died in 1879 and was exhumed several times before being put in her glass reliquary in Nevers, France. Her face is so perfect, so impossibly serene and attractive, that I had difficulty not smelling a rat. Then I found out that during the last exhumation but one, the ever-so-helpful folk who did it actually washed the body, so when they re-exhumed her in 1909 there was a slight discoloration to her face. This led to cosmetic procedures: "A precise imprint of the face was molded so that the firm of Pierre Imans [a high-quality mannequin designer and manufacturer] in Paris could make a light wax mask based on the imprints and on some genuine photos. This was common practice for relics in France, as it was feared that although the body was mummified, the blackish tinge to the face and the sunken eyes and nose would make an unpleasant impression on the public. Imprints of the hands were also taken for the presentation of the body." [wiki]

This explained everything! In fact, I was still suspicious, for it seems to me that "sunken eyes and nose" do not sound uncorrupted, never mind the discoloration, which was put down to the washing. On looking at the picture again, however, I can indeed see the underlying structure of a face, with that weird veneer that the wax mask gives to it. It's odd. Part of me is simply skeptical. But part of me wants it to be true, because it would be another unexplained thing in a far-too explained world. I find the whole process of masking relics strangely bizarre, a queer kind of hygenicization of something that should be startling. I already struggle not to feel the wool is being pulled over my eyes, or perhaps (to be kinder) I simply feel that there is a strong sort of wishful thinking going on by those involved; so for the Church to indulge in this sort of cosmeticism when the miraculousness should be allowed its own self-evidence - it makes me feel as if I'm being patronized. I'd much rather see the real thing, miraculous or not.

The question of incorruptibility implies a certain belief, very present in many religions, but particularly Catholicism, that the earthly sphere is a place of sin and somehow, being earthly, less...important. A lesser place than the place beyond death, where we will all go to reap our rewards, rewards that are better than those we receive here. So when someone's earthly remains, those parts of them that were left behind when they went to go to the spiritual world (to meet their Maker), don't follow the natural processes of decay, it is symbolic of the purity, the lack of sin, when they lived here on earth. In other words, they were so saintly in regular life that the sinlessness permeated their fleshly self, and it remained "above" such things as returning to the dust from whence they came.

I could be describing this inaccurately, but this is as close as I can get to what seems to be the thinking.

The problem with this thinking, for me - who is not Catholic, and not studied in Catholicism - is the basic tenet that the natural, "earthly" world is a lesser world than the one we go on to after death (whatever that may be). The very word "incorruptible" implies this attitude, as if the natural processes were a corruption, dirtying what is holy; whereas I find, on looking around me, that the intricacy of the decomposition process is incredible, amazing - miraculous, if you will - whether they be the product of some Creator or the result of some intricate evolutionary processes. The completeness, the incredible tidiness of it, is astounding, particularly when you look carefully at the processes that happen after death.

A white-backed vulture. There's a good reason vultures have no feathers on their heads.

In a natural environment, there are animals who live almost solely on dead bodies; they are, in essence, nature's janitors. They decrease the amount of body that needs to decompose, scatter the bones, and generally reduce what is there. Then a host of smaller janitors move in, breaking the remains down farther, carrying it away and dispersing it until there is very little left. What remains is then covered with leaves or dead plant matter, which in turn keeps whatever is left moist so that it can be fully dissolved by bacteria - with the exception of bones, which, happily for science, sometimes live on for millenia.

I think one of the things that people find difficult about this process (aside from things like smell and general asthetics) is that, in essence, the body is being eaten, being devoured by the agents of the soil. We have trouble thinking about why anything would want to eat such a revolting meal. But just think about it: if there was ever any sense of divinity in the universe, wouldn't it be symbolized by the fact that there are creatures out there who prefer to eat something so (to us) repulsive? That in this perfectly balanced world, everything is provided for, even the redistribution of our bodies' nutrients back to the soil, so that fruit can be made and flowers can flourish? There is nothing so wonderful, in my mind, as the fact that something so unwanted as a dead body can be turned into something so desirable as a flower. And all the things which do that work for us - buzzards and blowflies and their ilk - should be venerated for the job they do to make our world as beautiful as it is.

Which brings me to another historical point of view about nature: that line we draw, the one which is so clear and so difficult to define - the line between humans and nature. There are many, many ways that people of European descent try to distinguish themselves as separate from animals, and death is one of the biggies. Embalming, solid-metal caskets, crypts, mummification, you name it: we try to cheat nature out of reclaiming us, and prove that we are not simply animals, to lie down and be taken by the soil. The preservation of bodies is not a new concept, but it has lasted surprisingly long, considering how crowded our earth has become. It was only recently, for example, that the first person of European descent was cremated here in the U.S. (see this great article from the other Cabinet, about Theosophists and cremation), because up until the last century, nearly everyone believed they would not be able to go to Heaven unless their bodies were preserved intact.


There is a movement, begun in England in the 1990's, to make the burial industry more ecologically friendly, called "the alternative death movement," toward creating nature preserves where remains are interred with cardboard or other biodegradable caskets, and the only markers are native plants or stones. The bodies are not embalmed, and some are even simply wrapped in a shroud. The intense beauty of this kind of burial, to be returned to the embrace of the earth so as to nourish the land, seems to me far more mysterious and inspirational than the idea of leaving behind a moist and flexible carapace that is never allowed to go...well, home.

And really, the concept of forever is hard to grasp. Does having your remains stay immovable, fixed, speak more of eternity to you? Or does the more fluid, circular idea of matter constantly recycled - that your remains become part of the soil, then part of plants, then perhaps eaten by an herbivore, which in turn is eaten by another person, thus carrying some small part of you on in any number of others' bodies - seem vaster and more eternal? I think I would have to go with the latter. I understand the miraculousness of saints who linger, to help their supplicants; but ultimately, I find I would not want it for myself.

Ursula LeGuin talks about this in a different way in the last couple of her Earthsea books: this need to herd the dead into a place of their own, and the way that the unnaturalness of it begins to take its toll. It's a more metaphorical approach, but the idea that our natural cycle is to return to the earth, to the wholeness of everything, is well-presented.

I suppose the remains of saints are important in that they leave something behind for people to venerate. It is a kindness, a vehicle for more miracles, if you are a believer of those things. But for the rest of us, it is at this point just an industry, one that makes a great deal of money. If you have ever watched Six Feet Under, especially the episodes where the large corporation is trying to take over their small family funeral business, you may get some inkling. But try googling "casket manufacturer", and you'll come up with a really amazing peek into a big-business operation.

My friend Gwyan once did an art piece about how a lot of less-wealthy graves in Oakland, California got moved from the cemetery to make room for more graves. He found a mortuary catalog and printed flyers for caskets, from the Solid Bronze casket (yes, many coffins are actually metal these days) down to the Cardboard Casket, and posted them along the route the disenterred had taken from the cemetery to their new location. This from the same person who went with some others from the Cacophony Society (who were also involved with the origins of Burning Man) on a tour of the newly-abandoned California School of Mortuary Science, where all kinds of amazing things were unearthed, including a full glass bottle of LyfLyk - "For the velvety appearance of living tissue" (many thanks to the Frigid Fluid company for continuing to carry this fascinating product).

But I digress (eww!).

Abney Park Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery, in London, is a famous example of what happens when the burial industry goes awry: nature takes over, with quite wonderful results: leaning angels point to heaven, ivy from ancient wreaths has instead wreathed itself around wonderful Victorian monuments. The cemetery was built during the Victorian era, when the small local churchyards could no longer maintain the number of burials required. A ring of seven cemeteries were built in a ring around London, known as The Magnificent Seven, and an era of seriously fashionable Gothic burials was ushered in.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, for us), the companies who built these cemeteries simply didn't have the foresight to put money away for the future maintenance of the park, so when the cemetery was full, no more money was coming in and maintenance on it ceased altogether. By 1975, despite an annex across the road (where you can see Karl Marx's tomb), it had become such a financial disaster that they actually closed it, and it was only because a trust was formed and efforts made to save the cemetery that it hasn't completely fallen into ruin. Still, those intervening years have done wonders for the atmosphere of the place, and I would put it, along with its smaller sister cemetery, Abney Park in Hackney, as one of my top ten places to see in London. In fact Highgate was the scenery for a lot of the 1960's Hammer Horror movies, so if you want to do a little armchair tourism, you could watch a vampire flick or two.

In any case, this fearfulness, this attitude toward "corruption", is a conundrum not easily solved. To be separated from your loved ones forever - or, more hopefully, until they join you wherever - can be terrible to contemplate. No one knows for sure how death happens, and what happens to that meaningful spark that is you, when you go. Stepping off into a dark place is not an easy business. But to fear the breakdown of one's body, that return of your less meaningful parts to whence they came, should not be a fearful process, because you're not there anymore. It seems to me it is a gift you can give to the universe.

Don't get me wrong, if you want to become incorruptible and be put in a really cool reliquary, I'm not going to stop you. We all need some miraculous weirdness to keep us interested, keep the wonder going. ...I'm just saying, let's not all do it.


Some links for your perusal:

The Mummy Locator, with all the information you could ever want about mummies - this page points to Guanajuato.

A really great site all about why and how not to spend a lot of money on fancy caskets.

A directory of places in the U.S. that do green burials, and information on home funerals and other back-to-basics ideas.

A very minimalist site selling cardboard and other self-assembly caskets for as low as $49.95.

Shameless Fangirl Post

I'm going to use the might of my media arm here - and I'm going to do it shamelessly. If you don't like dripping praise, skip this one.

I love Diana Wynne Jones. Simple as that.

I first discovered her about three years ago, when someone in my family bought me the whole Dalemark Quartet, in one volume, in a half-priced bookstore because, he said, he "thought he had heard of her somewhere and thought I might like it." Next thing I knew, I was bounding along like a husky through the snow, as Ann Lamott says about writing (not), and I found myself laughing aloud at how great the storytelling was. In particular, there was a magical quality to Drowned Ammet which captivated me but which I still can't put my finger on.

The best thing was, when I looked at the list in the front pages, I was gobsmacked to discover that she had written over thirty books. It was like discovering treasure. This woman was clearly a Grande Dame of British fantasy.

Since then I have read every one I could put my hands on - or read them to my kids - and while they are not all as good as Drowned Ammett was for me the first time, they are, for the most part, remarkable feats of storytelling. True, they are technically "young adult", but I don't see how they have to be only young adult, as the stories are interesting to everyone. She has a deft hand with point-of-view, letting us see things but not necessarily understand them, while the characters are frustratingly naive or unwilling to interact with adults who could explain things, but therein often lies some of the tension. Personally, I admire her sheer innovativeness, which is hard to parallel. And best of all, she manages to write fantasy without cardboard cutout characters or shorthand scenery, or all those annoying things we think of when we're feeling tired of "fantasy" as a genre; her stories are grounded in place - meaning they tend to take place in one very-carefully thought out place - and well crafted. When magic happens, it is experienced by the character: it exists not as an action, but as a feeling.

There! It may not be Cabinet-worthy, and you may have all heard of her before, but I wanted to do it. And now I have.

* * *

For an interesting analysis of her writing, check out this well-written review, thanks to Strange Horizons, of Farah Mendlesohn's excellent creative criticism work on DWJ, which you can buy in book form at relatively high cost (I'm asking for it for my birthday). She has a good eye, does Ms. Mendlesohn.

My personal favorites, to get newbies started:

- Chrestomancy books
- Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is screamingly funny
- Castle in the Air (a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, which she also wrote - not to be confused with Castle in the Sky, the movie)
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a "guide", to all the pitfalls of cheesy fantasy-writing. Well done, hilarious, and easy to keep by your bed or elsewhere to pick up in odd moments
- and the Dalemark Quartet, of course.

On Vacation...From My Vacation

...That's from a Swollen Monkeys song. If anyone has a digital copy, let me know, my friend Gwyan is looking for it.

The Matter At Hand: I am taking a vacation for a couple of weeks, and hope that anyone who reads this will not simply fling up their hands and abandon me. I find that there are too many people in my house to do proper research right now, and am looking forward to the beginning of the school year to recapture some uninterrupted thoughts. Hope to see you soon!

Puppetmaster

I never know how many people have seen Street of Crocodiles, by the Brothers Quay, but I always feel like it's worth remembering. Years ago, back in the fog of my youthful ignorance I saw it for the first time and didn't really understand where it came from or what it was supposed to mean, but the Amazing Stuff quotient was high, I could tell that. And that atmosphere - of grubby glass and things moving unto themselves, dirty everyday items transformed by movement, odd, creepy dolls' head people - somehow it etched itself indelibly on my mind, and I started thinking about a different kind of asthetic, something which has ultimately led, I think, to this blog.

Here is a little part of it (the beginning):

The film, only 21 minutes, is based on (or perhaps I should say "inspired by") the book of the same name by Bruno Schultz. Mr. Schultz's book is an intense meditation on his early life in Poland, an intertwined set of prose pieces that are marked by his descriptions of inanimate objects and places as if they had emotions or were capable of expression. "Attics gape in horror," as one critic puts it, and "building facades wait stoically". A very particular vision of "inanimate anima" - anima being the spark of life - gives his writing depth and richness and, for me at least, a kind of believability. After all, we all do that kind of anthropomorphism, and it is simply a matter of taking one's childlike feeling that "things inanimate are thinking about you" (and holding it in one's mind until one is grown) to create the kind of atmospheric intensity that Mr. Schultz manages so well.

The Brothers Quay were influenced, among other things, by several Eastern Europeans, notably the great Ladislas Starevich (see my previous post with the bugs) and Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, who produced this (typical, for him) vision of Alice (unfortunately only a segment):

Eastern European animators come from a long and rich tradition of puppetry, and their creations show it. I like Svankmajer (and so do my children) for his quirky sense of humor. If you get a chance, try watching Dark, Light, Dark, in which two hands, eyeballs, ears, head, feet and genitalia meet in a room and decide to get together and form a more perfect...man. Or the three people made of bits of vegetables, bits of paper, and metal utensils - respectively - who literally chew each other up in Dimension of Dialogue's game of rock, paper, scissors.

There would have to be something creepy about anything that grew from puppet culture, though. Traditionally, puppets have walked that line between funny and creepy, and it's hard to say why. I'm not talking about Sesame Street puppets or the slightly watered-down childrens' shows you see in the park nowadays; I'm talking about real, Punch and Judy style puppetry, with the papier-mache heads and the tatty costumes. It's as if the puppet-master imbues a positive life into his puppets: when they are active, they delight; the grins becoming hilarious, the large eyes comical. But as soon as he puts them down, as soon as they lay, staring, alone and abandoned, the creepiness comes out. They appear to have some other life, some light in their eyes.

My favorite puppet, a very old one from the Italian Lake District belonging to my mother, demonstrates that some puppets can be simply beautiful - the only creepiness being in how incredibly alive they can look.

In Oakland, California, at the renovated Fairyland, they have several puppet-shows a day. The sound system is terrible, and the plays are really nothing to write home about, but the puppets come from some ancient manifestation of the show-business god, and haven't been renovated at all. It's really quite wonderful to go sit in the front row and try to examine them as they bounce around; and I find it extremely intriguing that children still seem to find it entertaining, and not slightly odd.

And then there's that Twighlight Zone, I think it was, where there was this puppet lying on a table. In the five seconds of it that I watched, the puppet turned its head to look at something before I hastily switched the channel. That five-second vision gave me nightmares for years, for it was too close to my own fearful imaginings.

A sample of Vent Haven's wonderful fare; this dummy has real human teeth.

Some of you may have seen Boingboing's amazing link to a Flickr user's pictures of the Vent Haven Museum of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, which bills itself as "the world's only museum of ventriloquial figures and memorabilia." The pictures were truly amazing, full of scary glamour and chipped, aging artistry. Unfortunately, the guy had a cease-and-desist situation and had to take the pictures down, for which we will all mourn. I wish that I had downloaded some of them before they did. Still, I suppose we could all write to the Museum to tell them that those Flickr pictures were the best advertisement of the place we had ever seen, and is the Museum still open? 'Cause we wanna visit.

I may have mentioned this before, but...remember the "clown scene" in Poltergeist? That is the perfect example of how a cheerful-looking toy's face can look terribly different in the wrong circumstances. It's terrifying: there's thunder, and the lights are flickering, and the clown just sits there, smiling...brrr. And there is the ubiquitous Chuckie, which I must mention simply because he is there, though I am somewhat of an anti-fan of slasher flicks. They seem to me to be formulaic, lacking in artistry, in fact lacking in anything creative or interesting. And unlike the really interesting movies, they show everything. Kind of like a hard-core pornography of gore.

(By the way, there is actually a phobia that is a fear of clowns. It's called coulrophobia).

I think it's clear that we seem to have a fascination with homunculi, or "little men". The term was first invented by the alchemist Paracelsus:

He once claimed that he had created a false human being that he referred to as the homunculus. The creature was to have stood no more than 12 inches tall, and did the work usually associated with a golem. However, after a short time, the homunculus turned on its creator and ran away. The recipe consisted of a bag of bones, semen, skin fragments and hair from any animal, of which the chimeric homunculus would be a hybrid. This was to be laid in the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point the embryo would form. [wiki]

Goethe's Faust and Homunculus

The idea of the homunculus not only caught on in the alchemical world, where all kinds of recipes were made for how to create a false human (mostly involving semen and manure, among other things - although sometimes they did involve a mandrake root, said root believed to look like a person); but it became related to the notion - first pondered by the Greeks, and later embraced by Charles Darwin of all people - that miniscule body parts were exchanged during the act of sex, and were assembled in the womb. In a further step, "preformationism" took this belief and eliminated the assembly altogether, saying instead that a tiny, whole human (homunculus) was contained in either the sperm or the egg, and that it was only a matter of growing this homunculus to a finished size. Thus the belief that frightening the mother, or cursing the father prior to sex, would lead to malformations and so on. (True to form, we are now discovering that many birth defects can indeed be traced back to the mother's pregnancy. Aren't old wives' tales amazing?)

Drawing of Human Sperm, 1694, Niklaas Hartsoeker: what he imagined sperm would look like if they could be seen.

But somehow, despite the proliferation of other connections to the homunculus idea, we always seem to come back to that original concept, that of the created tiny person, or the person who will do your bidding. It strikes the fancy, for some reason; all the more because the begetting was so magical. It wouldn't be the same, somehow, if the thing we created simply looked like a real person; instead, it has to be from the darkness, and it has to look odd. Much like puppets. (And I always get the feeling, looking at these descriptions by these ancient nerds the alchemists, that they were also about getting around the natural process of making babies. And maybe about getting a servant for free. Just like catching the leprauchan, and forcing him to give you his gold, or house elves, or the modern interest in little household robots.)

I think one of the reasons Street of Crocodiles is so successful (aside from the wonderful thread mechanics that run through it, the dust, the glass, the...! the...!) is the way the main character, and the minor ones too, possess this kind of eery homunculus quality, as if they were born from some disturbing ritual. The dolls' head characters are lit from within, and wear gloves of wound thread. The main character is chipped and staring, is strangely full of pathos in his fleetness and his slight decrepitude. He is a puppet, but more than that: a creature not of the womb, a created thing, moving through his dusty world as if he can't understand what he's doing there.