Homunculus

The homunculus is a representation of the man behind the man, the woman behind the woman, the body behind the body: the graphic mapping of what parts of the body are put together in proportion to how they’re laid out and innervated as related to our brain tissue. Not all sensations and volitional movements are distributed evenly. Thus, the homunculus is a distorted—even a comical—little creature.

For example, the hands are very sensitive, so the hands of the homunculus are large. So are the sex organs. And the lips. For that is how the mapping, in a Mercator projection fashion, pans out. (Think of Greenland.)

Everyone has a homunculus of their own; everyone’s homunculus changes as they grow older, wiser, and mature. Some homunculi, unfortunately, change as people grow hateful, resentful, and cruel. If only everyone could see their own homunculus and that part of it by which the soul is represented.

I once had a stable homunculus. It had grown over the years via honesty, integrity, and love for my fellow man, adhering happily along the convolutions, the gyri and sulci, of my brain.

Then came one of those fellow men with whom I’d gone into business. His name was Dwayne. Dwayne was a bad man. I didn’t know this, of course, as such men disguise themselves as reasonable and conciliatory to your best interests—especially when they have nothing and come to you for everything. Their homunculi lie in wait for the opportunity to get in a cheap shot. Their very own homuncular digits twitch to finger your own brain’s concavities.

Good men know how to make what’s in their best interests jive with what are your own; bad men leave you as roadkill. Dwayne aimed for living, breathing sentient creatures to make them roadkill.

Now I lick my wounds and knead the tire tread marks on me, my homunculus prone in the pit of the sulci where my reptile lives, having fallen there like a sucker through a trap door.

My reptile.

Every human brain, including mine, has such a reptile deep in the pits. It is the flight-or-fight captain of an armed ship. There in the primaeval abyss it sails, looking up from the basal ganglia of emotion and memories, an ancient and oh-so-human region of the limbic system called the amygdala.

Maturity and the sense to choose my fights carefully saw my homunculus outgrow my reptile by age 7; but now, floundering helplessly in the abyss, it is a sitting duck for it.

Bad memories lock together in the hippocampus tightly. Hatred is a glue that is thick.

When bad things happen—when bad people do bad things—these memories get the highest priority in sticking together in patterns of synapses that radiate their poisonous dendrites into everything else. The hippocampus is named after the Greek words for “sea horse” because of its shape. Yet, it is not a sea horse, but the proverbial elephant that never forgets—the storage bin for the poison arrows of emotion from the amygdala.

Dwayne.

I had built Dwayne up, truly believing his success would be my success and that the sum of our produce would exceed the addition of the parts. It’s the essence of any true partnership. I referred him business that came from what I myself would have garnered. We were successful—together: me from my hard work and cleverness—and Dwayne…from me.

Then he became more successful than me, and I didn’t understand why. It wasn’t long before he insisted on renegotiating the distribution of our net income.

A former client reported Dwayne had called him to tell him I was too busy to handle his account and that he, instead, would be handling it. Dwayne had confided in my employees that I had a list of them I planned on firing. Then he gave me his notice and moved next door, along with the employees he had claimed were on my list.

This sort of thing happens every day. It’s called business as usual. It’s called capitalism for some.

It’s as if business as usual is a license to cheat and steal while denying any foundation of ethics. “I have to do what’s best for me,” is the mantra. Loyalty comes in a distant also-ran once someone feels their oats.

Next, I lost many lucrative contracts, later hearing that Dwayne was spreading vicious lies about me. Things about me and the IRS. Things about addictions, cruelty, and exploitation. Things about me and my daughter. My board memberships were dropped, and it wasn’t long before he sat in my spot on each. My wife got a letter from a woman Dwayne knew who claimed “it was over” between her and me.

The only way to fight such a man smartly is by doing nothing. Do not play his game. Surely people would know the man I had always been. But the reality is that the truth never catches up to the lies.

When bad things happen to good people, it’s enough that it’s because they’ve been targeted by genetics, acts of nature, or disease. Those are mindless things that cannot be blamed. But when the bad things happen by design, by designing-bad people, it’s hard to understand why the assaults continue until way past complete ruin, even when the perpetrator has already more than won.

His win was complete. I once had it all; now I had nothing. Now he had it all. Including all that was mine. I had lost my reputation, job, my vocation, my money, my wife, and my family.

And my mind. There is no cruelty worse than being at the mercy of someone who is cruel.

So my homunculus—who is me—languishes, interred below the foundations of my limbic system, simmering in hate and fantasizing revenge. They say you can’t fight a dirty fighter because it’s hard to know where you draw the line. At burning down their house? Murder?

At some point, even under the fog of the primitive mind living precariously at the behest of self-serving reptilian hormones, you have to declare you’re better than that.

That took me a long time. It was hard. Does it mean forgiveness? Forgetting? What would Jesus do?

What would the Godfather do? It was just business, the ol’ bottom line.

The road to progress is eliminating your obstacles, and your obstacles are your enemies. I hadn’t started this, but I set myself up for it by drinking the poison of good faith. But good faith, for some, is just a fuse that is lit, burning its way to a victim who is expected to explode. Someone who didn’t take cover.

Someone who never saw it coming.

I wanted to ruin him…right back. Hurt him. More than he had hurt me. This was my amygdala talking now, the seat of emotion in my limbic system, and the very reptile that swaggers along the path of restitution via revenge. That path creates neurotransmitters that feel good, yet they are the dirty humors that engender fighting dirty.

I realized I might not be better than that.

After all, isn’t self-defense a noble pursuit? An inherent right of life? Can’t homunculi fight it out when their very existence is threatened? How ugly can one’s homunculus become?

I lay in the stagnant muck of my limbic system, breathing in the ashes of discord. I hacked up the bile I was living on. I seethed in a perversion of body temperature, overheating the stew I treaded.

Dwayne had to pay.

The trap door to hate is locked from the inside, just like Hell. But there are cracks in that trap door. I saw a sliver of light, reflecting from a mirror my original homunculus held, pivoting it this way and that to offer the side-eyed glimmers of illumination that stung like hope. I braced myself from the glare, from this hope. But I owed my homunculus an open mind; I owed hope a revisit. When you’re so mired in venom and maladaptive thinking, hope may sting, which is can make it hard to withstand. It’s easier just to go with the stench of spite, anger, and vengeance.

There was something about my original homunculus, something persevering from the values I had been taught. The slivers of light began to sting less. I sat up.

I was better than this.

I stood up, which angered my reptile. The skirmish with it was ugly, but when it was over my righteous hands had gained purchase onto some higher convolutions—the higher, modern lobes we had evolved to keep our reptiles in check. I strained to lift myself upward. The light grew brighter, the hope grew more tangible, and the reptile began slipping away. Hope no longer stung but was warm and nurturing.

It felt good. Being “better than this” was an achievement, a noble deed done well, and then it felt worth the bruises, cuts, and concussions.

People like Dwayne do well…for a time. But they leave a trail of enemies as they go. The hippocampus of the one doing the slighting doesn’t have the memory glue as sticky as the one who is slighted. Before too long, Dwayne got hurt. Hurt bad. In fact, he was killed. By his wife, who got off on self-defense—the noble pursuit and inherent right of life.

Did I win?

It’s not a competition. Business-as-usual is a competition; capitalism is a competition. But good faith is not. Good faith is one’s definition. It is that part of one’s homunculus that overlies the soul that innervates it.

My climb from primitive rage to civilized appraisal was a metaphor for the rise of the survivalist troglodytes to modern man. There was a reason we had evolved higher convolutions to suppress the murderous, self-serving thoughts of our rudimentary reptiles.

It was because our destiny was to kick the mesomorphic cavemen and their reptiles aside—to be better than this.