What I do, what I give to the world, is that I watch. I observe. I perceive. I take it inside me.

I take creative work inside me like semen. I allow it to impregnate my egg-like mind, to gestate. And what is born is the intercoiling of consciousnesses.

Without sperm, there is no impregnation, but without the egg, sperm is useless, hardened into an old sock.

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

The flamboyantly colored face of the male mandrill echoes his derrière. A red line along the middle of his face flanked by blue paranasal ridges replicates his bright red penis against blue buttocks. Even his orange goatee copies the orange tufts of hair below his scrotum.

Similarly, the female gelada baboon repeats on her chest the patterning of her rump: her two bright red nipples are placed so close together they look like labia. The naked skin around them resembles that on her behind. We wonder about the function of these showy signals of monkeys and smile at their weird body self-mimicry.

But might the same apply to us? Why are we the only primate with everted (turned inside out) lips, making them contrast with the surrounding skin? Do our red lips mimic a vulva? Why do we so often enhance them with lipstick and slightly part and lick them in suggestive ways?

Why are we the only primates with permanently protruding breasts, often accentuated with the help of bras or injected with silicone? Breasts don’t need this shape for effective nursing. Do women’s breasts mimic the rounded shape of buttocks?

Why do we have pointy noses that protrude, whereas other primates have no trouble smelling without such odd contraptions on their faces?

Doth not the shape of a man’s bulbous nose recall that of his flaccid penis?

Frans de Waal, Different

Beni Bonobo: Hmm . . . looks like a yummy banana to me.

I want nummy in my tummy!

The nose is his wild inner spirit, chafing against the constraints of modern life. The nose is even (speaking of penises) a penis, to some critics (with its loss, Kovalyov is unmanned, unable to resume his life of romantic avarice).

But the beauty of the story is that, through all of this, or in spite of all of this, or all of this notwithstanding, the nose is still . . . a nose. A nose of sorts. A real nose and a metaphorical one. A nose that keeps changing in response to what the story needs of it.

The nose is a tool to get us looking at the ways in which we go in search of that which is essential and which we have lost. The nose is the means by which Gogol does his crazy dance of joy.

But also, it’s a nose. It even has a pimple.

We feel that all of this needs to be explained, somehow, and our friend the lesser writer might be tempted to do just that (“Actually, it turns out, what had really happened was . . .”). But if the story’s crazy logic gets explained away, then so does that strange revelatory feeling it produces in us.

I protest the story’s failure to cohere logically.

“I know,” the narrator says, “it’s a train wreck, isn’t it?”

And somehow that’s enough.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

Behold the male member of the human ape species.

He spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.

He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but tries to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis.

Desmond Morris, Naked Ape