Weird manuscripts

The Voynich Manuscript has become a beacon for a secular community of quasi-Talmudic scholars whose interpretive ingenuity and stamina have few parallels.

After my recent immersion in the culture of the Codex Seraphinianus, it seems I am everywhere encountering references to the Voynich Manuscript.

There is an increasing body of evidence that the manuscript is a hoax, and the persistent belief that it's a code to be cracked is based on faulty assumptions, for the simple reason that we want to believe.

Wilfred Voynich, a Polish revolutionary, "discovered" the manuscript that came to be named after him in 1912. He claimed to have bought the manuscript in an Austrian castle, but later Villa Mondragone was disclosed as the source. A letter inside the manuscript indicated that Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar, had been asked to try his hand at translating it.

Aside: What little I've come to learn about Voynich makes him sound like a character out of Prus, a composite at any rate, that I wonder if The Doll didn't inspire Voynich in his person and in his attitude.

Meanwhile, I continue to read Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, which presents sections of a manuscript chronicling Kircher's life. At this point: Kircher and his young Jesuit biographer are at Villa Palagonia; Kircher discovers a weird (demonic, or scientifically advanced) manuscript and destroys it.

Also, Kircher is in attendance at a feast that is getting out of hand in all sorts of ways, and Caspar finds himself in a delicate situation with his beautiful, and married, hostess, and just when you think it might be starting to get a little bit naughty, he switches to Latin. I cannot decide if this is funny, sexy, or simply weird.

Is it art?

Dada, or something like it, is alive and kicking in Montreal.

Earlier this week I attended a cabaret hommage to Codex Seraphinianus and its creator, Luigi Serafini. The show was sponsored by the Université de Foulosophie.

According to Douglas Hofstadter, the Codex to many people seems "to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility," and this was clearly the spirit that embodied the Rialto theatre Monday night.

Some of it was music. Some of it was comedy. A lot of it was weird. Some of it may have been poetry or philosophy, or parody and social commentary. I'm not too sure. There was nudity. There were aliens. And it got political ("Tuons Harper!" they chanted).

By chance I was seated just across the aisle from Luigi. He was inscrutable. Amused, honoured, insulted, bored? No idea.

About the show
My favourite bit involved the two men in black with the shiny, featureless face masks, who used a child's doll dressed in white frills to demonstrate the phases of the sun. Or something like that. It was mostly nonverbal, and those bits that were spoken were distorted, with just enough real words seeping through to hint at a meaning.

Some highlights:

Chorale Bruitist Joker, a noise music choir. The piece was alien and cacophonous, but clearly also "composed" and musical. Audio samples on the website.

Natalie Cora, who plays a kora, an instrument that looks straight out of Serafini's world.

Soizick Hébert, whose hair looks to have been constructed using the Codex's geometry, was absolutely hilarious.



Daniel Heikalo, bearded and capped, performed a piece for recorder and voice, coming off as a kind of medieval Jethro Tull. The video here includes percussion, and relative to what I witnessed it's rather low key, but this clip hints at some of the weird and wild.



About the Codex
The Codex Seraphinianus: How Mysterious Is a Mysterious Text If the Author Is Still Alive (and Emailing)? — Justin Taylor tells you why the Codex so captivating.

Another Green World: The Codex Seraphinianus — John Coulthart tells you what Douglas Hofstadter and Alberto Manguel make of the Codex.

The Worlds of Luigi Serafini — Jordan Hurder explains the differences between editions.

Orbis Pictus — Italo Calvino's introduction to the Codex in its Italian and French editions.

Clearly, I'll be needing to acquire my own copy.

Foulosophie

This poster caught my eye when I was downtown this weekend.

Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini, is considered by some to be the world's weirdest book. Written in a made-up language, it is essentially unreadable, and since its publication in 1981 it has amassed a cult following.

It will be payed homage, cabaret-style, at the Theatre Rialto, April 1, 2013.

The event is sponsored by, among others, the Université de Foulosophie, being a play on the words "philosophy" and fou, or "mad" (in the sense of "crazy"), though I suspect there may be something foul about it too.