kaos

ciphers or read unknown languages; to an occultist this would be the most obvious and
potentially fruitful place to start. Certainly I myself have definitely gained glimpses
after visualising the Seal of Asmoday over the mysterious folios. When I have spent too
long poring over the Voynich ms., building up over merged days of sustained study with
too little sleep, so utterly absorbed that in the end only my computer knows what day it
is, I have noticed myself slipping into reading passages with perfect fluency only to
have the letters cover themselves over again with a thick dust of mystery. What I have
just read vanishes even from consciousness, all that remains is a difficult memory of the
intensity with which the manuscript can interact with the mind, inducing a kind of
academic glossolalia that yields up shifting sands of meaning that slips through your
fingers and away. Am I reading what’s there, or just lost in a stream of consciousness
that has somehow been sparked by some chance resemblance on the page, and this flow
of usually vivid imagery in my mind is simply overlaying the mechanical act of appearing
to read words and sentences but which still remain unintelligible. Any clear
understanding from an altered state of consciousness is rarely clear with the return of
rationality, and the task of disentangling valid insights from distortions of the senses in
the end seems much like sorting the wheat from the chaff only to discover in retrospect
that you have merely sorted the chaff into two piles by the most labour-intensive method.
The Voynich ms. is a scholar’s koan.
And as Robert Firth pointed out, there is another and far simpler reason why the
manuscript is devoid of corrections without needing to posit the writer’s extreme
familiarity with the language: because “there is no meaning to correct, merely lucrative
gibberish to be generated as rapidly as possible.” By “lucrative” I assume Firth is referring
to the fact that Rudolf II is supposed to have paid 600 gold ducats for it.
On a tangential point, Zen in the Art of Calligraphy has some interesting electron
microscope photographs comparing the calligraphy of acknowledged Japanese masters
with their forgers, the masters’ ink particles were regularly ordered and vibrant, full of
bokki, whereas those of the fakes were lacklustre and disordered. Having practised
Chinese calligraphic techniques and never attained a great standard in it, I was surprised
on looking at my own English handwriting in ordinary blue biro under a 20× dissecting
microscope that what I regarded as my usual scrawl looked extraordinarily beautiful,
possessing many of the finer features of good Chinese calligraphy that were simply not
apparent to me as written. This is a good example of wuwei, “not doing”, in art. What
I had formally been attempting to transfer from my hand to the paper, but could rarely
achieve to my satisfaction with Chinese characters—because I was trying too hard—
was in the end done best quite spontaneously without intention and without even my
conscious knowledge in ordinary dashed-off handwriting. And once I realised this I
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