It’s a typical writer’s puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That’s basically how I feel about almost everything that’s been written about the VMs: even though it’s an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of “The Curse”:
“In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books.“
Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can’t be faulted: but it’s aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you’re hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you – the reader is the target.
In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction – its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.
When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.
But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.
At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever – because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.
Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer’s folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.
So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death – the moment when his strange book was finally set free.
“What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?“
You may not like it: but is that just because you’ve become too used to reading Wikipedia?
Hi Nick,
It is not lalala but AIAIAI
It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.
I agree Nick, but….if you can read it, things become different.
At http://www.voynich.nl I try to add information and translations whenever I can.
Nick,
The things about galileo came from other websites, can you mail me on this ?
I do not understand why this happens.
The author might not have thought at all, just did his job.
If you say:
there is a drawing from ost sea you are right.
if you say the castle stands in central Europe you are right
if you say the language is Dutch you are right
If I say religion is involved ,
I am right.
Can you react on Maria Mgdalena and Constantinopulus?
Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can’t be faulted: but it’s aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you’re hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you – the reader is the target.
The book was made with love…..for the head (yep).
I am a real person,talking to a computer, not getting an answer.
Hi Jody,
I’m having the weekend off! Which, of course, means dealing with the various home crises that I’ve been avoiding all week. 🙂
Don’t worry, I’ve had a quick look at your http://www.voynich.nl/ site, and will be reviewing it all properly very shortly.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Parts of the VMS are coded, we know, herbals are aranged.
I need someone for the symbols. If it works trough letters okee.
in or out ?
Nick I offer you the opportunity to show that you are very GOOD.
I need you, but I am not gonna beg for it…….
Is it a cipher or symbol mystery ?
Or is it the same ?
any one else on this ?
i am done
I really think this post should be a page. May I put it up as one on my site?
You’ve said exactly what I’ve been trying to explain in different ways, but never managing such clarity.
The ‘mystery’ is a personal lack of understanding – projected back onto the manuscript and sort-of then made its own fault, whereas the greatest barrier to understanding it is expecting it to be understandable without having to learn too much: not another language, or culture, or religious viewpoint, or way of translating three-dimensional things to the two-dimensional page; different conventions for writing, making pictures… communicating with our peers.
THAT’s the real barrier. Everyone wants the manuscript to be explicable in terms of the reality they already live in, not the one which informs a manuscript which was written when your 21-times-great grandfather was born.
Seriously – I’d like to reblog this if you’ll permit.
Diane: unfortunately, I’ve run Cipher Mysteries with a zero-reblogging policy since it began, so the answer is – to be consistent – no. But it’s only a short page and a simple idea, so I’m sure you can find your own way of expressing it. 🙂
Sure – I’ll just quote a paragraph in formal style. No problem.
On second thoughts, perhaps I should conform to the Voynicheros’ “in-house” style, and either pretend that I’ve happened to create the same paragraph myself, from direct inspiration or else repeat the matter, without quotes, and attributing it to someone ascribing to the same theory as I do, or just repeating it as if it were all wiki-facts.
Choices, choices..
The day that any Voynichero actually engages in debate with me – I mean real debate, addressing the mass of evidence, will truly be a happy day for me.
One reason why I hope that Gert’s proposal for a new forum manages to get more of the new- than of the old brigade (of whom, I guess, I’m now one).