Here’s a little cipher (semi-)mystery for you. The 20th century poet Edwin Morgan was so taken by the emerging world of computers that in 1949 he started collecting together files / scrapbooks of cybernetics clippings and notes. Given that, once Morgan began his concrete poetry phase in 1962, it was somehow natural that he would gravitate towards computer-generated (or at least computer-mediated) poems.

He eventually wrote “The Computer’s First Code Poem” in 1968 (note that a couple of letterpairs are swapped relative to the very first published version of this poem):

TEYZA PRQTP ZSNSX OSRMY VCFBO VJSDA
XSEVK JCSPV HSMCV RFBOP OZQDW EAOAD
TSRVY CFEZP OXFRV PTFEP FRXAE OFVVA
HFOPK DZYJR TYPPA PVYBT OAZYJ UAOAD
VEQBT DEQJZ WSZZP WSRWK UAEYU LYSRV
HYUAX BSRWP PIFQZ QOYNA KFDDQ PCYYV
BQRSD VQTSE TQEVK FTARX VSOSQ BYFRX
TQRXQ PVEFV LYZVP HSEPV TFBQP QHYYV
VYUSD TYVVY PVSZZ PCYJP FRDFV QYEVQ
PJQBT CYFES JQSZP QTTQZ DQRQZ VQUSP
TFRWP VCEYJ TZQSR JYEXP QOYFV XCYJP
MCYPV CQSWF AUSVP QTSRM GYYSX VQUSP

The literary trick here is that, even though this apes the layout of WWII cipher messages, the plaintext is actually a sequence of five letter English words, i.e. concrete words trapped inside the cipher cage:

prole snaps livid bingo thumb twice
dirty whist fight numbs black rebec
pinto hurls bdunt spurs under butte
fubsy clown posse stomp below xebec
tramp crawl kills kinky xerox joint
foxed minks squal above yucca shoot
manic tapir party upend tibia mound
panda strut jolts first pumas afoot
toxic potto still shows uncut aorta
swamp houri wails appal canal taxis
punks throw plain words about dhows
ghost haiku exits aping zooid taxis

Endearingly, Cryptocrack isn’t quite able to solve this, swapping v and x around in the cipher alphabet (it probably didn’t have “XEROX” in its dictionary, bless). And it is a little odd that Morgan used “taxis” twice, so perhaps he was a fan of taxis?

As is so often the case with ciphers, there appear to be some typos. So my best guesses would be that in the intended version of the plaintext:

• “squal” should have been “squat”
• “fubsy” should have been “fussy”
• “bdunt” should have been “blunt”
• “potto” should have been “lotto” (there’s also “bingo” in the first line)
• “rebec” should have been “xebec” (again)

But… might it be that these are all deliberate, and that there’s in fact a second message hidden in the mistakes?

For my part, I don’t honestly think there is: but I can’t rule out the possibility that Morgan was more cunning than anyone suspected. So it remains a cipher (semi-)mystery.

“Jack and the Cursed Manuscript” – Part One

1. MEDIEVAL HOVEL

(THOUGH AS THE LIGHTS COME UP, IT INCREASINGLY RESEMBLES A MODERN-DAY CRACK DEN)

JACK’S MUM: Woe is me! I’m a poor old peasant woman ‘oo ‘as frittered a giant’s castle full o’ gold on online casinos an’ Class A drugs.

JACK [aside to the audience]: You’d have thought it might have lasted longer than a week.

JACK’S MUM: Tell me, my darlin’ Jack, does we ‘ave anyfink in the world left ter sell?

JACK: Only the cow you won in a virtual meat raffle, the one you called “Meteor”.

METEOR: Moo.

JACK’S MUM [aside to the audience]: Face it, you can’t get Meteor than a cow. [badum-tshhh]

JACK: I’ll take her to market, I’m bound to see some more magic beans there. I’m on a lucky streak, got the Midas touch, I have.

JACK’S MUM [aside to the audience]: Don’t ‘e take after me? Ooh, I couldn’t be prouder!

2. TOWN SQUARE

TOWN CRYER: Young fellow!

JACK: Errrm… [looks around] do you mean me?

TOWN CRYER: The very same! The young man unwillingly taking his cow to market, just like Rick Astley and his sheep.

JACK: Rick Astley?

TOWN CRYER: It’s how he got rich, you know. “Never gonna give ewe up, never gonna let ewe down”.

METEOR: Moo.

TOWN CRYER: Exactly. And not at all like that idiot lad Jack who swapped his cow for magic beans and killed the giant.

JACK: Errrm… “idiot lad”?

TOWN CRYER: Even as we speak, insurance company agents are combing the land to track him down and bring him to justice.

JACK [backing away]: I’d… best be going, I think.

3. MEDIEVAL MARKET

JACK APPROACHES A BOOKSELLER WITH A MOUSTACHE AND TWINKLING EYES.

JACK: Excuse me, sir, but have you seen a curious traveller? He was right here last week, selling m-m-m-mysterious beans. Definitely not magic ones, anyway.

WILFRID: He’s been and gone. [badum-tshhh]

JACK: Oh no! So what priceless MacGuffin will I exchange our possessions for this week?

WILFRID: I have just the thing for you. [He brandishes the Voynich Manuscript] Behold – the world’s most unreadable manuscript! And it even has a blank price tag!

JACK: That’s my kind of price tag.

WILFRID: …because you’re insanely rich?

JACK: No, because I’m innumerate.

WILFRID: Errrm… so how much do you actually have to spend?

JACK: Basically, this cow.

METEOR: Moo.

WILFRID: Well… this manuscript’s proper price should be ten cows, but I’d accept one cow now with another nine in the future if you become unexpectedly filthy rich.

JACK: No, no, I had that last week: a guy selling magic geese here also wanted a down payment.

WILFRID [rolls eyes]: OK, just one cow for the manuscript, then.

JACK: A pleasure to do business with you, Mister. [Takes book and hands him cow’s lead]

WILFRID [aside to audience]: Why should I care? Now I’ve seen one, I can hoax as many as I like. Ethel will be delighted!

4. BACK AT THE HOVEL

JACK: I’m back, mum!

JACK’S MUM: So what did you get for dear old Meteor, then? More magic beans?

JACK: No, something much better. I give you – The World’s Most Unreadable Manuscript! [He triumphantly holds the book aloft]

JACK’S MUM: Errrm… [awkward pause] more unreadable than Article 57? And every footballer’s memoirs ever written?

JACK: At least 10% more unreadable than those, yes.

JACK’S MUM: So… what’s it about?

JACK [rolls eyes, passes the book to his mother]: It’s not about anything, it’s unreadable. Even the pictures aren’t about anything, they’re unreadable too.

JACK’S MUM: Well, that is a novelty. [Puts on airs and graces voice] One shall have to run one’s new acquisition past one’s dear friends next door.

JACK [encourages audience to join in]: Oh, No We Won’t!

JACK’S MUM: Oh, Yes, We Will. Dame Trot and Prince Salerno know all about ‘erbal medicine. They’re bound to be able to broaden your young scope.

JACK [muttering under his breath]: So I’ve heard, so I’ve heard.

JACK’S MUM: Come, young Jack. Take one’s arm as one perambulates to one’s neighbour’s esteemed location.

JACK: Whatevs, Mama. [shakes head silently]

5. AT DAME TROT’S CAMP MANSION

DAME TROT [opening the door]: How fantabulosa, it’s my bona omi young Jack! And his shyckled palone Margaret. [calls upstairs] Princey, off the khazi, visitors at front of ‘ouse.

JACK’S MUM: So delayted to see, you, may dear Dame Trot.

JACK: But… she’s a man?

DAME TROT: I’ll have none of that lingua in my flowery, young omi. Again in Polari, please.

JACK: But… Palone Trot is an omi?

DAME TROT [aside to the audience]: I don’t think the poor chicken knows he’s in a panto! [To Jack, somewhat condescendingly] Oh, it’s an old tradition in these parts.

JACK: But… your riah isn’t zhooshed like a palone, and you haven’t even got fake willets. What kind of a panto Dame are you?

DAME TROT [aghast]: Why, according to Charles Singer’s (1928) “From Magic to Science”, Dame Trot was a made-up female practitioner based on an entirely male medical tradition.

JACK: So you’re a Dame only in name?

DAME TROT: Precisely. You can’t just camp up your crypto to get onto Cipher Mysteries, these days you have to play by the ‘istorical rule book.

PRINCE SALERNO [emerging from inside the house]: Bona journo, everyone. What brings you here this bona morning?

JACK’S MUM: One has a mysterious book to show you both. [She extracts the Voynich Manuscript from her capacious handbag]

PRINCE SALERNO [visibly shocked and appalled]: Kiss my quongs and slap my town-hall drape, it is The Cursed Book that she has!

DAME TROT: What, Katie Price’s fifth autobiography?

PRINCE SALERNO: Nay, nay, 10% worse still – it is the book that has no beginning and no end.

DAME TROT: That still sounds like “Love, Lipstick and Lies”

PRINCE SALERNO: Jest not!

DAME TROT: I jest did.

PRINCE SALERNO: Margaret and Jack, to free yourself from this terrible curse, you must now climb Mount Doom and hurl the book deep into the biggest Crack you can find.

JACK’S MUM: Oh. Is there not time for a cup of Earl Grey before one goes?

PRINCE SALERNO [glowers even more powerfully]: No. When destiny raises its head, you must grasp it firmly with both hands.

DAME TROT: Definitely both hands.

PRINCE SALERNO: Go now, and remember the ancient wisdom of the Masons – the bigger the Crack, the better the builder. Fare thee well!

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

What journalists the world over love to do is to bring two vaguely related things together to review or discuss, as if by doing so they identify an incipient trend or fashion. Once pointed out, of course, this trick reeks of self-indulgent modern tossery: but in the scientific interest of exploring different ways of writing about unsolved historical ciphers, I thought it might at least be a little interesting to try on this dropped shoe, to see for myself whether it’s fur or glass.

So here goes.

Jess Feldman’s “Call It a Premonition”

Jess Feldman’s slim book of poetry “Call It a Premonition” eerily subtitles itself “Translations from the Voynich Manuscript”.

When I tweeted Jess to ask how her set of poems related to the Voynich Manuscript, she replied:

I didn’t base the poems on any specific pages. Just created the poems by looking at the manuscript holistically and imagining it as the diary of a 13 year old girl. Even though it’s a different time period, I was influenced by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Is it any good? Well, if you want you can read the 18-page PDF here and decide for yourself (and let’s face it, it’s not going to take long). For me, though, there are some obvious highlights: and with my unsolved historical cipher hat on, I certainly couldn’t read the line in “Another Dead Fellow”…

Look:
I’ve a shiny new hairpiece. See, cuz: a mermaid

…without thinking of the curious fish/mermaid hybrid that appears on f79v in Quire 13:

Similarly, the line in “I Dreamed Of”…

a leashed hart young doe collared in soft pink bouclé
the king’s own grazing animals

…brought to my mind the strangely red-painted animal on the same page (note where the heavy painter has smooshed green paint all over the lines, so that we can’t easily discern the outlines that were originally drawn here):

Finally, “The Summer of 1438” will surely ring true for some long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers:

I’m learning
Sometimes
Unsolved mysteries
It’s better not to ask

My favourite single poem from the set, however, is her eponymous “Call It a Premonition”, which is last but certainly not least:

In a distant future
I look like a boy only
still a girl but in slacks okay
I am moving my lacquered
fingers so text materializes
across a framed fluid tapestry
without seams Without origin
unmarried far from dead
childless and leather-booted
I say words like Co-workers,
I hate this fucking job and
I mean it but I am happy
enough I think
comparatively speaking
nonetheless

To me, this kicks an angry skateboard shoe at our foolish modernity’s ankle in a way that stings both kicker and kickee. I enjoyed it, and hope for more good Feldmany stuff in the future, slacks or otherwise. 😉

The poetry of “Supercomputer CARMEL”

In many ways, all that ackshwall poetterie couldn’t really sit further from our second contender in the ring tonight. Championed by CompSci historical cipher buff Professor Kevin Knight, CARMEL is a supercomputer running AI pattern-recognition software (according to, wait, the History Channel press release is round here somewhere) that he filled with all manner of documents and items to do with the Zodiac Killer Cipher, as part of the Hunt For The Zodiac TV documentary series that started a few days ago.

Well… that’s basically what the History Channel (and the programme makers at Karga Seven) would like us to think. However, despite all the nicely-lit close-ups of charcoal grey racks studded with the obligatory array of blinking LEDs, CARMEL isn’t a “supercomputer” at all, it’s a laboratory teaching support code toolkit developed (in C++ with a bit of Boost) and extensively tweaked over the last twenty years at the Information Sciences Institute at USC where Knight is a professor. Strictly speaking, it’s a “finite-state transducer package written by Jonathan Graehl”, that basically lets you set up a whole load of linked and/or nested finite state machines and then do all manner of clever things with them, such as train them (i.e. condition the transition weights) just by passing data into them, via either “EM (expectation-maximization) training” or “Bayesian Chinese Restaurant Process training”.

In fact, ISI students (and doubtless many others) have wheeled out the CARMEL toolkit over that period to write all manner of experimental NLP (natural language processing) software, from cipher solvers – though if you have to repeat anything “trillions of times” to get a result, something’s probably going horribly wrong with your choice of algorithm – to accelerated knowledge acquisition to (yes, you guessed it) synthetic poetry generation.

The wonderfully creepy thing is that by seeding the (CARMEL toolkit assisted) poetry generator specifically with the corpus of letters written by the Zodiac Killer, you can – with a smidgeon of justification – say that you’re generating Zodiac Killer (-seeded) poetry. It’s by no means a simulated look into his head, sure, but rather a rhyming sampling plucked from the linguistic soup apparently (on the evidence of the contents of his letters, anyway) swilling around there. Sort of.

But is this artificial poetry any good? Well, (with the caveat that I don’t know the settings or the precise keywords used to seed the particular runs) I can do no better than quote some examples given on the web and let you decide for yourself.

Existence enters your entire nation.
A twisted mind reveals becoming manic,
An endless modern ending medication,
Another rotten soul becomes dynamic.

Or under pressure on genetic tests.
Surrounded by controlling my depression,
And only human torture never rests,
Or maybe you expect an easy lesson…

Handily, you can also generate your own here. I tried out a few for myself (the title of each is the keyword I chose), each took no more than a couple of seconds to pop up:

BRUTAL

Another day without a life abused.
Confused or blinded by the nitty gritty,
Afraid of being openly accused,
You and me against the world severely.

Or this:

PARADISE

Something like an angel on the vine!
An endless dream about eternal youth,
A power full of blood and sugar pine,
A sigh of love and see the naked truth.

OK, it’s not hard to see that these are simply terrible poems, mashing up pukable birthday card rhymes with a madman’s self-loathing and anger. But perhaps some entrepreneur will now use this to corner the market in psychopathic greetings cards (though perhaps even modern society has a little way further to descend before that really hits the zeitgeisty spot).

Hegelian synthesis?

This is of course the point where journalists, happy to have simulated catching a trend (or created a simulacrum of catching a trend, depending on how picky you are), press [Send], kick off their loafers, and inject some ridiculous Class A drug (or whatever journos prefer these days). “It’s a wrap!” as I once shouted angrily (having actually ordered a sandwich).

But having thought about it for a few days, I think that a common thread subtly links the two sets of poetry. In the case of Jess Feldman, she imagined herself into the inner mental world of “a 13 year old girl” living in a brutal historical period: while the Zodiac Killer text corpus also transports us (via the CompSci magic of trained finite-state transducers) into the stage of his broken psychodrama. Yet for me, the challenging link between the two is not the brutality of the two worlds (by which I mean the girl’s outer world and the Zodiac’s inner world) but the two sets’ shared performative aspect.

Why? Well: in my opinion, Jess Feldman’s poetry is – I think, but feel free to have your own opinion – written as performance pieces: the poems are not hurty / shouty / broken / combat wordplay, but stuff that could comfortably be performed: their language is consistently wry and agile, half-spoken thoughts in the grey area between what we say and what we think.

Similarly, even though the Zodiac Killer synthetic poetry is essentially an experimental linguistic simulation, it is necessarily anchored within the inherently narcissistic and manipulative language he employed for effect in his letters: and whether you like it or not, I think it is the raw language that constrains the computer’s output far more than the rhyme scheme.

Without any real doubt, the Zodiac Killer’s letters (and indeed his ciphertexts) were constructed solely for the practical needs of his hateful theatre and his need to control by terror, not for communication. The notion that we might ever actually learn something so banal as his name from any of his ciphertexts (even the Z13) seems to me ridiculous and pathetically needy: what he wrote was never a diary, but a performance that’s both as fake as Reality TV and as psychotic as Charles Manson.

My left arm, disembodied, slowly rejoins the mothership
Searching for adverbs, unsuccessful as ever
Distant aches filed for future reference
Blur, wash, smudged light chinks overpainting
Eyes that shouldn’t be open quickly close
And re-enter that censored dream again, the one with the
And the
And the two naked women standing oddly, reading telegrams
“ABACTOR ABLATIVE” says one. The other:

The room fills with water and light and shouts from the trapped
I look down at my ticket: Third Class, yet again.

And I realise that I am awake.

The notion that Jorge Luis Borges’ “Labyrinths” – a collection of idiosyncratic short stories, essays, and even parables by the much-acclaimed Argentinian writer, wrangled into English with no little hair-pulling – somehow parallels Voynich research is one that has been floated and repeated for decades.

But is it true now, here in the Fake News world of 2017? Is Borges a harbinger of what we see, or are we all post-Borges?

Describing The Indescribable

What Borges does in his short stories is to gleefully plunder history, not for mere colour (as so many writers now do) but to subvert it and channel it into a secret paradoxical alt.history, which typically forms the conceptual spine of each story’s skeleton.

The twisted steps backwards he takes to go forward again are equal parts erudite and imaginary. These all lead to a creative pyre whose flames are fed by philosophy, religion, esotericism, literature, self-referentiality, dreams, chess, labyrinths, and the numberless ways to cheat (or at least sidestep) the infinities of time, space, and mathematics.

Yet despite the range of references, the setting is predominantly a high-register, sexless, atheistic domain, ruled by stern, darkly logical planets. As a reader, you often feel as though the author is trying to conjure up a paradoxical exit visa from one dark oppressive reality into another.

Borges’ Three Tells

It’s not hard to tell his writing apart from just about anybody else’s.

His first writing trademark is embellished and over-decorated footnotes and references to books and articles which may or may not exist, embedding (if not actually entangling) his narratives in an imaginary textual web. This corresponds to the “falsifying and magnifying” tendency he derides himself (at a remove) for.

His second trademark is inserting himself into his stories, often as an unreliable narrator (not such a modern conceit as some may think).

His third trademark is that his stories almost always reveal themselves to be less than the sum of their parts – the denouement is often little more than a peek behind Oz’s curtain, collapsing the conceit preceding it.

Is Borges Worth Reading?

This is a tough question. Many of the things that are good about his writing would also likely make him completely unreadable to many modern readers. If you are impatient and/or prefer things to be grounded in the concrete, Borges’ concept-heavy counter-factuals are almost certainly not for you.

Yet the bigger problem, I think, is one of style, because Borges writes with a kind of refined, over-polished lightness that somehow never quite becomes levity. I don’t believe that the reading difficulties are translation artefacts: they’d be just as difficult in Hawaiian or Esperanto.

Is Borges a fellow-traveller to Voynich researchers? He certainly sets his readers cerebral challenges, ones which wear cloaks of obscurity, esotericism, and a tight knowingness, yet which he then reveals to be simpler than they at first seemed: and in some ways this is the (idealized) research trajectory.

But in the end, I think the answer is no: his mystification and erudition aren’t his means to knowledge, they are merely the scaffolding he uses to support the canvas behind his all-too-briefly-erected stages. Borges offers only an anagram of research, not research itself: the teasing paranoia of conspiracy, rather than causality.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Borges: but, like fried grasshoppers dipped in Marmite, I can quite see he’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes. :-/

A nice set of past Voynich limericks are elsewhere on Cipher Mysteries, but I thought (six years on) I’d write a couple of new ones for you:

Might Voynichese be Nahuatl?
Or incomprehensible prattle?
We might never find
How this thing was designed
Without patronage from Seattle.

The Voynich Manuscript’s a conundrum
One that draws us away from the humdrum
It defies those who attack it
But have faith – you’ll soon crack it
Illegitimi non carborundum! 🙂