an aural noise
word salad: Nutek Chill proudly presents the new Electronic studio Album by Earth Child called ‘Plants Languages’ including 9 original tracks with a special human touch and lots of gratitude and love for life.
one of the things I read in antisocial isolation
An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery
The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars – and attracted cranks and conspiracy therorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.
An example of what scholars call the “pharmaceutical” section of the Voynich Manuscript. Four apothecary jars appear to be scattered amid a selection of herbs, suggesting a possible medicinal recipe. Embiggenable.
LISA FAGIN DAVIS was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.
In the library catalog, the book—a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel—had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969.
Davis grew up in Oklahoma City, transfixed by the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. When the Beinecke curator first showed her the Voynich Manuscript, she thought, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive with meaning.
Flowering through the indecipherable script were otherworldly illustrations: strange, prehistoric-looking plants with leaves in dreamy geometries; oversize pages that folded out to reveal rosettes, zodiacs, stars, the cosmos; lists of apparent medicinal formulas alongside drawings of herbs and spindly bottles. Most striking of all were the groups of naked women. They held stars on strings, like balloons, or stood in green pools fed by trickling ducts and by pipes that looked like fallopian tubes. Many of the women, arms outstretched, seemed less to be bathing than working, as plumbers in some primordial waterworks.
Although the book’s parchment and pigments looked medieval, the drawings of the women had no close cultural parallel, in any era. Even the plants—which appeared to have the stems of one species and the roots of another—resisted identification. …
Ultimate healing, best relaxation. Maru is brushed while listening to birdsong.
Ed. 究極の癒し、最高のリラクゼーション。マルは鳥のさえずりを聞いてブラシをかけられます。
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.
ONE MORE THING:
Over 2 Million Left Brain-Dead In Most Brutal Day Of Culture Wars Yet https://t.co/ADSyTWmonc
— The Onion (@TheOnion) August 7, 2024
