The Italian artist Luigi Serafini produced a richly illustrated book called the Codex Seraphinianus in the late 1970’s.
The book is an encyclopedia containing bizarre pictures of a parallel universe of alien origin, and its 364 pages are filled with obscure writings in an unknown language.
Don Luigi chose to express alien ideas inside surreal artistic images that were his deciphering of the thoughts and ideas pressed upon him by the aliens; whether in dreams or a dreamlike state of consciousness only he can choose to say.
That the paintings are often parodies of things found in our world is proof of the difficulty he faced in expressing thoughts so different from what he was accustomed to.
The writing system used in his book appears to be modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems, but with letters that curve into each other in patterns that cryptologists and linguists have been unable to break*
In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on 11 May 2009, Serafini stated that there is no meaning hidden behind the script of the Codex, which is asemic; that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the reader is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.
The online version of the book can be read here and a pdf file can be downloaded here but shame on you if you resort to digital means to read this book -- beg , borrow or steal (or even buy?) a copy.
*After a careful study of the phenomena known as the Codex Seraphinianus I have discovered the ‘Jewel hidden in plain sight’ and deciphered the other rosetta stone -- the one that was contained inside an image known as the Matrix. The result is a new alphabet that I am calling La Matrixa ®, in honor of Don Luigi. -- Try the alphabet translator here
In the beginning, there was language. In the universe Luigi Serafini inhabits and depicts, I believe that written language preceded the images: beneath the form of a meticulous, agile, and limpid cursive (and strength lies in admitting it is limpid), that we always feel on the point of deciphering them just when each word and each letter escapes us. If the Other Universe communicates anguish to us, it’s less because it differs from ours than because it resembles it: the writing, in the same way, could have developed very similarly to ours in a linguistic forum that is unknown to us, without being altogether unknowable.… Serafini’s language does not distinguish itself only by its alphabet, but also by its syntax: the objects of this universe evoke the language of the artist, such as we see them illustrated in the pages of his encyclopedia, and are almost always identifiable, but their mutual relations appear psychologically disturbed to us by their unexpected relationships and connections.… Here is the conclusive point: endowed with the power to evoke a world in which the syntax of things is subverted, the Serafinian writing must hide, beneath the mystery of its indecipherable surface, a more profound mystery touching on the internal logic of language and thought. The lines that connect the images of this world tangle and cross; the confusion of the visual attributes gives birth to monsters, Serafini’s teratological universe. But the teratology itself implicates a logic which appears to us to, turn by turn, flower and disappear, at the same time giving us the sense that the words are carefully traced back to the point of the quill. Like Ovid, and his Metamorphoses, Serafini believes in the contiguity and permeability of all the domains of being.- introduction by Italo Calvino
