క కా కి కీ కు కూ కృ కౄ కౢ కౣ కె కే కై కొ కో కౌ కఁ కం కః క్
ఖ ఖా ఖి ఖీ ఖు ఖూ ఖృ ఖౄ ఖౢ ఖౣ ఖె ఖే ఖై ఖొ ఖో ఖౌ ఖఁ ఖం ఖః ఖ్
No one can read the Codex Seraphinianus: at best you can leaf through it, uncomprehending but with a continual feeling of discovery. The most similar work is probably the Voynich Manuscript. It is an encyclopedia of a unknown world in an unknown language, in a script that resembles a kind of cursive Telugu. The copy I have is doubly mysterious. It is a color printout of a poorly scanned copy, with three hole punches down the inside and outside of the pages, in an oversize binder.
As a child, I liked to leaf through encyclopedias looking for interesting articles or illustrations. When I was about ten, I had a dream that I had found an encyclopedia article about the Transformers, with detailed photos and histories of all the bistable toys. Of course no such article existed, but I felt such a longing for it! (Now, of course, Transformers has its own wiki, and it is hard to communicate to my son just how precious libraries were to me.)
Later, in high school, I discovered in the Oberlin college library a book called The Complete Dictionary of Illustration. It was a reprint of the plates from a German encyclopedia from the 19th century. Without the accompanying text, and unable to read even the very sparse labels in German, it was a fascinating experience of trying to puzzle things out. This page was about weather phenomena, but what weather makes a ship's mast glow, or mountains to hang in the air upside down above the ocean? What buildings are these the floor plans of? This must be a map showing every building in Paris, but why is Paris laid out like a spiral? What festival in what cult is depicted here? Here is a chart showing the evolution of scripts, with a couple of odd omissions. Here is a page full of inscrutable inventions. I kept it out as long as I was allowed, and when I asked my mom to check it out for me again soon after, the librarian told her it had never existed and wasn't in the catalog. (Years later I discovered that I had called it The Complete Encyclopedia of Illustration, rather than Dictionary, and the college student at the desk was not very good at being a librarian.)
The experience of looking through the Codex is very similar. On every page, incompatible things are mixed together: people and machine, or cursive and thread, or eggs and landscape. It is a Book of Changes, a grimoire of magical transformation. It often reminded me of the Mushi, those things which are something like words, and something like diseases, and something like animals, and something like curses, the flora and fauna of the spiritual realm. This book would fit right in the shelves of the Mushishi's backpack. Of course it also brought to mind Borges' Tlön and Italo Calvino and the Apeendices at the end of Return of the King. The nature of creativity is often thought to lie in the combining of disparate things, and I think the book is talking about itself, in a way, about the mysterious subconscious dream process of artistic creation. I first learned of the Codex from Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, another book that was very important in my life, as I have spent my entire professional life trying to answer the questions it brought up in my mind.
I have been working on a similar project myself, though unlike Serafini I hope to make my text translatable; I created the artificial language using machine learning software and all the translation will be automatic, which Serafini couldn't have done in the 1970s.
ఘ ఘా ఘి ఘీ ఘు ఘూ ఘృ ఘౄ ఘౢ ఘౣ ఘె ఘే ఘై ఘొ ఘో ఘౌ
ఙ ఙా ఙి ఙీ ఙు ఙూ ఙృ ఙౄ ఙౢ ఙౣ ఙె ఙే ఙై ఙొ ఙో ఙౌ