Microscope

The microscope will make us blind, said Goethe.

There is a nearly universal tendency to look at the text of the Voynich manuscript – and the pictures too – under magnification. It happens by default with online studies. Then we casually zoom in for a closer look.

This is all very well, but it may obscure some important, even tectonic, facts.

The first is that the manuscript is quite small. Those who study it online might be surprised at just how small it is and even if aware of it might lose sight of this fact in the course of sustained study of magnified pages.

The manuscript is just over 9 x 6 inches in size. Small! It is helpful to find another book of roughly the same dimensions to handle and use as a model.

The second is uniformity. To the naked eye it is a very uniform work with a single script evenly written throughout. When we look closer we find different scribal hands, even dialects (?), but this should not obscure the fact that each scribe has tried to present a uniform script, a unified look. Even if it is not uniform, it is written to appear so.

The third is familiarity. This is somewhat subjective, but the script seems tantalizing familiar. It looks as though you could read it easily. It is conspicuously not exotic or outlandish or alien. It appeals to familiar orthography. To appearances, it is comforting. It is only when we look again that it is perplexing (and when we start looking really closely that it is perplexing indeed.) Magnification can exaggerate its strangeness. It is not made to look strange. It is made to look familiar.

The fourth is openness and clarity. The work is rough-shod, but it is not cluttered. The script is unknown but is evidently easy to write and easy to read and has been designed that way. By design and technique the manuscript strives to be clear and open. This overall impression of clarity and openess can be lost and forgotten in magnification.

The fifth is the relationship between text and illustration. Whenever we zoom in on either we distort or lose this relationship. Whereas, the work is clearly presented to us as an illustrated text (or annotated illustrations) and the reader is expected to understand text and illustration together. This might not be the actual state of affairs, but it is certainly presented as if it is.

The sixth is visual effects. An example of this are the gallows letters grouping at the top of paragraphs and text blocks. There may be many reasons why this occurs, but one of them may be aesthetic and they may have a function within the page as a whole. It is possible some glyphs are nulls that serve aesthetic functions, such as making the text look more Latin. Magnification distorts or neglects whole-page effects.

Goethe was not saying that the microscope has no value. He is simply stating the fact that when one thing is revealed another is concealed. When we look at one thing we are not looking at another. (It’s a big theme in German philosophy, Heidegger and so on.) Whenever we zoom in we lose the perspective of the manuscript as-it-presents-itself, phenomenologically. And necessarily so. It is not a bad thing – scientific method and all - but neither is it a small thing. ‘We murder to dissect.’ – William Blake.

I think it is important to be well-grounded in the phenomenological reality of the manuscript and to never stray too far from it. The codex is small, the text is tiny: can we give much credence to proposals that see even tinier complex systems hidden in that already miniscule script? Or are these supposed hidden systems artifacts of magnification? The natural reading of the work is at 100%. That is the baseline. The work needs to be understood and appreciated at that level in the first instance.

Everything uncovered by closer inspection needs to be referred back to that baseline. For example:

We might decide that the spaces in Voynichese are artificial and “vords” are not words.

This necessarily raises the question:

Why then has it been presented as if “vords” are words in an easy-to-read, flowing natural text?

We must explain, at every turn, why the appearance is different to the reality. The appearance, though, is our first fact. The work has been contrived to be presented to the reader in a certain way. We should not rush to the microscope without having a very solid appreciation of the manuscript as an artifact, an object, and as a presentiment, a ‘performance’. The macro scale is not a naïve reading: it is the phenomenological frame in which all closer investigations must take place. 

R. B.