Voynich

Manuscript
Codex
Seraphinianus Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus
Lebbeus
Woods
Advanced
Microkingdoms
She Who Sees
The Unknown
House of
Eternal Return
Invisible
Cities
Draw an image that stands for the city that Calvino describes.
You may attempt a sketch of the entire city itself, or an aspect
of it: a character, an artifact, or a scene
Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep,
subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants
dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in
drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no father.
Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake;
an invisible landscape conditions the visible one;
everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the
lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky.

Consequently, two forms of religion exist in Isaura.

The city's gods, according to some people, live in the

depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground
streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets
that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the
edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses
of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the
windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the
trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs
perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the
aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes,
the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks
that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that
moves entirely upward.
When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler
sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another,
scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these
cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and
this process is carried out in rotation.

Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the
grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his
house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then
the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting
for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a
different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will
spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is
renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or
streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others. Since
their society is ordered without great distinctions of wealth or authority,
the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts;
variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in the span of a
lifetime a man rarely returns to a job that had already been his.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty
chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors
changed ; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents;
they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities
of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the
fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.
The
Cosmological
Web
The determination of the architectural style of a
house is an expression of the self-apprehension of
the man within climate…such climactic
conditioning is even more obvious in the case of
food…it is not that man made the choice between
livestock-raising and fishing according to his
preference for meat or fish. On the contrary, he
came to prefer meat or fish because climate
determined whether he should engage in stock-
raising or in fishing…
We can also discover climactic phenomena in all
the expressions of human activity, such as
literature, art, religion, and manners and customs.
This is a natural consequence as long as man
apprehends himself in climate.

Watsuji Tetsuro, Fudo

Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary
oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing
or even of the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has
ever ‘looked up’ anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression ‘to look up
something’ is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without
writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they
represent are visual. They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back—‘recall’ them.
But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace (a
visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They
are occurrences, events…

All sensation takes place in time, but sound has a special relationship to time
unlike that of the other fields that register in human sensation. Sound exists
only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially
evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word
‘permanence’, by the time I get to the ‘-nence’, the ‘perma-’ is gone, and has to be
gone…

For anyone who has a sense of what words are in a primary oral culture, or a
culture not far removed from primary orality, it is not surprising that the
Hebrew term dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event’. Neither is it surprising that oral
peoples commonly, and probably universally, consider words to have great
power. Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power. A hunter can see a
buffalo, smell, taste, and touch a buffalo when the buffalo is completely inert,
even dead, but if he hears a buffalo, he had better watch out: something is going
on. In this sense, all sound, and especially oral utterance, which comes from
inside living organisms, is ‘dynamic’.
…At the heart of Aztec metaphysics stands the ontological
thesis that there exists at bottom just one thing: dynamic,
vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred
power, force, or energy. The Aztecs referred to this power as
teotl. Reality and thus the cosmos and all its inhabitants
are identical with and consist of teotl. Since teotl is
constitutionally uniform, reality consists ultimately of just one
kind of stuff: energy… Process, movement, change, and
transformation define teotl. That which is real is that which
becomes, changes, and moves. Reality is characterized by
becoming – not by being or “is-ness.” To exist – to be real – is to
become, to move, to change.

James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy

The Cosmological Web

Give your cosmology

a name
 What is their world like?
What kind of environment and climate?
What kinds of plants and animals?
Is the world single or multiple?
Nature How do they relate to nature?
How do they define their relationship to it?

Give your cosmology

a name

Community Bodies

How do they relate to other beings?

What kinds of bodies do they have?
Who belongs to their community?
Do they believe in the body as one or many?
How do they interact with other beings?
How do they think of bodily difference (being, gender,
What are their values?
disability, madness etc.?)
What ways do they think of exchange?
What are their ideals regarding their bodies?
 Language

Social
Technology
Structure
Nature

Give your cosmology

a name

Culture
Economy
Community Bodies