Edition 43 | 2021
Finding Meaning in an Indecipherable Encyclopedia Words Aira De Los Santos
Through the YouTube channel, Curious Archive, I recently discovered Codex Seraphinianus; a surreal encyclopedia documenting a fictional world loosely inspired by Earth’s plants, animals, scientific discoveries and society. Alongside detailed illustrations of fish resembling watchful human eyes and a life cycle of a tree which ends with the tree walking away, the fascination surrounding the encyclopedia is due to its rareness and expensiveness. If you’re fortunate enough to flick through a physical copy, it can feel like discovering a distant universe. As someone who’s only seen scans online, while I am amazed with its use of imagination, growing up with the internet, I’m desensitized to “weird” imagery. It would be more shocking to those who read it in 1981, when it was first published.
university, I still put pressure on myself to understand stuff like the autonomic nervous system immediately. Biology was one of my weak subjects (it’s neither formulaic like math, or allowed a degree of subjectivity like literary analysis), so I have to work extra hard to absorb what I have learnt. My thought process turns from, ‘Wow that’s interesting!’ to ‘Wait, if I don’t understand this, I might not do well on the test.’ Cue that feeling of dread. Sometimes my mind also goes to thinking about how privilege impacts my access to higher education. Born into a middle-class intelligent family, I am forever grateful that I grew up being able to afford school and having my parents help me with math problems I was stuck on. I can afford to be demotivated for a while because my parents can financially support me. Students with a poorer family might need to juggle work, full-time study and not have the luxury to switch majors if they’re having an existential crisis. It’s realisations like this that make the world random and cruel, and it’s even worse for women in developing countries who might never get access to proper education. Sometimes, it’s like why are any of us here anyways? Are some people just going to live their life always struggling to meet their basic needs? The issues some people go through are worse than the most awkward situation drawn in Codex Seraphinianus (that’s subjective, but my vote goes to the couple in bed slowly turning into one crocodile).
Still, Codex Seraphinianus beautifully conveys the fresh curiosity people get when learning about a topic they know nothing about, way before they are required to apply it academically or in the real world, and imposter syndrome kicks in. The author, Luigi Serafini, said that he wanted the encyclopedia to capture the feeling children get with books they currently lack the literacy skills to understand. This is shown through the text’s asemic script, without meaning, so the reader can interpret the sentences in their own way. Though, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to decipher its language, and though its letters are indecipherable, the page-numbering system is a variation of base 21.
So, instead of just enjoying my time at university, I am constantly trying to justify that I made the right choice by asking myself questions. Am I making the most out of this opportunity, or am I slacking off with assessments again? I love my courses, but maybe I was meant to be a journalist instead. Do I even have the work ethic to
Lately, I have been struggling to find that fresh curiosity children get easily. For context, I’m a first-year cognitive neuroscience student who’s 19. A lot of university-level courses build upon knowledge from high school, so even though I barely learnt about human brain structure before
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