[Talk] Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019

[RenegadeHealer]

"In the Voynich I find a coherence, but above all an incoherence. The manuscript borrows some iconographic motifs, but assembles them in figures that are not realistic. So, there is a coherence from the point of view of iconographic language, but an incoherence in the assembly. And it is this aspect that makes me say that it was not a herbarium to be used in medical practice, but a creation, a caricature, an imitation, a game"

This idea of an interplay between coherence and incoherence immediately calls to mind the odd and distinct ways schizophrenia patients use language. I can usually tell that a person has un- or under-treated schizophrenia simply by listening to them talk or reading their writing for a bit. Grammar and syntax are intact at the level of bigrams / short phrases but, wrong at the level of the sentence. Familiar words are used with new and not entirely clear meanings. And most strikingly, none of the sentences uttered seem to have a point, or really say anything concrete. But taking a bird's eye view of a paragraph of schizophrenic language, clear themes, and usually a fairly clear intention of some sort, show themselves. There is a method to the madness, if you will. In their own highly idiosyncratic way, these patients' utterances do make sense. They just reference a lot of experiences for which no one but the patient has any reference point, let alone word.

While I would describe schizophrenic use of language as superficially incoherent but deeply coherent, the translation provided us by Nablator and DeepL.com would seem to imply that Prof. Touwaide describes the content of the VMS in exactly the opposite way: superficially coherent but deeply incoherent. (I could very well be putting words in his mouth here, especially as I don't speak Italian and nuances get lost in translation.)

@Koen, I followed your link to the thread where you talk about the VMS possibly being an intellectual game of some sort, and read a few of your old blog posts tangential to this topic as well. While this is merely subjective and anecdotal, there have been nights I've stared at pages of the VMS, and gotten a subtle feeling like I'm being punked.