[Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[RenegadeHealer]

Why? Is that "more attested"? Less unusual? 

I'm probably misrepresenting some arguments here, but to me it sounds like "if this text contains meaning, it must have been done in a way that's never been done before, therefore they must have done this whole other thing that has never been done before."

You have a valid point, Koen. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And on the subject of absence, it's worth remembering that the vast majority of human writing specimens have been lost irretrievably. Think personal notebooks and letters, which seldom outlast their owner for very long, if at all. And of course, less and less of what was written survives the farther back one goes.

It's possible — likely, even — that the vast expanse of lost writing included many that were clearly meaningful to the writer and intended reader(s), encoded symbolically in a way that nearly any other people would find odd, idiosyncratic, and impenetrable. I reckon without the backstories and creator Q&A, many of the posts on the Subreddits r/neography and r/conscripts would fall into this category.

In terms of what has and has not been done before, Schwartz brings up Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus. Serafini is a fairly private man, who grants few interviews. He is reluctant to comment much on his bizarre creation, and has been somewhat cryptic and terse when he has. But he has steadfastly denied its text has any meaning: It's meant to be marveled at and wondered about, and give the beholder a creepy sense of liminality and the uncanny valley effect. The parallels are problematic, particularly the fact that the Codex Seraphinianus was written in 1981, and there are some tantalizing hints that Serafini was familiar with not only with the VMs, but also with the modern traditions of asemic writing and Dadaism / Surrealism. Still, Schwartz's point remains: An entire volume of bizarrely illustrated meaningless writing is something that at least one person has been motivated to create successfully. Why couldn't someone half a millennium prior been willing and able to do similarly?

But you're right: we don't have any real basis for telling the difference between meaningful symbolic language encoded in a way that's too idiosyncratic and lacking in context for the meaning to be extracted, and asemic writing that looks meaningful but isn't.

I hope you're right and I'm wrong.