Outside In

The Infinite Codex

What is The Codex? – that is the question.

Physically, this is book 12 in a planned series of 115 volumes. Each contains 60 sides of 81 characters (of which there will be 531,441: the cube of 81).

When you turn the pages of The Codex the experience is slightly strange, almost like becoming lost in a landscape without any familiar reference points. As with everything you experience, you try to relate what you’re seeing with something you’ve encountered before. But, beyond the sense that you might be looking at an oriental language (or that the characters resemble faces or figures) it’s hard to make much sense of it. Even so, without being derived from any alphabet or known language (nor being readable in the regular sense) it is far from meaningless.

It contains much information (only in a form that is not easy to extrapolate because it was not consciously conceived) and its scope is such that any patterns within it are not readily seen.

It was born of the realisation that, being a part of (and therefore inseparable from nature) I must be able to access and extract information that we could learn from; something which might shed light on nature’s complexity. As it unfolds, I think it could prove its worth as an experiment, revealing the way nature exploits disorder to create her own order.The mind’s dark secret is that, far from being stable and orderly, it enjoys bursts of chaotic activity which, paradoxically, improve mental dexterity and reasoning.

Among the questions The Codex poses, are these:

1) If we free ourselves from what is a constant focus: recognising patterns, making predictions and establishing order (so as to navigate our lives safely) then what might we discover?

2) Does The Codex somehow describe the way in which the skeleton of the mind is articulated? Is it, perhaps, describing the architecture of thought? Or, is it more?

3) Am I, on my focus-less quest for no place and no thing, somehow unveiling the elusive nature of creation itself?

Whatever. I leave it for you to decide.

My task is quite easy, since there are only a few simple rules:

A. Let there be line

B. Let there be bilateral symmetry

C. Let each of the characters be lozenge-shaped and of roughly the same size

D. Let them be arranged on an A5 page in 9 rows and 9 columns.

Apart from these rules there are no other constraints: no conscious decisions about what marks to put down; no attempt to make sense of what’s unfolding (or where it’s going) just keeping to the form set out above and simply putting pen to paper. All I do is sit in my chair by the window and think of every other thing, but what I’m doing.

A great square has no corners:

A great work is never done with;

A great shout comes from a whisper,

And the greatest of forms is beyond shape.

Tao without substance – 

Invisible –

Ever-creating

Forever creating

(Chapter 41 (of 81) from the Tao Te Ching)