On Redibility, Presence, and the Form That Remains
Redible (adj.) — from the Old English rædan: to interpret, to advise, to read.
A redible object does not demand decoding. It remains coherent and quietly present, even if misunderstood or overlooked.
A life can be redible. A manuscript. A moment.
Redible is a word from the pathless path.
It has always been here. I only named it.
Voynich Manuscript (detail). Screen capture taken at 3:09 PM from my iPhone. This is the third page in the manuscript containing text. The “4”-shaped glyph (EVA-q) appeared once per page on the two text pages before this — but on this page, it shows up four times: three times in this block alone. Its rendering is noticeably more fluid, more beautiful — as if earlier appearances were tentative, and this page marked a confident return. Not decoded. But I felt the pattern settle.
I. Beyond the Language Axiom
The Voynich manuscript has drawn scholars, cryptographers, and mystics into its looping glyphs and botanical impossibilities for over a century. Its allure is not merely that it resists translation, but that it sustains that resistance with internal consistency. The script seems patterned, even disciplined. Pages echo one another. Sections cluster around thematic illustrations. Whatever this is, it is not nonsense.
And yet it has never been read.
Nearly every serious attempt to understand the manuscript begins with an assumption so foundational it is rarely named: that the Voynich is a form of language. This is the language axiom — the belief that if symbols are patterned and deployed sequentially, they must encode communicative meaning. That assumption isn’t unreasonable — language is one of the most familiar human structures for working with symbol and pattern. But it may also be what keeps us from recognizing what the Voynich actually is.
What if it is not a code to be broken, but a structure to be inhabited?
What if the form precedes the function, and the glyphs do not point outward toward meaning, but inward toward regulation?
This is not a mystical proposition. It is a structural one.
II. Voynich as Redible Object
Most efforts to decode the Voynich manuscript focus on its text: the curling, rhythmic script that appear to form words, arranged in paragraphs across over 200 vellum pages. Scholars map character frequencies, run entropy analyses, and test hypotheses against natural languages or ciphers. But this approach assumes that the text is primary.
In most cases, the illustrations came first. The strange plants, bathing women, cosmological wheels, and alchemical diagrams were drawn onto the pages before the glyphs were written. The text was then carefully added around them — curving around the contours of pools, spiraling along wheels, or neatly lining the margins of botanical figures.
Even in traditions like concrete poetry — where text bends to the visual — language still reaches outward, offering meaning. But in the Voynich, the glyphs respond so sensitively to visual form that they seem to settle into the page itself. It becomes harder to imagine they were ever meant to carry a message apart from the act of their making. The gesture holds, but it does not speak.
The layout offers another clue. The text does not simply wrap to fill available space — it is broken into even, visually balanced blocks, often column-like, almost architectural. There are no corrections, no false starts, no spaces left for additions or marginal gloss. The consistency appears to be spatial rather than semantic — suggesting intentional form, even in the absence of known meaning.
This suggests a different kind of coherence: not one designed to be read, but one designed to return well. A redible structure, not a legible one.
A redible object does not ask to be interpreted. It holds a shape that resonates through repetition, symmetry, and pattern recurrence. Its meaning is not extracted but inhabited. Like a woven textile, it asks nothing but presence. It holds, and can be entered through the senses.
The Voynich manuscript may be just such a thing.
III. Pattern as Regulation, not Communication
If the Voynich manuscript was not meant to transmit meaning, what function might it serve? The answer may lie in the nature of the patterns themselves. The script is neither random nor rigid. It is fluid, recursive, and adaptive. Certain glyphs — such as the iconic “4”-shaped character transcribed as q in the EVA system — appear rarely at first, then with increasing frequency as the manuscript progresses. New forms seem to emerge not as deliberate invention, but through subtle elaborations of existing shapes.
This is not the hallmark of an invented language. It is the hallmark of
improvisation within constraint — a kind of aesthetic motor-patterning, where form emerges through use. It resembles what musicians experience when a repeated motif evolves slightly with each pass, or what calligraphers discover when muscle memory guides the pen beyond conscious design.
I have written before about
The Autistic Mode ⧉ — a way of thinking where meaning is not extracted or performed, but sustained through internal coherence. The Voynich manuscript, viewed this way, may not be a riddle but a form of remaining.
In
neurodivergent cognition — particularly among autistic individuals — this kind of pattern stability is often not decorative, but regulatory. Repetition is not just soothing; it sustains orientation. The act of forming patterns can quiet internal dissonance, provide a framework for holding presence, or mark time through structure rather than rhythm. It does not require external purpose to be meaningful. The purpose is in the doing.
If the author of the Voynich manuscript was not a linguist or a prophet but someone with a highly attuned, internally oriented aesthetic sensitivity — perhaps even someone who was illiterate in the formal sense but deeply familiar with the feel of manuscripts — then the manuscript may not be a failed communication at all. It may be a successful
structure for coherence.
This would explain its internal consistency without requiring encoded meaning. It would also explain its singularity: why no other work has ever surfaced in this script, and why there is no marginalia, no translation, no key. Because there was never anything to decode.
IV. Echoes Across Time
That the Voynich manuscript continues to compel attention more than 600 years after its creation is often framed as a mystery of content. But if there is no content — no translation to uncover — then what accounts for its enduring presence?
Perhaps it is not the mystery that holds us, but the structure.
What the manuscript offers is not access to a lost language but a glimpse into a mode of coherence not bound by communicative norms. Its glyphs do not point outward toward collective legibility but refract inward toward a personal architecture of return. Each block of text is a rhythm nested in visual containment. Each page is a balance of tension and resolution, achieved not through grammar but through formal fidelity.
This way of making is not foreign to us — it is simply underrecognized. Anyone who has ever created something not for sharing but for dwelling knows the feeling. The gesture that repeats not to say something new, but to keep something intact. The structure that doesn’t evolve by concept, but by return. The object that offers no key, because its truth is not hidden — it is embedded.
This essay does not argue for an autistic authorship of the Voynich manuscript. It simply suggests that autistic modes of pattern-making, regulation, and structural coherence may illuminate what this object already is. The manuscript does not perform meaning. It sustains form. In doing so, it resonates with a different kind of intelligence — one grounded in presence rather than social explanation, spatial rather than sequential, internally coherent without requiring translation into a shared frame.
The Voynich manuscript does not endure because it invites translation. It endures because we assume it emerged from mystery — not from pathology. Were its author identified as autistic, its patterns might have been cast as compulsive, its glyphs as meaningless. But because the mind behind it remains unnamed, its structure is permitted to remain — strange, beautiful, unresolved. In that unknowing, we afford it a kind of respect we rarely grant to neurodivergent expression.
I did not set out to solve it. I stayed with it as one might stay with a field of flowers, or a page of music never played aloud. Not for understanding, but for coherence.
For some of us — those whose lives move by structural fidelity rather than social rhythm — it reads like recognition.
V. A Closing Return
I’ve spent years
building something ⧉ that, in some sense, had already begun — not as a project, but as a pattern. A thread that gathered shape long before I named it. Few people I know read it. Not because it’s hidden, or difficult, or even obscure, but because it resists the usual signs of arrival. There are no arguments to win, no takeaways, no entry points marked for ease. It’s not meant to persuade. It’s meant to hold.
And yet, like the manuscript, it is carefully made. Shapes recur. Phrases loop. Meanings surface through repetition, not explanation. I don’t write to be understood in the conventional sense —
I write to stay close ⧉ to something I otherwise lose in the noise.
So when I look at the Voynich manuscript, I don’t see a puzzle waiting for a key. I see a shape of thought made durable. I see someone — not trying to communicate, but trying to remain. Someone whose glyphs may have never meant anything, but whose patterns meant everything.
And I know: if that person had been named — had been marked as autistic — the manuscript might never have been studied. It would have been explained away, not returned to. Its coherence mistaken for compulsion. Its form mistaken for failure.
This is the grief beneath the gesture — and also its quiet rebellion.
My project is not to remain anonymous, but to bring what would have been dismissed into the open and ask:
Can it still resonate?
Can coherence still be felt once the source is known?
If it can, then something in the human condition has widened.
And if it cannot, then I leave this — not to be decoded, but simply to remain.
~ End ~
For orientation beyond this page, you may enter through:
•
The Vibrating Thread: From the Field of Redibility
•
Naikan in Four Movements
•
Threadwork (or begin with
Threshold to Threadwork ⧉ for a gentler entry)
•
The Holding Vow Sutra (drawn from the arc of
Naikan: The Rhythm of Vow ⧉ , but arriving later)
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