User:Lamemoria/sandbox

The Florentine Codex, An Erasure

Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan missionary to the Aztec Nahua people of Mexico, best known as the compiler of the Florentine Codex, also known as Historia de las cosas de Nueva Espana (General History of the Things of New Spain); the actual date of Bernardino de Sahagun's birth and death is unknown, though some believe he was born in Sahagún in 1499 and died in what is now Mexico City in 1590. In this we believe. We do not know what he looked like, though there are thousands of pictures and hundreds of statues bearing his likeness; we are not even sure if he wrote the first encyclopedia of the New World, The Florentine Codex, the first book of knowledge that describes things Latino, things unknown to him, terra incognita, to us, then...

52 keys form the alphabet beneath my fingers, sequential punches illuminate the words hidden within the frame. An unnatural union made from my head to inanimate touch marks this forced relationship between my hand and lettered grey keys. Perfectly squared black pixels frame the outline of knowledge, information flows from mind, to plastic, to sand, to flesh, to paper, to another body, to another eye that gazes upon the page in a world made anew with every entry. The touch of knowledge looks cold, feels distant. The desired result: an encyclopedia, in part.

Prologue One-Dear Reader

When this work began, it began to be said by those who knew of it, that a dictionary was being made.

How does this dictionary Progress ?

It is impossible for me to prepare a dictionary

I have laid groundwork

arranged columns A clear copy not finished language aid me                knowledge

is language

with all its secrets

Prologue II—

The Ceremonies

all writers             authenticate

testimonies

proofs authenticate

proof

I                                                                      know They made truth in these books

It was done this way.

Grammarians                        employed in Ancient times

conferred many days they                               I

explained language

writing the explanation

painting

originals

I still have the originals.

Before me a facsimile, an inanimate archive, a codex still partial and fleeting, despite its weight. 45 pounds, 800 pages, decorated in tightly wrapped red leather, now protected by books and rooms few visit in the night, the time when Sahagun noted he would write, in those moments when candle light traced the words, guiding the hand towards his redemption. Today, I find myself searching its pages, unable to read the Nauhtl and Spanish broken by tongues now lost in translation. I search for hints of wisdom, of self, of a past that links to terra incognita. In the end, I am more impressed with the room that holds this archive, a library built with 13,000 year old quarried lime-stone under the strictest of guidelines within the mountains hundreds of years after the architecture of the codex would rise within the frame of the New World. I have only found that the archon is always younger than its inhabitants. Now, technology has rendered the room mute, a relic of print culture, unable to read its own history; and so too the books written by hands have now lost the ability to speak in a world that forgets to contemplate, to hear, to reflect without exacting guidance.

Prologue III-The Origins

Books empty things

fictions

divine rational

falsehoods

belief idolatry

in out

Books

Prologue IV-The Soothsayers

Birth

Fortells

Necromantic

Books

I am alone for hours, days, weeks, nearly a year searching for the candlelight to guide my hand towards redemption. I maintain my search for meaning in the words of the past, gated by rooms catologued and indexed so that I may find a glimpse of heritage within the dust that now obscures my vision. Like Sahagun, I search for ghosts, hoping to catalogue their knowledge with my writing—to grasp partial and fleeting moments with encyclopedic visions obscured by memory. These memories now no more than information, bits held within my consciousness, transformed to knowledge through the touch of the keyboard, made known through my interpretation. If Encyclopedic texts distil the comprehensive characteristics of the things of a given age, what do they say of the writer who collects things, information, memories. What does the encyclopedia say of a single solitary soul who spends his life transcribing the things of an age? Leibniz proposed that the encyclopedia would lead to  “universal knowledge, human happiness, public good, the true knowledge of God, eternal peace, and the end of all useless philosophical dispute.”   In effect, he saw the encycopdeia as a prtable library, one in which would stand outside the mind of a given reader, a repository of things and ideas that could be accessed with a simple flip of a the page. He did now mention that the writing of such an encyclopedia would lead the writer to such devine conclusions.

Prologue V-The Omens

Dark night

wanting to investigate

We seek secret things

paths forbidden

cries of the living

We search for apparitions in the fragrance of things,

in                                                                          auguries

placed here. Prologue VI-Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy

Savage and Decadent

eyes

wise

and humble

Cruel virtues

contained

In life

we

invent

language

of

ancestors

Prologue VII—The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years

our

writings

invented

The sun

The moon

The Air

The stars The land The fire

Originated

In blindness

Language the last element

a subject translated whole Book VIII-Kings and Lords

recollections of ancient things

influenced by some oracle

below the equinoctial line

he was a great necromancer

now very visible reveal

indications of its fortune

such until his behavior

Ceased

Governing

Their

Customs

Prologue IX-The Merchants

History

speaks of supernatural

phenomena where

generations of people

dwell

as a thing

contrary to human nature

X: The People

I follow the order of persons—

Of the body

Of eternal and external organs

Of the ailments

Of learning and practicing

Of astrology

Of theology

Of our Catholic Faith

Of their habits

Of this land

Of the state

Of our dwellings

Of idolatry and drunkenness

Of time and unbelief

Of language

Of mind

Of grammar

Prologue XX-Earthly Things

Make comparisons

A compendium

Created through

a

teotl

a {term}

a thing good and evil

a sun

a god

a rich storehouse

of all

meaning

XII-The Conquest

I desired to write in the Mexican language

For these reasons, it seems to me to have written this history,

A time it is believed they

I

told the truth

Sahagun calls his disciples, young Nahuatl compilers of The Florentine Codex, to his deathbed; they sing scolia, songs to conjure the corporeal body into an immortal ghost, a saint of New World knowledge. He looks at them—a failure—for his Codex is not quite complete. No longer in his possession, the codex is now an ornamental object for King Philip II, a gift to his nephew on his wedding day. Other scribes used the copies to wrap spices for the lovers of the Conquest. Others just burned it. Too much knowledge for its time. The first encyclopaedia that would challenge the divinity of God, the idea of the Other, of terra incognita, is lost; the remains today now in Rome, a remnant of a relic. In the last moments, a life unfulfilled, a work still incomplete, he still wonders: Was it their Codex? Their hand? Was I able to explain away the unknown? Can I put my name above the pages, even now?