So I’m researching this bizarre book for one of my classes and I just happened to fall in love with it. Now I’m spending an exorbitant amount of time reading interviews of the author and I need to share what I have found.

Conceived in the late 70s in Rome by Luigi Serafini, the Codex Seraphinianus in exquisitely odd encyclopedia that perfectly represents the imperfection and incoherence of an artist’s uninhibited imagination. It doesn’t make any conventional sense. It completely transcends the parameters of a book as we have been taught to know them. And I think it hurts your brain to look at because your mind panics over the nonsense that you just presented to it. For all of these reasons, I love it completely.

But what I really became fascinated by was what Serafini had to say about the the process of creating the Codex. In an interview with Bird In Flight, he talks about how when he was working on the piece in the late 1970s in Rome, he was also watching the world that he knew fall through his fingers like sand. With rising crime, overwhelming spikes in tourism, and the emergence of the internet, he explains how it was truly a watershed moment of history where humanity was changing irrevocably. He knew that there would never be a way back to the world that recognized, so he created a book that would document it as he saw it. This is what I fell in love with, for the book emerged out of the desire to simply document and preserve something in a world that feels as if everything is constantly going away from us. It emerged out of nostalgia. And that will never not be relevant.

What also stood out to me is how Serafini described the feeling of working on a book like this. He said it was something that he had to do, something that he needed to get it out of him and onto the page. He equated the process to being in a trance, to being lost in a space where time does not exist. And that’s the most accurate explanation of the creative impulse that I can think of. It’s the reason I created this blog.

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