Thoughts and themes (so far...)

The overarching theme of these tracts seems to be that of solving some kind of puzzle.   The author is clearly groping for some solution, some “path”, through to a resolution.   You almost feel as if the author is in some way trapped and is trying to discover a way out of his or her situation.    It makes me wonder whether this feeling of entrapment is merely mental or whether it might be actually physical in nature.   In later tracts we start to have images of windows and rooms and trees which physically constrain, block the sight and offer glimpses of possibilities. 

Could this person have been physically constrained and is trying to actually escape or are these tracts a description of the search for a philosophical “enlightenment”?   It is clear that there are flashes of clarity where the author “sees” whatever they are looking for or it is “clear” which direction that they should take. The thing that makes me more persuaded of some kind of physical constraint is the fact that the tracts are enciphered (albeit in a very simple way), perhaps to hide their contents from someone else and that they are written in very different notebooks – almost as if the author was constrained by whatever writing material he or she could get hold of.   As a converse, the philosophical or mental constraint is indicated for me by the apparent requirement to write 200 words, no more, no less and start each tract with the “signature” vxvx.  

I don’t know if I’m overanalysing all this.   The more I work through the tracts, the more I feel that I’m getting some insight into the personality of the author and the condition in which he or she finds themselves.   Obviously all this is based on my perceptions only, so if any of you have views, I’d be interested to hear them.

Tract Number Brown Book:3

Here goes...

vxvx

The light is dimming and the wind is picking up.   What the day holds is unclear.   Silence surrounds me, unusual, strange.   The writing is before me, but evades my vision.   A voice sounds, seeming near, but without meaning.   Simply to speak those words drives a greater thought.  The light, the wind, pushing into the deep recesses of my thought, unfolding a deeper light, illumination of profound inner contemplation.  The significance is provoking.   If the stars in their courses mark the manner of man, the sun in its splendour counts the days.   Yet the cup is nearly empty.   All that the day holds appears bleak.   Yet the birds sing and though battered by the wind diligently follow their nature.   And the platform of a thousand stars shows the way.   This is the way.   That sudden darkness is followed by a sudden light.   Stillness brings darkness, movement light.   Through inaction the aching cold remains.   Action delivers the soothing warmth that pushes the body into further action.   More voices, the day springs into life.   A clock chimes to show the way, leading us out of the timeless dark.  A dim light is here and the stillness and bleakness may not be so.

So this is about writing, voices, names.   There is a theme of light illuminating things and, emerging here, the idea of a path or way and action that must be taken.   I'm also interested in a clock chiming to show the way - are we talking about a specific time being eluded to?   And the very lyrical but probably metaphoric " If the stars in their courses mark the manner of man, the sun in its splendour counts the days".

Discovery

B6086 Grange Lane, South Yorkshire, early October 2010.   

It was a Saturday, either 3^rd or the 10^th, I don’t remember which one.   I was cycling along, minding my own business, when I saw something stuck in a tree.   Now normally the sight of rubbish in the countryside would not have come as much of a surprise.   However for some reason, perhaps because the podcast I was listening to happened to end at that time and for some reason the next one didn’t start up automatically, I stopped to have a look.   Because it was a wooden box in a tree, I reasoned that it couldn’t have been blown there by the wind, and fly tippers weren’t generally that tidy.   I propped my bike against the tree and pulled down the box.   In it were the journals.   It was a couple of hundred yards away from a place called Thundercliffe Grange, which is a fantastic name and I couldn’t resist naming the journals after it.   I have no evidence (yet?) that the Grange has any connection with the journals.  

First Steps

Let's have a short look at the mountain we're going to have to climb.   I'm taking one thing as an assumption here, that these tracts mean something.   This may be a leap, but you'll see as I decipher more of them that there is not only a theme developing, but there are also other insights and directions being revealed.   That said I've only got through ten of them so far - it remains to be seen whether there is anything coherent here at all.

As a recap, here's Brown Book:1

 

vxvx
And I saw it light up and the men that stood before it stepped back to view the broader scene which glowed in a fire that no world had viewed. The signs called out in the name that all had known but none had spoken and the sky grew bright with the word.   Then the star brightened and it was as if the one name that had been spoken named all.   A single voice sounded and the trees, shaking softly in the wind, grew close.   A steady stream of flowing, endless shapes moved ever forward, never backwards.   He spoke and when he did the stars remembered.   And the mountain reached up towards the skies never ceasing in its reach or grasp, unthinking, though the thoughts that came were much later, in deep time, signifying and understanding that could only come after aeons.   No approval came, only the cost was marked.   The coins stood in piles yet the twisted shapes never moved appearing to be waiting for a great hand to move them from their fixed point.   Clouds raced across the sky.   Days passed slowly as if mired in time.   And the light which first illuminated the words slowly dimmed.

And now the next tract, Brown Book:2.   The cipher is again a straight alphabetic sequence, this time starting with G:

vxvx
It is so.   Now is the time when the plain truth stares us in the face and makes us see where the path is leading us.   But paths turn and we face the challenge to know which fork to take as the line falters, the light dims, and the vastness of the mountains which block our way, force us to regard their craggy heights and contemplate their form.   Is that form as solid as it appears or, is it in a wordless way beckoning towards something insubstantial a path through rather than a great trek over?   Is there a shorter way?   And if so, then the talk of works over lifetimes becomes discussions of the here and now.   It can be.   You can be.   Now.   That great range to scale turns inwards and can be scaled in a day.   Inside, the mountains of the heart are strengthened by the comfort of solitude, are made less substantial, not more, by the understanding we have of the inner path.   Not for a dim future but for a bright today.   This way can be clear though seeming obscure.   Hasten slowly.   Move with care yet swiftly.   This day it can be done. Now.

BB1 is in the past tense and reads like some kind of a vision or dream, whereas BB2 seems to be a statement of the present, of things the are.   It is also a lot more questioning, but in a philosophical way.   BB1 has some kind of single event happening, with some kind of single entity acting and then disappearing creating a pause.  BB2 is more of a statement that some action which seems impossible is in fact possible.   Could it be that BB2 refers to the actions that could or should be taken to move things forwards after the event in BB1?   If so, it would appear that this could be done quickly "in a day", by some kind of solitary contemplation or action.    And we have the image of mountains in both (hence the first sentence of this post, sorry).   But we also have the image of a path which, as you will see, becomes stronger and more important in some of the subsequent tracts.

I hope this gives you a flavour of what I am attempting, and I also hope that you can help me in this endeavour.   I'd appreciate you comments, views and ideas - even if you think what I'm attempting is hopeless!

Cataloguing the tracts

I’ve chosen to call these things “tracts” because “passage” doesn’t sound right and they are not quite “verses”.   As they are scattered across the journals and there is no numbering or dating system, I’m using the following notation:

Identifier of the journal: Sequential number of tract in the journal

The tract I published in the second post is Brown Book:1.   There are no dates on the journals so there is no way to tell in what order the journals were written.   It may be possible to construct a chronology once the translation is done but it is not apparent at present.   All the journals appear to be in a similar state of age.   Therefore I’ve picked one at random (the brown one) and started working through it.   Brown Book is a spiral bound notebook with a brown cardboard cover.   It is six inches by eight and a quarter inches, which I think equates to A5 size.   The writing is in black or blue biro.

Just a taster - the first entry

To give you a feel for the kind of entries we are dealing with, the following is the first entry I deciphered.   The substitution key for this one substituted A for C and then followed in alphabetical order from then on - a very simple cipher.   Well, here goes:
 ------

vxvx

And I saw it light up and the men that stood before it stepped back to view the broader scene which glowed in a fire that no world had viewed. The signs called out in the name that all had known but none had spoken and the sky grew bright with the word.   Then the star brightened and it was as if the one name that had been spoken named all.   A single voice sounded and the trees, shaking softly in the wind, grew close.   A steady stream of flowing, endless shapes moved ever forward, never backwards.   He spoke and when he did the stars remembered.   And the mountain reached up towards the skies never ceasing in its reach or grasp, unthinking, though the thoughts that came were much later, in deep time, signifying and understanding that could only come after aeons.   No approval came, only the cost was marked.   The coins stood in piles yet the twisted shapes never moved appearing to be waiting for a great hand to move them from their fixed point.   Clouds raced across the sky.   Days passed slowly as if mired in time.   And the light which first illuminated the words slowly dimmed.

------

So there you have it.   You'll notice it starts with the letters "vxvx", which is the same for all the passages I've deciphered so far.   This could be some indication of the author's identity, although, let's face it, it could be anything.   It's also exactly two hundred words, including the header.   But, most importantly, it doesn't seem to make any sense at all.   And this is just the first.   Any ideas gratefully received.   I'll post them up as I decipher them, but there are already appearing certain themes which may get us somewhere.

First Post - What are the Thundercliffe Journals?

The Thundercliffe Journals are a set of old notebooks that I found that contain some extremely puzzling entries.   Because I can't really tell what they mean, I thought that by detailing them in a blog, I could share them with a wider community who might be able to help decipher them.   

There are two hundred of these entries, each of exactly two hundred words each.   Each entry has been encrypted with a very simple letter substitution cipher code, but each entry uses a different combination.   Clearly the ciphers are eventually repeated (there are, after all only 26 letters in the alphabet), but there seems so far to be no pattern to the way it repeats.   As I have not yet deciphered all the entries so far, in fact I'm only up to number ten, there is always a chance that a pattern will emerge.   

I'll fill in more details about how I discovered them and what they look like, which may give a clue to their authorship, as I build up this blog.

Finally, this is my first blog, so please be patient with me.   Any advice will be gratefully received and I welcome any help anyone out there can provide to work out what on earth these journals are about.