Of Sculptures & Codes

Oh, how I do love serendipitous synchronicity. On this, our first full day of our second sojourn this year to Lower Down in Shropshire, I happened on a beauty. But first, let's recapitulate the Salopian connection to my family that I've referred to in quite a few posts past - last February's visit being the most recent - Elizabeth Graves, née Southall: my Great-Great Aunt and hostess of The White Horse Inn in Clun, Shropshire, for some decades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; surviving two husbands in the process; and whose connection to me was unknown by me until a couple of years ago, even though the pub has been a favourite holiday haunt [see blog posts passim on the subject to get that oblique reference] of ours for thirty years or so. Anyhow, today I bought my usual copy of the FT Weekend and we repaired to the White Horse for a good basic pub lunch of sausage and chips, washed down in my case with a couple of pints of their home-brewed Pale Ale.

I started to read a piece in the magazine just before we left to return to the cottage, about the sculpture entitled "Kryptos" by Jim Sanborn, which resides on the campus of The Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, USA, which consists of four encrypted messages cut into an S-shaped copper sheet, which sits as part of an installation completed in November, 1990. The first three encrypted puzzles were solved in that decade: the quickest off the mark being cryptanalysts at The National Security Agency, in 1992, with the CIA and an independent analyst cracking them seven years later. However, the fourth piece of the thing which Sanborn says will reveal yet another, fifth puzzle when viewed alongside the other three solutions, has yet to be cracked by anyone. I'd recommend Googling around the topic, it's pretty fascinating stuff, especially if you're into the cryptic.

Which brings me to the latest bit of synchronicity. Whilst I was searching around for more information about this thing and the cult following that has grown up around it over the decades - everybody loves a seemingly intractable puzzle, don't they? Well, some of us do, anyway; - I checked out the Wikipedia entry for the sculpture, and scrolling down to the 'See Also...' section, I noted three references linking out to other sources, the third of which was to the Voynich Manuscript, another as yet unsolved mystery that has been around for much longer. Again there is tons of stuff out there on the subject; some academic and erudite, some just plain daft in nature. The point is that the house we have been staying in here in Shropshire, on-and-off for the past twenty seven years or so, is owned by the co-author of a book on the very subject of the Voynich manuscript, Gerry Kennedy; which has been translated into multiple languages, including a Japanese edition [pictured atop the title page of the FT piece above], a copy of which translation sits on a bookshelf in the sitting room here. You couldn't make it up...