Sometimes, in the arts, the line between laudable creativity and haphazard incomprehensibility gets strangely blurred. Adjectives like “tour de force,” “auteur,” and “groundbreaking” get tossed around willy-nilly. It’s too easy to point to a work that’s difficult to understand and declare it “genius.”

In the world of literature, some books — like the rambling sprawl of “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, the semantic-shattering “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce, or the fake-poem-by-a-fake-novelist “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov — are justifiably called any of those words. But if you read a line like “dark plumbs the smoothbore teeth flexed rigid” taken out of context and left to hang like a random strand from Allen Ginsberg’s legendary beat poem “Howl,” is that merely an exercise in poetics? Does it have a single, concrete meaning? Put technically: Does creative relevance require semantic intention? 

In the visual arts, some critics called the renowned drip-drop painter Jackson Pollack’s work “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless,” as The New York Times quotes. An article on Unaffiliated Press goes one savage step further with its headline, “Jackson Pollock is Trash and Abstract Expressionism Needs to Die.” Psychology Today, though, when reporting on a study about abstractions and ambiguity, found that tolerance for abstraction tends to scale with education: the more you understand, the more you appreciate.

So what are we to make of an utterly abstract text stuffed with surrealistic imagery and a fake language? Is it genius? Meaningless? Enter the “Codex Seraphinianus.”

An encyclopedic fever dream of otherworldly visions

Wikimedia Commons

A Rorschach test of imagination from artist Luigi Serafini

Wikimedia Commons

A 'proto-blog' telling the story of telling meaning

Laurent Viteur/Getty Images

Wired conducted an in-depth interview with Luigi Serafini in 2013. Serafini took several years to write the “Codex Seraphinianus” from his studio in Rome. To him, born in 1949, it was the “product of a generation that chose to connect and create a network, rather than kill each other in wars like their fathers did.” He likened it to a “proto-blog” personally conveyed by readers, and said that he was “anticipating the net by sharing my work with as many people as possible.” One of his goals was “to convey to the reader… the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand,” and that “the real challenge is to offer something completely new and different.” 

The internet did indeed popularize the mythos of the “Codex Seraphinianus.” Serafini said: “The book took over his author, I ended up being just a go-between … It’s a book that speaks about crisis and about communication and it’s quite apocalyptical, suited for the present times. Anything can happen inside the Codex, just like in the Internet.”

In the end, the “Codex Seraphinianus” does what all art minimally does, genius or otherwise: It tells us about ourselves as we attempt to make sense of it. Like the original Italian publisher Alberto Manguel says on The World, “We have a tendency to believe that everything that surrounds us is an encoded language… We make sense of the world in order to survive in it.”