Water, lemon juice, and some magic, the kind that makes your eyes open.
Toothpicks used as nibs, goose feathers that do not stain anymore, inks full of transparent liquid, we bet you can read unwritten notebooks?
Invisible at the time of application, the “ink sympathetic” has known over the centuries different uses and steganography (ok, the writing covered) was used with the most disparate ends.
Herodotus used it in some of his Stories, the Spartans for the prevention of possible attacks, and one of the most ingenious forms was that thought by Histiaeus, tyrant of Miletus who in 490 a.c. to communicate an important message to an ally, He engraved it on the skin of his favorite servant (and thank goodness..) sending him on a journey only when the hair had grown back enough.
Of course, important but not urgent you could say, but what do you want to do, back then there were no ephemeral messages of whatsapp..
They were written books on witchcraft able to hide from the Inquisition their true nature (denounce the barbaric execution of women considered heretical or “possessed” just because epileptic) burning words of love between banal birthday wishes, I mean, these are some outrageous escape plans on shopping lists, grocery bills that can subvert regimes, in short, stories of conspiracies and spies that may even be romantic, but maybe a little out of fashion..
Today that the printed paper is no longer used much, it is cryptography that can mask the true text, a bit like the Enigma Code whose decryption allowed the Allies to win the Second World War, and from the Da Vinci Code onwards, even paintings and paintings have had their glory: overwritten canvases, templar plots and masonic atmospheres have filled pages and TV screens with intricate and compelling stories, up to the files shared via the web, seemingly harmless images that if magnified enough detect pixels colored specifically to make them correspond to alphabetic characters..
Languages.
In code.
By images.
Security through secrecy, water and lemon to write ma.. to read?
Steganalysis, which studies the reverse process and aims to determine whether a medium capable of carrying information contains secret messages etc. but.. what boredom!
With the nice ink just the heat, which for a strange reaction fantachimica allows words to appear!
Now, when we dream we also compose invisible words in the mind, because you know, the greatest artists work just at night.
We paint silent and secret images, stories and stories that suddenly light up behind the eyelids of the eyes closed by sleep, dreamlike adventures that when you wake up can disappear, but that sometimes remain.
And how do you understand something, to translate it, to decipher it, to try to understand it, to interpret it?
We often try in psychotherapy, and if our Rosetta Stone is perhaps the theoretical reference, I think that the necessary heat can only be related to the relationship.
The affective investment, the vitality, the fantasy, can make verbal and visible the hidden communications, and I don’t know if the dreams are nice, certainly they are not made of ink, but they are human, and if sometimes they can be lost or even get sick, I’m sure of one thing.
No one can ever take them away.
Marco Randisi
Leave a Reply