Huw Lemmey and Hildegard of Bingen, Unknown Language, Ignota Books, 2020
Long, long before the Information Age ended, young Hildegard of Bingen finds beauty in the moral and spiritual ruins of her medieval world. In her forty-third year, she inscribes her cosmic visions into Scivias, an indescribably beautiful codex of writing and illuminations thought to be destroyed during the evacuation of Earth.
In a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls on Avaaz, Pinky Agarwalia discovers fragments of this visionary text containing hitherto unknown pathways to a lost vision of human co-existence with plants and non-humans – and the seeds of its rebirth on Avaaz.
Bursting with mythic quantum energy, Hildegard's vital linguistic potion viriditas, threaded throughout her communiques, is a lush, verdant, renewable life-force. Her ecological message may be just the magic needed for rebirth on Avaaz.
Hildegard's mystic toolkit for the future includes a cosmology, medicine, a morphology of crystals, recipes – and the symbols of a new language.
As Pinky Agarwalia traces the diagrams with her fingertip, she suddenly understands – a vision that appears without warning in her own mind – that she must first immerse these materials in water, a guarded substance. In the water, the molecules of the hidden language dissolve, freeze then reconfigure into new shapes, the crystalline language communicated not through sound but by feeling and light. ?Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's mysterious invented 'unknown language', arrives just in time for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.
"Unknown Language really is unlike any other book I've read this year. It merges poetry, prose, and essayic writing into a book much greater than the sum of its parts. Each section alone offers something that resonates beyond the page, and in concert they all feel necessary towards conveying Hildegard von Bingen's expansive impact. The book is stirring and evocative, even for someone like me with little connection to the Christian mythos. But Unknown Language's true strength is in creation. Like Hildegard von Bingen herself, Unknown Language imagines a new mode of being, a way of life outside of the confines of contemporary society. By introducing a new vocabulary, it offers access to an expanse beyond its covers." -Chicago Review of Books
Unknown Language is a work of collaboration and correspondence. Was it always conceived this way and how did it come about?
In each project that we undertake we’re interested in worlding, asking “What is a world?” and “What kind of a world do you want to live in?” Unknown Language is possibly the first in the genre called speculative mysticism, and is an exercise in world-building through speculative fiction, for “the truth is a matter of the imagination”. To do this we knew that it would be necessary to bring together fragments of that world in non-chronological time, and that this would require multiple voices.
The core of Unknown Language is composed by Huw Lemmey, whom we invited to write a rendition of Hildegard’s story with her words, but to translate her teachings into a story that speaks to our age and that also resonates with her potent concept of viriditas, “greeness”: to re-green her work itself, to find ways of putting in conversation her experiences in the moral and spiritual ruins of her world with ours. As ever, Huw’s vision is sensitive to queerness and desire, here embedded in Christian mystical texts, and he brings a depth and sophistication to the encounter between politics and religion in the historical Middle Ages. The result is a queer pilgrimage narrative that tells the story of the journey of a soul. We feel this image is the best gesture towards the nature of Huw and Hildegard’s collaboration.
Bhanu Kapil’s work around monstrosity, hybridity, the humanimal, the migrant, mental health, the body and the racialised subject made her our ideal introducer to frame Hildegard’s story with a highly original, gently funny and touching new mythology that flips the colonialist underpinnings of discovery narratives in which an orphan of civilisational collapse finds and activates fragments of Hildegard’s messages. Her Pinky Agarwalia receives the story of Hildegard in 2121 on the planet Avaaz, formerly known as Earth, as well as the scholarly text of Dr. Alice Spawls from the Plague Year of 2020. Dr. Spawls’ text, written by Alice Spawls, is a paper about Hildegard’s remarkable musical composition, pointing towards the polyphonic nature of the project as a whole. - Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers
Collaborating with the dead, Hildegard of Bingen, genius and villainywith Huw Lemmey (Bad Gays) – podcast
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