PATRICIA M. BOWERS

Inspiration for “The Code”

 

One night in my dream, I found myself standing in a very large building and noticed how clean, simple and sleek it was. The walls were very shiny and smooth and I wondered what the building was made of. Then I realized it was made of titanium. Curiously I walked around the building and saw paintings hung on the walls. They seemed to multiply as I walked, then I realized that I was in a gallery. I noticed that one of the paintings looked familiar. As I looked closer it was indeed the painting that I had been working on and having difficultly completing the center. To my amazement the painting hanging on the wall was finished. It had all this tiny writing in the core; I wondered why it was there and who had done the painting? I was very excited when I woke up and realized that I could finally finish the painting! A few days passed before I could get to the canvas but when I started to paint a series of symbol’s emerged on the tip of my brush. I was painting so fast that it was hard to keep my hand away from the wet painting. I looked in the pot of the paint and I could see more of the tiny symbols and they seemed to flow like liquid from my brush to the canvas. Upon completing the painting I didn’t understand the symbols or their meaning, it seemed to look like a code.

 

Later that month while I was walking on the beach I reconnected with a woman I had meant her some years earlier and I had actually thought about her when I was painting” the Code”. I told her about my dream and the painting I had just completed and she asked to see it. Upon seeing “The Code” she was brought to tears and she knew the painting belonged to her.

 

Two years later on a trip to England I went to the Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. It was there I first saw the “Rosetta Stone”. The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 by one of Napoleons officers near Rosetta, Egypt during Napoleons’ quest to conquer Egypt’s mysteries. Rosetta Stone is made of black basalt and has three different kinds of writing, one in Greek, one in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the other cursive script. Jean-Francois Champollion, a French linguist deciphered the third language bases in Coptic, although this language is not spoken anymore it is a demotic or democratic language. Champollion was then able to recognize that hieroglyphs have both an idea and a sound value, thus cracking the codes of languages of the Rosetta stone.

 

“The code “symbols are very similar to the demotic writing on the Rosetta Stone.

 

PMB