What happens when the characters tumble from their tales? When rhyme stumbles, and the Goose remembers? In this playful and poignant poem, nursery rhymes unravel, fairy tales awaken, and the stories themselves walk past their plots.“Once Upon Askew” is a whimsical reflection on the lives of stories—and those who dwell within them.
or, The Story That Would Not Sit Still by Donald S. Yarab
Listen, child—I am the Old Grey Goose, And I was there when books came loose, When volumes tumbled, pages flew, And all the stories mixed like stew.
It started with a mighty thud— Books falling open, words like mud, All swirling, mingling, line by line, Till Alice’s world came mixing into mine.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” she cried, Right into Cow’s green pasture-side, Where “Hey Diddle Diddle” used to play— Now Cow asks questions all the day.
The Spoon caught Alice’s strange delight, Abandoned dishes, fled by night, Beneath a moon from whose bright story— From Carroll’s tale or Goose’s glory?
I squawked from my own tumbled page— Which book? What tale? What ancient age? While Cat’s grin stretched across our scene, Belonging nowhere, everywhere seen.
We passed the wall where once he sat— Poor Humpty, puzzled, round, and flat. Though patched, he watches, cracked but clear, And murmurs, “Not all ends end in fear.”
But one lay still beyond the swirl— A slumbering, untouched young girl. The tales all passed; she did not wake, No prince, no plot her trance to break. Yet in her stillness, something stirred— A dream not shaped by spoken word.
We found Red Riding Hood alone, Her basket lost, her sure path gone. The Wolf came next—not sly, but stunned, As if unsure what he had done. They walked apart, then side by side, Two stories stripped of fear and pride, Each wondering if what they knew Was ever really, wholly true.
So off we walked, this mixed-up crew: Alice with questions, Cow with moo That carried wisdom, Spoon with light From every moon and every night.
Behind us trailed the broken bits— Half-rhymes and verbs that sought their fits, Metaphors in mismatched dancing shoes, Still seeking out their missing clues.
No longer bound by story’s rules, We’d become something new, no fools— Not quite the characters we’d been, Not free of them—but in between.
And hovering above our band, That smile from Cheshire’s distant land— A grin that needs no cat to hold, A question that will not be told.
This is what happens, child, you see, When stories tumble, wild and free— They find they’re more alike than not, And walk together past their plot.
Recently, I read with great interest Hari Kunzru’s article “Doing Their Own Research” in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 2025). It is a piercing, sometimes surreal examination of the strange coalition now shaping American political and spiritual culture: a “New Weird Fusionism” of right-wing conspiracy, countercultural wellness, and mystical absolutism. The portrait he offers—of a society increasingly shaped by magical thinking, selective paranoia, and a weaponized imagination—was as disturbing as it was insightful.
But what struck me most was the realization that the cultural atmosphere Kunzru describes makes it increasingly likely that contemplative works like my recent Liber Agglutivi will be not merely misread—but conscripted into the very worldview they seek to resist.
In that work, framed as a fictional medieval treatise on sacred language, I explore how language, when approached with reverence and silence, becomes not a tool of communication but a site of presence—how it may not only speak about reality, but participate in it. Yet as I read Kunzru’s analysis of conspirituality—the synthesis of conspiracy and New Age belief—I saw an eerie proximity between certain rhetorical structures in Liber Agglutivi and the thought patterns of this cultural formation: secrecy, marginalia, hidden knowledge, the recovery of “true” language lost to corruption.
The danger is real: in an age where every form of mystery gets weaponized, how do we distinguish between authentic contemplative practice and its paranoid simulacra?
It is precisely here that the contrast must be made explicit.
The Liber is not a manual for decoding reality through esoteric symbols or a codebook for revealing global plots. It is not a mystical justification for control, nor an invitation to gnostic certainty. Its words are not “keys” to hidden truths in the paranoid sense Kunzru describes. Rather, it is a contemplative experiment—a poetic, philosophical invitation to see language as something we enter with humility, not something we wield with certainty.
What conspirituality offers is often a form of linguistic inflation: a conviction that to name something is to master it, that to imagine is to manifest, that hidden truths are personal weapons in a war against “them.” This is not reverence for mystery but inflation through proximity to it. The practitioner of conspirituality approaches mystery as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked that will grant power over reality itself.
By contrast, the Liber offers a theology of kenosis—a self-emptying approach to speech in which the word is not a sword, but a veil; not a control mechanism, but a site of transfigured listening. Where conspirituality seeks to decode, contemplation seeks to be changed by what it encounters.
Consider the difference in practice. A conspirituality adherent might read the Liber’s phrase about “memory that knows not what it remembers” as a hint toward recovering suppressed historical truths or accessing forbidden knowledge that “they” do not want you to have.
A contemplative reader approaches the same phrase as an invitation to sit with unknowing itself—to let the mystery remain mysterious while allowing it to transform one’s relationship to knowledge. The first approach inflates the ego; the second empties it.
Kunzru’s analysis is especially compelling in its treatment of magical thinking across the domains of politics, religion, and economics. It is alarming to witness the persistence of the nineteenth-century “mind-cure” tradition—the belief that reality is downstream of personal attitude—now manifesting as national governance logic.
That Donald Trump, among others, internalized Norman Vincent Peale’s message of mental affirmation to the point that factuality became irrelevant is not merely a character trait—it is a symptom of an epistemological crisis. Similarly, the self-help gospel of The Secret, evangelical prosperity teachings, and the memetic evangelism of internet conspiracists all illustrate a culture in which to believe is to make it so.
The boundary between wish and world is not merely blurred—it is denied.
The Liber Agglutivi, by contrast, insists that language’s creative power arises not from assertive will but from contemplative reception. The phrase “word that becomes the thing” does not mean that the self wills reality into being. It means that, in sacred silence, the word discloses what is already most true.
This is a fundamentally different ontology. It is not manifestation; it is reverent participation.
Kunzru rightly notes how easily mystical language can be conscripted by paranoid styles. The idea that “everything is connected,” which in contemplative practice leads to compassion and humility, in conspiracy often leads to reductionism and scapegoating.
The Liber speaks of memory that “knows not what it remembers”—a phrase meant to evoke mystery and presence, not cognitive shortcuts to hidden truths.
So while Kunzru’s essay is not a critique of my work, it felt like a necessary caution about the times in which such a work might be read. In an age of epistemic confusion and symbolic inflation, sacred language must be handled with even greater care.
We must distinguish between language as control and language as communion; between the voice that silences others and the voice that emerges from deep silence. We must recognize that in our current moment, the very practices that might lead us toward wisdom—attention to mystery, reverence for hidden dimensions of experience, suspicion of surface explanations—can be corrupted into tools of manipulation and division.
The Liber Agglutivi may look like a book of secrets, but it is really a book about unknowing—about hearing the spaces where speech begins. And in a world where every utterance is increasingly co-opted for political or psychological leverage, the commitment to silence, reverence, and the mystery of meaning may itself be the most radical stance available to us.
Words that reign do so only when they have ceased to serve the self. In our age of weaponized mysticism, that may be the difference between wisdom and delusion, between contemplation and conspiracy.
A Reflection Interwoven with Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled 2005, acrylic on canvas, 128 x 194½ in “His madness is a circle of fire, an unbroken circuit of excess, each attempt at containment spilling into the next”—Art historian Malcolm Bull on the Bacchus paintings.
The three poems, CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA, which follow—Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum—did not emerge by design. They followed Liber Agglutivi as if by necessity. Once the treatise had been written, these poems had to be. They are not commentaries on the Liber, nor are they didactic restatements of its metaphysical claims. Rather, they are its echo—its ember. They are the hymns sung at the threshold that Liber Agglutivi only describes.
Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval-inspired treatise can enter these poems directly. They function as meditations on how language lives in us before we speak it, while we speak it, and after our words have fallen silent. Readers of the Liber will recognize these concerns, but the poems make them immediate and felt rather than theoretical.
They move through language as tremor, fire, and resonance. The sequence below mirrors the deeper structure of the Liber: from the agglutum primitivum (pre-verbal memory), to the verbum intransitivum (word as creation), to the postverbum and glosselitha (residual presence).
CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA
I. Ante Verba
Language as Tremor, Silence as Light
Ante Verba (Versus ad limen vocis) Verbum non dicitur, sed fit. Non transit, sed regnat. Nomen quod loquitur se ipsum non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus. Lingua non fert sensum, sed tremorem. Memoria quae nescit quid meminerit audit quod non sonat. Tacere est tangere lumen. Loqui est amittere formam, ut recipiatur flamma.
Before Words (Verses at the threshold of voice) The word is not spoken, but becomes. It does not pass through, but reigns. The name that speaks itself arises not from the mouth, but from the bones. Language carries not meaning, but tremor. Memory that knows not what it remembers hears what does not sound. To be silent is to touch light. To speak is to lose form, so that the flame may be received.
This poem inhabits the space where language has not yet been spoken but is already forming. It suggests that words do not begin with speech—they begin with the body, with memory, with a force older than conscious thought. In the Liber, this is called the agglutum primitivum—the murmur that speaks itself rather than being spoken.
The line “non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus” (“arises not from the mouth, but from the bones”) aligns with Martin Heidegger’s vision in Letter on Humanism, where language is not a tool but the “house of Being.” Maurice Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, understands silence not as negation but as a paradoxical mode of presence—a vision we carry forward in our own line from Ante Verba: “Tacere est tangere lumen.”
The poem resists the tendency to think of silence as a void. It suggests instead that silence is already full—that the word is merely what breaks the threshold.
II. Verba
Language Does Not Carry Meaning—It Generates It
Verba Non instrumenta, sed ignes. Non indicia, sed invocationes. Ex spiritu fiunt formae. Ex sono fit lumen. Verbum non portat sensum; generat. Non sequitur lucem; effundit eam. Obliti sumus verba sentire— at illa nos sentiunt.
Words Not instruments, but fires. Not signs, but invocations. From spirit, forms arise. From sound, light is made. The word does not carry meaning; it generates it. It does not follow light; it pours it forth. We have forgotten how to feel words— but they feel us.
Verba shifts from anticipation to ignition. Here, the word becomes flame. It does not describe; it creates. This is the essence of the verbum intransitivum found in the Liber—a word that does not pass meaning from subject to object, but emits meaning by its very being.
This echoes Jacques Derrida’s insight in Of Grammatology: that language does not simply transmit ideas—it generates meaning anew with every utterance. Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? treats language as an existential act, not a report, and this vision is mirrored in the line “Verbum non portat sensum; generat.”
The agglutivum, as the Liber defines it, is precisely this: a word that binds meaning not through grammar, but through presence. The poem closes with a reversal: it is not we who perceive words, but words that perceive us.
III. Postverbum
The Spectral Afterlife of Language
Postverbum Verbum abit, sed tremor manet. Non vox, sed vestigium vocis. Non lumen, sed fulgor in ruina. Post verbum non est silentium, sed memoria quae loqui recusat. Forma cecidit— resonantia viget. Non est oblivio, nec repetitio. Est remanentia sine nomine. Quod dictum est, abit. Quod vivit, remanet.
After-Word The word departs, but the tremor remains. Not voice, but the trace of voice. Not light, but gleam within ruin. After the word there is not silence, but memory that refuses to speak. Form has fallen— resonance thrives. It is not forgetting, nor repetition. It is remainder without name. What has been spoken departs. What lives remains.
What remains when the word falls away? Postverbum addresses the residue of speech, its spectral persistence. The Liber speaks of the glosselitha—words no longer active but still resonant. This poem inhabits that after-space: where meaning is not present, yet not gone.
Derrida’s trace (especially in Writing and Difference) hovers here: a remnant of presence that cannot be fully recovered, nor fully lost. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, evokes this through the fragment—the broken form more alive than the whole. And Bachelard’s “intimate immensity,” in The Poetics of Space, seems apt: the vast echo of what once was word.
This is not nostalgia. It is presence beyond sound.
Coda: Language as Tremor, Fire, Trace
The poems above are not marginal to Liber Agglutivi—they are its liturgy. They enact what the treatise evokes: a philosophy of speech where the word is not a vessel but a lifeform.
If the Liber speaks of agglutive words—words that bind not by syntax but by resonance—then these poems are agglutive acts. They offer no argument. They offer invocation.
Together, they invite us to listen differently—not just to what we say, but to what speaks through us when we are most quiet, most present, most alive to the mystery of having language at all.
It is difficult to describe the Liber Agglutivi, or as translated into English, The Agglutivum: A Treatise on the Intransitive Voice, for both its origin and content resist conventional classification. Its genesis, as I recount within the pages themselves, was not intellectual but oneiric. The word agglutive—unknown to me then, undefined in any language I … Continue reading “Liber Agglutivi: A Work of Fiction, Philosophy, and Reverence”
The Agglutivum: A Treatise on the Intransitive Voice Transcribed and Edited with Glosses by Donald S. Yarab Paperback, 58 Pages, 6in × 9in, $7.99 plus $5 postage CLICK IMAGE ABOVE TO ORDER BOUND COPY
It is difficult to describe the Liber Agglutivi, or as translated into English, The Agglutivum: A Treatise on the Intransitive Voice, for both its origin and content resist conventional classification. Its genesis, as I recount within the pages themselves, was not intellectual but oneiric. The word agglutive—unknown to me then, undefined in any language I knew—visited me repeatedly in sleep. So compelling was its sound and weight that, upon waking, I began at once to give breath to the whisper that had haunted my rest. What emerged was not story or doctrine, but something stranger and perhaps more elemental.
The text that followed felt less composed than revealed—an excavation rather than a construction. It is, in the truest sense, a received work. Its structure—voculae, glosselitha, silentia, postverba—appeared as if drawn from some hidden grammar beneath ordinary speech. Though shaped in Latin (with an English translation as appendix) and framed by scholarly apparatus, it is not a parody nor a pastiche, but a sincere tribute to the metaphysical impulse in language.
Readers may find echoes of Borges, Vico, and Pseudo-Dionysius; others may see affinities with mystical traditions, liturgical fragments, or even speculative linguistics. It may be read as fictive scripture, poetic glossolalia, philosophical provocation, or theological shadowplay. Or perhaps—if read rightly—it is none of these, but instead a call to silence, to memory, to the threshold of meaning itself.
Let it be said plainly: this work will not appeal to all. It is slow and strange, elliptical and spare. But for the rare reader attuned to the hum beneath the words we know, it may, in its own agglutive way, speak.
The work is available to read through the link below as a free PDF. For those who find affinity with it, an inexpensive bound copy may be ordered by clicking the image of the book above.
A Contemporary Meditation Inspired by the Liber Agglutivi
The Agglutivum suggests but does not systematize a catalog of words that resist conventional grammar—words that seem to create rather than merely describe reality. What follows is a modern attempt to identify and explore such “ontological voculae,” developed in the spirit of the medieval treatise but acknowledging its contemporary construction.
Voculae Agglutivae
A Supplement to the Glossarium Philosophicum Non omnia verba dicuntur ut loquantur. Quaedam dicuntur ut fiant.
I. Sacra Voculae – Sacred Utterances
These words do not inform; they summon. Often liturgical, they retain weight through resonance, not explanation.
Amen Confirmatio sine contentu. —What is confirmed is not always known.
Alleluia Laus pura, sine scopo. —Praise that outruns its object.
Kyrie Clamor, non formula. —Not request, but primal cry.
Hosanna Eruptio, non enuntiatio. —A word of ascent, not address.
Om / Aum Vox quae se ipsam audit. —The breath that sustains itself.
II. Voculae Primitivae – Primal Expressions
Pre-conceptual utterances: the first stirrings of meaning, or the last.
Yes Vocabulum consentientis animae. —Affirmation without argument.
No Negatio sine opposito. —The first refusal of the void.
“Every door leads deeper. Every step farther from certainty.” (Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View of a Corridor, 1662, oil on canvas)
Prefatory Note
In my youth — now roughly four decades past — while studying the slender yet profound Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of St. Bonaventure, there arose in my mind a simple observation: “Thin books are dangerous.” By their brevity, they conceal depths which the unwary may mistake for shallows. By their compactness, they pierce more swiftly, and leave marks more enduring than tomes of a thousand pages.
The small variations presented below draw their form, though not their genius, from the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges — that master of mirrors, labyrinths, and forgotten libraries. If there is any virtue herein, it is owed to his example; if there is error, it is mine alone.
May the reader proceed with care, for the thinnest books, and perhaps the thinnest tales, are those most difficult to escape.
“The shortest books require the longest penance.” — Anonymous marginal note, Biblioteca Laurenziana
I. The Library of Thin Books
In the city of Aram, whose streets no cartographer has ever agreed upon, there was once a secret library known only to a few scholars and fewer fools. It was said to contain the sum of human knowledge, but organized strangely: the thick books were shelved in dusty catacombs, seldom touched, while the thin books were kept in a bright chamber at the center, on shelves of polished cedar.
The Keeper of the Library explained this arrangement to all who entered: “The thick books are for forgetting. The thin books are for believing.”
Each thin book contained a single idea, expressed so perfectly that it resisted all argument. Sovereignty Belongs to the Strong was one book. The World is a Dream of the Gods was another. Still another was simply titled Obey.
Visitors who read the thick books emerged thoughtful and burdened, full of hesitations, counterexamples, and second thoughts. Visitors who read the thin books emerged transformed: resolute, fervent, certain.
Over time, it was not the heavy tomes that shaped Aram’s kings, priests, and scholars, but the thin volumes, read once and carried forever.
It is said that the city of Aram fell, not through invasion, nor famine, nor pestilence, but because, in the end, its citizens each lived by the idea of a different thin book, and could no longer understand one another.
The Library still stands, or so the story goes, though its doors are sealed and the books grow thinner by the century.
There is a final book, the thinnest of all, placed at the highest shelf where none but the Keeper can reach. It contains no words at all.
Its title is: Certainty.
⁂
II. The Shadows of the Books
There is a city — it does not matter which — where it is rumored that a second library exists beneath the great Library of Learned Tomes.
The surface library, the Library of Learned Tomes, is a noble place: its corridors are vast, its tomes heavy with ink and argument, and its readers slow, uncertain, weighed down by the burden of complexity. No truth is simple there; every assertion is marked and belied by a hundred footnotes, every conclusion bruised by rebuttal.
But below, beneath stone and time, there is another library. It is said to be vast but weightless. There, one finds only thin books — so thin they seem at times to flicker in the light, as if they might vanish.
Scholars, sensing the rumors, sometimes descend. They find books titled with dangerous simplicity: Justice is the Right of the Victorious,History is the Story We Tell Ourselves,The Future is Written.
Each thin book feels familiar. And well it should. For these thin books are the shadows of the thick books above¹: each vast, tangled treatise, compressed into a single, unassailable maxim.
The discovery at first seems marvelous. Why wrestle with a thousand pages when the essence can be grasped in a sentence? Why debate, when the answer can be carried in one’s pocket, ready for all occasions?
But the thin books are not summaries; they are distortions. They are what remains when doubt, nuance, and contradiction are stripped away. They are the husks of thought — seductive because they seem lighter, easier, final.
In time, those who read only the thin books come to mistrust the thick ones. They grow impatient with questions, contemptuous of ambiguity, zealous for a clarity that admits no appeal.
Some say that it was not neglect but the rise of the thin books that doomed the upper Library. That the heavy volumes grew dusty because the city’s rulers and citizens alike began to prefer the glimmer of certainty to the slow, earned labor of understanding.
In the end, the Library of Learned Tomes collapsed inward like a drained well. And the shadow library, weightless and triumphant, remained.
Somewhere, perhaps, it still remains.
Somewhere, perhaps, it is growing.
⁂
III. Coda: A Reflection in the Labyrinth
Some say that even the tale you have just read — the account of the thick and the thin, the surface and the shadow — is itself no more than a thin book: a single idea, polished to gleam, shorn of its necessary doubts.
If so, it is but one more glimmer in the labyrinth.
One more reflection upon reflections, cast by a candle already guttering.
One more danger to remember, and to forget.
IV. Scholium
¹ Cf. the lost Tractatus de Umbris Librorum (“Treatise on the Shadows of Books”), attributed to the forgotten scholar Balthasar of Istria (fl. late 13th century), who wrote: “The greater the volume, the more labyrinths it contains; the thinner the shadow it casts, the more swiftly it pierces the heart.” No complete manuscript survives, though fragments are said to be embedded in certain marginal glosses of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Some dispute the existence of Balthasar himself, suggesting he is merely the invention of later compilers seeking to dignify their own thinness with the patina of lost antiquity.
Northcoast Antiquarian 