Some time ago—perhaps a year or more—I shared the thought with a friend that, in the absence of a life partner, career milestones, or the outward markers many associate with ongoing joy and fulfillment, I found myself sustained by something smaller, more elusive, yet no less profound: moments. Fleeting as they are, these glimpses—of joy, beauty, tenderness, or connection—carry a weight that lingers long after they pass. Whether in laughter with a friend, a burst of color in nature, the unexpected joy found in art and music, or the hush of shared silence, these moments are what remain.
This conversation was brought to mind earlier today, during a pause in some simple yard work. A robin—one I have come to recognize—perched beside me on a rock for nearly twenty minutes. He did not fly, only hopped, watching me as if we were resting together. That brief companionship, quiet and unexpected, brought back the full force of that earlier insight.
The poem that follows is a first, rough attempt to give shape to that reflection.
This robin, who kept me quiet company, reminded me of the beauty in small moments—and even allowed me, kindly, to take his portrait.
Moments
by Donald S. Yarab
After so long, I see it now— life is not the grand arc we thought we were writing, not triumph etched in time or years stacked with care. It is moments.
The held door, a beat longer than required. A cloud painting itself across the sky. A flower blooming through a crack in concrete.
The hum of a bee, the song of a bird, a friend’s first hello— welcome, familiar music in the air. Laughter spilling like light through a quiet room.
A touch that speaks without language. Sunlight flickering through leaves— nature’s own Morse code. The warm drift from the kitchen: garlic, hope, onions, memory.
The first bite of something sweet dissolving on the tongue. The joy of someone you love laughing till they snort, till they can’t breathe, till you’re laughing too at nothing, at everything.
These— small rebellions against the world’s weight: its monotony, its cold indifference.
But the moments— oh, they persist. They slip through the cracks of our hardest days and remind us why we stay, why we watch, why we dare to hope for just one more:
one more kindness, one more beauty, one more laugh, one more flicker of light— each a defiance, each a benediction in this brief, bright, impossible gift of being alive.
Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo (1908) Indian ink brush wash and colored pencil on paper, 64 × 48 cm. Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium.
At the Crossing
by Donald S. Yarab
Words gather like dew on dawn’s edge, names unspoken, waiting to be born. They tremble in the mouth of silence— a stillness before the world. But say them, and they splinter— what was whole becomes approximate. Each syllable divides the light and leaves behind shadow.
Color can have no truth— for truth demands a stillness color will not grant. It shifts with light, with eye, with sorrow or with song. If it were true, which hue would reign? Whose gaze would be the measure? It is not fact, but feeling— not essence, but event.
Touch is first knowing, before word, before sight. It does not describe—it confirms. Yet it deceives: a surface hides a wound, a hand may linger, then withdraw. What truth lies in contact— in pressure, in pulse? Or is touch merely the place where self and other collide and pretend to know?
Sound resonates not in air alone, but in the hollows of the soul. One hears hymn, another wound. Its truth lies not in frequency, but in the body that receives it— in bones that tremble, in hearts that flinch. Which is the true tone— the one that soothes, or the one that sears?
Time marches allegedly, metronomic, proud— but to whom does it keep this beat? To the grieving, it halts mid-breath; to the joyful, it slips its leash and runs. Some say it flows; others drown without a ripple. Perhaps it does not move at all— perhaps we shift, casting shadows on still walls and calling them hours.
Truth cannot be summoned by sense, nor sealed in proposition. It glimmers, briefly, when doubt is honored, when contradiction is not flaw but form. Truth is not what endures, but what survives the testing— a trembling filament between worlds, not the anchor, but the thread.
Intersection is not a place but a moment— when word is heard, when color wounds, when sound divides the silence, when time dissolves into breath, and touch recalls the nearness of all things.
And there— at that trembling margin— truth does not appear. It haunts the space where meaning almost forms.
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.
In myth, the Furies pursue the guilty. In this meditative poem, they do not chase or condemn, but pause—witnesses to memory, silence, and the uncertain balance between reckoning and reprieve. Beneath the yew, they wait—not gone, not appeased, but listening.
Vincent van Gogh, Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888) Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm London, Helly Nahmad Gallery
“Necdum illum aut trunca lustrauerat obuia taxo / Eumenis…” — Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10
“Nor yet had the Fury met him, bearing the lustral yew…” — Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10 (adapted translation)
As darkness descends and light abates, The Furies wake at the turning of fates. No horn is blown, no omen flies— Only the hush where judgment lies.
They come not crowned, but cloaked in ash, With broken names and eyes that flash. Not wrath alone, but what endures— The weight of memory that never cures.
They walk where silence used to sleep, Where secrets rot and letters bleed. The breath of dusk is cold and tight— A wound reopens in the night.
By yews they pause, where death takes root, In soil grown thick with ash and fruit. The bark is split with silent cries, The rings record what speech denies.
They do not speak, but still the trees Murmur of trespass in the breeze. The wind forgets its mournful tone— As if the world waits to atone.
A shadow stirs, but does not fall; A light withdraws, but leaves a call. No hand is raised, no doom is cast— And yet the pulse runs through the past.
The air is thick with what might be: A breaking, or a turning key. The Furies halt—but do not sleep. And from the yews, the silence… deep.
So still they stand beneath the yew— The Furies veiled in dusk’s soft hue. Its needles dark, its berries red, It shelters both the quick and dead.
They neither strike nor turn away, But hold the hush at break of day. Their eyes are dark, their purpose blurred— As if they wait to hear a word.
Northcoast Antiquarian 