Beyond the One Map: Toward a Craft-Based Understanding of Human Inquiry

Modern scholarship’s great temptation—one that has often spilled into civic and cultural life—has been the pursuit of totality: to trace coherence from the disorder that followed revolutions, continental wars, and world wars, gathering fragments into systems that promised to restore meaning to the wreckage of history. Across disciplines—from medieval literary studies to economics, from art history to psychology—the twentieth century witnessed a striking convergence toward singular, systematic frameworks. Ernst Robert Curtius organized literature around recurring topoi;[1] Erwin Panofsky read art through iconographic programs;[2] Carl Gustav Jung distilled human experience into archetypes; and economists—whether Marxist or neoclassical (the dominant free-market orthodoxy, often traced back to Adam Smith)—sought universal laws governing production and exchange. Each claimed to reveal the deep structure beneath surface variation. Each, in claiming totality, shaded toward ideology—becoming, in some instances, rigid orthodoxy.[3]

This essay argues for another path: treat systematic frameworks as tools rather than truths; judge methods by the illumination they afford rather than by their doctrinal purity; and acknowledge the irreducible complexity of human phenomena. This is not relativism—some interpretations are demonstrably better than others. Rather, it is the recognition that inquiry dealing with meaning-making beings is fundamentally a craft requiring practical wisdom (phronēsis), not a science discovering exceptionless laws.

The Pattern of Capture

The mid-century turn toward formalism and structuralism did not arise by accident. Disciplines sought scientific legitimacy: systematic method, universal patterns, predictive power. The result was a proliferation of One Map systems.

In literary studies, New Criticism treated texts as autonomous formal objects; structuralists sought universal narrative grammars. Curtius’s monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages catalogued the enduring armature of topoi that seemed to organize the Western tradition. In art history, Panofsky’s iconology promised the decipherment of hidden programs and symbolic orders, making artworks legible as texts within overarching schemas. In psychology, rival schools—psychoanalytic, behaviorist, cognitive—each claimed the key to the mind’s machinery; Jung added a transhistorical repertoire of archetypes as the psyche’s deep code. In economics, Marxism and neoclassical theory offered total pictures—historical materialism on the one hand; rational, utility-maximizing agents in equilibrium on the other—each confident that its lawlike structures governed the social world.

What these systems shared was the conviction that beneath diversity lay discoverable, general structures—topoi, archetypes, economic laws, narrative grammars. Master the structure and one could, in principle, explain everything within the domain. Deviations became error, noise, or “false consciousness” in need of correction.

Powerful incentives drove the turn. The prestige of natural science encouraged methodological mimicry. The chaos of revolutions and wars, whether on battlefields or in the life of ideas, created a hunger for stable foundations. Professionalization rewarded methods that could be taught, replicated, and certified. There was genuine intellectual exhilaration in finding patterns that seemed to recur across times and cultures.

The cost was equally great. Every framework, in sharply illuminating some aspects, systematically obscured others. The formalist who honed attention to technique missed history. The Marxist who foregrounded class dynamics missed irreducible symbolic or aesthetic meaning. The psychoanalyst who reduced motivation to the unconscious discounted deliberation and norm-following. The economist who modeled rational actors abstracted away meaning, culture, emotion, and power.

Worse, frameworks became tribal identities. Scholars and others did not merely use Marxist analysis or formalist reading; they were Marxists or formalists. To question the framework threatened belonging, status, and career. Method hardened into movement.

The Metacritical Turn—and Its Recurrence

By the 1960s–70s, reactions emerged. Poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault exposed the fissures and power-saturated operations of totalizing systems. Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms are historically contingent and periodically overturned.[4] Feminist and postcolonial critics showed how seemingly universal structures often encoded particular (male, Western) vantage points.

These critiques were clarifying. They revealed the politics of knowledge, the contingency of canons, the slipperiness of signification. Yet the tragedy is familiar: many of these movements reproduced the error they named. Poststructuralism ossified into an orthodoxy policed by jargon; feminist and postcolonial discourses fractured into camps, each claiming the right diagnosis; Kuhn’s paradigm talk became a ready instrument for dismissing unwelcome evidence (“that is just your paradigm”). The critics of ideology birthed new ideologies.

The recurrence is not mysterious. Academic, social, and political life rewards membership and defensible positions. Deep engagement breeds emotional investment. Intellectual communities cohere around shared tools, which then become badges. Psychologically, human beings prefer coherent worldviews; critiques of totality tend, over time, to totalize themselves.

The consequence is a landscape of warring camps, each armed with a schema, each convinced of its sufficiency, each systematically blind to what it excludes.

The Pattern Persists

The tendency has not abated. Contemporary scholarship, while more fragmented than the mid-century consolidations, continues to generate frameworks that, having illuminated genuine blindnesses, themselves become new orthodoxies.

In literary studies, identity-based criticism has made permanent contributions: revealing whose voices were systematically silenced, exposing how “universal human experience” often encoded particular (white, male, Western) perspectives, opening canons to previously excluded works, and showing how power operates through representation. These insights cannot and should not be reversed. Yet in many disciplines, identity analysis is in practice often treated as mandatory—as if race, gender, and colonial dynamics exhaust what makes literature significant. Aesthetic achievement, formal innovation, philosophical depth, or meanings that transcend identity categories risk dismissal as naive or complicit evasion. A tool that reveals crucial dimensions has become, in practice, the only lens deemed legitimate.

In art history, social approaches rightly challenged the fantasy of autonomous art divorced from material conditions. Examining how patronage, markets, institutions, and class relations shape artistic production has enriched understanding immeasurably. But when this insight hardens into orthodoxy, artworks risk reduction to mere symptoms of social forces—historical documents that could be replaced by period photographs without loss. What makes something art rather than illustration, what constitutes aesthetic achievement, why this painting rather than another—these questions become suspect, dismissed as formalist mystification.

In psychology, cognitive neuroscience has genuinely advanced understanding of how brain mechanisms underlie mental phenomena. Neuroimaging and computational models provide knowledge unavailable to earlier approaches, and any comprehensive psychology must integrate these findings. Yet when neural accounts claim completeness, they eliminate what phenomenological and psychodynamic traditions captured: what experience is like from the inside, how people create meaning, how culture shapes consciousness, and the reality of conscious deliberation. Persons become brains; intentions become activations; meanings dissolve into mechanisms.

In history, social history’s turn toward “history from below”—material conditions, ordinary lives, structural forces—corrected the great-man myopia of earlier approaches and revealed how the non-elite shaped events. This expansion of historical vision is irreversible progress. But the corresponding neglect of how individuals, ideas, and political decisions matter—how Lincoln’s choices, Robespierre’s rhetoric, or Empress Dowager Cixi’s interventions in succession and reform, which may be judged to have prolonged the Qing dynasty, hastened its fall, or proved irrelevant against structural inevitabilities—represents a new distortion. Agency disappears into forces; contingency into necessity.

In economics, behavioral approaches rightly demonstrate that people are not the perfectly rational calculators of neoclassical models. Incorporating psychology into economic analysis addresses real limitations. Yet these insights typically remain within the neoclassical framework as corrective patches rather than fundamentally reconceiving how culture, meaning, power, and institutions shape economic life. The model receives adjustments; the model’s adequacy remains unquestioned.

Each new framework sees genuinely what its predecessor missed. Identity criticism perceives exclusions that formalism could not. Social art history grasps material conditions that connoisseurship ignored. Neuroscience reveals mechanisms that behaviorism and psychoanalysis could only theorize. Social history captures structural forces that political narrative obscured. These are real advances, not fashions.

But each also misses what its predecessor saw—and tends toward its own totality despite beginning as correction. Identity criticism risks losing the aesthetic. Social approaches risk losing the artwork. Neuroscience risks losing the person. Social history risks losing agency. The tools that should be added to the kit instead displace previous tools.

What is not happening is accumulation—the steady building of a varied toolkit where new approaches supplement rather than replace useful older ones. A mature literary criticism would use identity analysis and formalist attention to craft and historical context and aesthetic response, depending on what the text requires. A comprehensive psychology would integrate neuroscience and phenomenology and social context and developmental history. The skilled interpreter today should command these multiple approaches—not choosing between them but deploying each where it illuminates. Exceptions exist: some cognitive scientists integrate neuroimaging with phenomenological reports; some art historians combine social analysis with formal attention; interdisciplinary centers occasionally foster genuine synthesis. But these remain minority practices, swimming against dominant institutional currents rather than exemplifying them. Whether such emerging synthetic approaches represent genuine accumulation or merely the next turn of the cycle remains to be seen. Meanwhile, disciplines continue to trade one narrow lens for another, each generation convinced it has finally escaped narrowness by adopting the current correction.

The pattern is structural, not accidental. Professional incentives reward sharp breaks over synthesis. Tribal dynamics require scholars to define themselves against predecessors, not as continuators. The genuine difficulty of using multiple frameworks simultaneously encourages retreat to single-method mastery. And every framework that proves illuminating in some cases tempts practitioners to apply it universally—if identity criticism works brilliantly here, why not everywhere? The cycle repeats: insight hardens into ideology; correction becomes constraint; the tool claims to be the only tool needed.

The Category Error

The deeper problem is categorical. Objects of natural science lack interiority. Molecules do not interpret norms, pursue purposes, or remember. For entities without meanings, general law is the right instrument.

Human beings, by contrast, are meaning-making creatures who simultaneously:

calculate and improvise,
follow scripts and invent norms,
respond to incentives and pursue ideals,
act from unconscious drives and exercise conscious choice,
inherit traditions and forge new symbols,
seek survival and cultivate gratuitous beauty,
are biologically constrained and culturally various,
experience wonder, fear, shame, delight, duty.

Any framework that captures only one dimension—economic calculation, unconscious motivation, cultural determination, biological drive—remains partial. The person buying bread engages in exchange, enacts identity, satisfies hunger, recalls childhood, manages anxiety, enjoys form and fragrance, and participates in a regime of power. No single map captures this simultaneity.

Disciplines that study such beings—history, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, literary criticism—are, at their core, interpretive arts. They require:

Judgment rather than algorithm,
Phronēsis rather than procedure,
Tacit knowledge learned by apprenticeship rather than fully codified rules,
Rule-following attunement that resists complete formalization,
Contextual sensitivity to what matters here,
Tolerance for ambiguity without surrendering evaluative standards.

Attempts to make these disciplines “scientific” by imposing formal models with universal reach typically expunge the very features that make human life human: interpretation, normativity, innovation, and freedom.

The Cartographer’s Lesson

A parable. A cartographer produces an exquisite chart—precise, elegant, guild-approved. When caravans disappear along routes the chart marks as clear, he blames the travelers. When rivers shift and roads become swamps, he demands that administrators “restore” the world to match the drawing. When armed men raise tolls at chokepoints, he dismisses them as “marginalia.”

Meanwhile, a surveyor carries rough packets: flood records, bridge failures, toll schedules, sailors’ soundings, fragments of local lore. She uses whatever map fits this terrain; when none suffice, she walks and looks.

The cartographer confuses map and territory. The surveyor knows every map is a partial, provisional tool. When the cartographer finally admits that “the law of the land is not the land,” he learns what the surveyor already knew: use maps to begin understanding, not to replace it.

This is the stance human inquiry requires. Marxist or neoclassical analysis, formalist poetics, psychoanalytic interpretation, rational-choice modeling—each is a map that foregrounds some contours while backgrounding others. The live question is never “Which map is true?” but “Which map (or combination) illuminates this terrain?”

Toward Methodological Craft

What does it mean to approach inquiry as craft?

Instrumental Pragmatism
Judge frameworks by illumination, not identity. Ask: does this help me understand this event, text, institution, behavior? Elegance is not a virtue if it casts decisive features into shadow.

Cultivated Eclecticism
Not dilettantism, but disciplined familiarity with multiple tools. A craftsperson keeps a varied kit and knows enough of each tool’s capabilities and limits to deploy it skillfully. This is harder than mastering a single framework—it requires years of practice with multiple traditions—but complex phenomena demand it.

Contextual Judgment (phronēsis)
No algorithm selects the right tool. Judgment forms through experience with cases, by seeing many patterns and exceptions, by learning what usually works where—and when to break one’s own habits. This is wisdom in Aristotle’s sense: the capacity to deliberate well about particulars.

Humble Acknowledgment of Limits
Every account is partial. The most honest claim is: “This framework reveals these aspects; others remain for other tools; still others remain opaque.” This is not relativism—we can distinguish better from worse interpretations—but recognition that comprehensiveness is impossible.

Results-Oriented Assessment
Evaluate interpretations by their explanatory and revelatory power—by whether they clarify evidence, accommodate counter-instances, and guide action—not by ritual conformity to a method. A method that violates orthodoxy but illuminates is superior to one that adheres but obscures.

Integration of the Shadow
Jung reminds us that the shadow we deny returns to trouble us.[5] What is true of the individual psyche is true also of our frameworks: each casts its own shadow, and what is banished comes back in altered form. The economic model cannot banish meaning and power; the formalist reading cannot banish history; the ideological critique cannot banish beauty and grace.

This posture is professionally risky. It builds no monolithic school, resists catechisms, and is harder to teach than technique. Judgment developed through apprenticeship cannot be reduced to steps in a textbook. The approach offers no easy tribal home. But it is the only posture proportionate to the subject.

This is not promiscuous eclecticism. Disciplined pluralism admits tools only insofar as they illuminate evidence, survive scrutiny against counter-instances, and cohere with established knowledge. The craftsman does not grab random implements but selects from a kit assembled through rigorous training. Bad interpretations remain bad—not because they violate methodological purity but because they distort evidence, ignore context, or fail explanatory tests. The point is that these evaluative standards are substantive (does it illuminate?) rather than procedural (does it follow the right method?).

Bread, Briefly

Consider bread. The economist sees prices and allocation; the anthropologist sees ritual identity; the historian sees revolutions sparked by grain shortages; the psychologist sees memory and comfort; the political theorist sees power over grain as power over people; the nutritionist sees macronutrients; the phenomenologist attends to the experience of crust and crumb. Each lens discloses a real aspect; none exhausts the thing. The person buying or baking bread engages all these dimensions simultaneously—and more besides, including whimsy, habit, and ineffable preference—and yet retains a mystery and irreducible particularity even after comprehensive analysis.

If bread—daily, simple bread—eludes total capture by any single framework, what hubris imagines that a theory could comprehend a people, a polity, an epoch?

The Political Parallel

The same craft logic applies to political economy. The modern state is neither pure predation (libertarian fantasy) nor pure salvation (vulgar statism). It is at once:

necessary infrastructure for complex life,
a perennial object of capture by interests,
the guarantor of freedom through law and its limiter through coercion,
creator and creature of market relations,
supplier of public goods and vector of exploitation.

Markets, likewise, excel at coordinating dispersed knowledge in some contexts and fail dramatically in others. The craftsman’s question is never “state or market?” but “which functions, organized how, accountable to whom, balanced by which constraints, under these conditions?”

Statesmanship, like scholarship, is an art of fitting means to circumstances. The statesman confronting an economic crisis needs to ask: Is this a moment for market incentives? For regulation? For direct provision? For some combination? The answer depends on diagnosis, not doctrine. Different problems require different tools. Ideological commitment to a single framework—whether libertarian, socialist, or technocratic—produces the intellectual equivalent of using a hammer on every problem because hammers are the only tool one recognizes.

Lineage of Craft

This essay’s argument stands within a tradition of pluralist and anti-foundationalist thought, indebted particularly to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, though it extends their insights across a broader range of disciplines and grounds them more explicitly in craft epistemology.[6]

Accordingly, this methodological stance is not a novel invention, nor is it “anything goes” relativism. It has a distinguished lineage. Aristotle distinguished epistēmē (demonstrable knowledge of universals) from phronēsis (practical wisdom about particulars) and technē (productive craft).[7] The human sciences, in his taxonomy, require phronēsis more than epistēmē—judgment about what to do in this case, not deduction from general laws.

Michael Polanyi taught that “we know more than we can tell,” that crucial expertise is tacit and transmitted by apprenticeship rather than explicit instruction.[8] The master craftsman knows when the wood will split, when the dough has risen enough, when the argument needs qualification—not by applying rules but through practiced sensitivity that cannot be fully articulated.

Wittgenstein observed that rule-following is socially embedded; the application of a rule is not itself rule-governed all the way down. At some point, as he wrote, “my spade is turned”—we act not from further rules but from trained judgment within a form of life.[9] This is not arbitrary; it is how competence actually works.

Clifford Geertz urged “thick description” in anthropology: embedding action in the “webs of significance” people themselves have spun, rather than subsuming it under general theory. [10] His interpretive approach recognized that understanding human behavior requires grasping the symbolic meanings actions hold for participants—meanings that are locally constructed and resist universal formalization.

These thinkers did not advocate methodological anarchy. They articulated rigors appropriate to human subjects: the discipline of attending carefully to context, of learning through practice, of acknowledging the limits of explicit formalization, of judging particulars wisely rather than applying universal rules mechanically.

Conclusion: Use This to Begin

The point is not to abandon systematic frameworks. Marxist analysis, formalist reading, psychoanalytic interpretation, economic modeling—all can illuminate. The point is to resist turning tools into totalities, to refuse the ideological capture that confuses method with truth.

What is required is methodological humility joined to practical ambition: admit partiality while pressing for understanding by bringing multiple tools to bear. This yields no catechism, no resting place, no easy fellowship. It is harder than certainty. It is also more honest, and more fruitful.

The best we can achieve is not final answers but better questions; not perfect maps but skillful navigation; not total theories but hard-won wisdom. The work asks for judgment, experience, humility—and the courage to say, at the edge of understanding, that the phenomenon retains depths we cannot plumb and possibilities we cannot predict.

The law of the land is not the land.
Light and shadow arise together.
Every map owes the world a margin.

Use this to begin.

Notes

[1] Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953).

[2] Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2018; first published 1939). See especially “Introductory: Studies in Iconology,” 3-31.

[3] In principle, these approaches can serve as complementary tools—free market and Marxian analysis, for instance, each shedding light when applied together to an historical situation. Yet in practice, frameworks often ossify into rigid ideologies. Marxism once held this place in the USSR; neoclassical economics has increasingly assumed it in the United States. A striking example is Ohio’s 2025 mandate requiring all public universities to incorporate Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into a three-credit American civic literacy course, alongside the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Lincoln’s addresses, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. See Ohio Revised Code § 3345.382 (2025).

[4] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; first published 1962).

[5] Carl Gustav Jung, “The Shadow,” in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, The Collected Works Works of C.G. Jung vol. 9, part 2, ed. and trans. by G. Adler & R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; first published 1959). Jung argued that the shadow comprises those aspects of the psyche that contradict the conscious self-image and are therefore repressed or denied; when unacknowledged, the shadow returns in distorted forms, and psychological wholeness requires consciously integrating what has been excluded.

[6] Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009; first published 1979); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989).

[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, 1139a-1142a.

[8] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), 4.

[9] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and J. Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009; first published 1953), §217: “‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. / Once I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’ / (Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but for their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.)”

[10] Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

The Lingering Fire: Language Before, Within, and Beyond Speech

A Reflection Interwoven with Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled
2005, acrylic on canvas — 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.

We do not merely speak.
We are spoken.

A Handful of Dust, A Handful of Light

**Detail highlighting the dust motes from “Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne” (Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, 1900)**
**By Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)**
Oil on canvas, 70 cm × 59 cm
Ordrupgaard Museum. Photograph Public Domain.

Dust lingers in the ruins of empires, in the fading footprints of the past. It clings to the forgotten, settles upon the broken. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land declares “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” evoking a profound existential dread—the terror of insignificance, the finality of death in a world where nothing endures. Shelley’s Ozymandias presents the cruel irony that even the mightiest fall into dust, their ambitions erased by time. Shakespeare reinforces this democratic nature of mortality in Cymbeline, reminding us that: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust” (Act IV, Scene 2). The biblical refrain, “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19) serves as a humbling reminder of human mortality—our bodies fated to mingle with soil and ruin.

This narrative of dust as dissolution has dominated our cultural consciousness for millennia. Yet beneath this interpretation lies a profound irony: the very science that revealed our cosmic insignificance also offers us a path to transcendence.

As we began to understand the origins of matter itself, a counternarrative emerged. The spectrographic analysis of stars, the discovery of nucleosynthesis, and the mapping of elemental creation within stellar lifecycles revealed an unexpected truth: the dust of our being is not merely the residue of life lost but the particulate remnants of stars long dead.

This scientific revelation transforms our relationship with dust. No longer just the symbol of our inevitable decay, it becomes evidence of our cosmic lineage. In this expanded understanding, we are made of elements forged in stellar cores—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron—the ashes of ancient supernovae. As Carl Sagan elaborated: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.” (Cosmos, 1980)

The death of those stars gave birth to us. Thus, when our bodies return to dust, they are not returning to nothingness, but to the infinite. This is a poetic inversion of the traditional dread associated with dust. Instead of entropy as a reduction to meaninglessness, it becomes a return to something larger than the self.

Where Eliot shows us fear in dust, Carl Sagan tells us: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.” Lawrence M. Krauss echoes this sentiment: “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded…. You are all stardust… the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron …. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.” (A Universe from Nothing, 2009)

The Paradox of Cosmic Fear

If one understands oneself as a finite being, bound to decay, dust is terrifying—it signifies loss. But if one understands oneself as an ephemeral expression of the universe, momentarily coalesced and destined to dissolve back into the great celestial flow, then there is no reason for fear. The end is not the end, but a return to origins.

So why does existential dread persist? Perhaps it is the ego’s reluctance to let go of selfhood. Perhaps it is the mind’s inability to accept that individual consciousness does not endure. Perhaps it is because dust, unlike stars, is silent. A ruined city, a forgotten name, a scattering of bones—all speak of oblivion, not grandeur.

As William Blake advised in The Proverbs of Hell, we “Drive [our] cart and [our] plow over the bones of the dead,” suggesting our instinctive fear of becoming that which is trampled and forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges captures this anxiety when he writes that “time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river”—we are both the eroder and the eroded, the dust-maker and the dust.

Yet, as a poem once attributed to Emily Dickinson but now considered of uncertain authorship reminds us: “Ashes denote that fire was; / Revere the grayest pile / For the departed creature’s sake / That hovered there awhile.” Dust does not truly vanish. It transforms.

Yet if the erasure of self is what we fear, we must ask: is selfhood truly lost, or merely transformed? If dust dissolves, does it vanish—or does it scatter into something greater?

From Dust to Light: The Redemption of Stardust

Yet if we understand dust not as an annihilation of self but as the very fabric of renewal, the fear dissolves. The metaphor itself must be rewritten: From dust we are made, from stardust we are formed. To dust we return, to the stars we return.

Walt Whitman intuited this cycle when he wrote: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” (Song of Myself, LII) His biological understanding of transformation prefigures our cosmic one—matter recycled through systems larger than ourselves.

If the metaphor itself shifts, then the meaning shifts with it. We do not fall into dust; we rise into radiance. We do not vanish into the void; we dissolve into the cosmos, as much a part of the next great supernova as we once were of the last. Even in knowing that we return to the stars, a quiet unease remains: what of the self? If I dissolve into light, is there still an “I”?

This cosmic transformation demands a new poetic language—one that recasts the traditional imagery of dust not as a symbol of loss but as a promise of renewal. If we are to truly grasp this shift in understanding, we must reimagine the very metaphors through which we comprehend our mortality. In the spirit of this reframing, I offer these verses that trace our journey from stardust to dust and back again:

From dust we are made—
Not of earth, but embered light,
Forged in stellar furnace bright,
A whisper of stars in the cosmic shade.

To dust we return—
Not to silence, not to loss,
But scattered bright across the gloss
Of galaxies that twist and burn.

Fear not the handful of dust—
It is not death, nor mere decay,
But embers cast upon the way,
To rise once more in cosmic trust.

Thus, the fear in Eliot’s handful of dust dissolves when we see it not as an end, but as a beginning of something else. In the vast cosmic cycle, there is no finality—only motion, only transformation. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam gestures toward this understanding when it speaks of being “Star-scatter’d on the Grass”—our elements returning to the cosmos from which they came. If all that we are, all that we love, all that we create ultimately returns to the stars, is that not immortality?

The Choice of Understanding

We return to the beginning, as dust does. The words of Genesis remind us: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Yet now, having traced the journey of dust from earth to stars, we hear these words anew. Through the narrow human lens, we interpret them as a grim certainty—dust as ruin, silence, and the erasure of memory. We see only decay, the dissolution of self, the inevitable fading of all things into oblivion.

But through the enlightened cosmic lens, we recognize a deeper truth. Dust is not an end, but a transformation. It is not absence, but renewal. It is potential, energy, and the foundation of new worlds.

As Jorge Luis Borges reflects in We Are the Time:

“We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.
We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.
We are the river and we are that Greek
who looks himself in the river.”

Borges, invoking Heraclitus’ ever-flowing river, offers a vision of existence as movement, dissolution, and renewal. We are not fixed, immutable beings; we are the water, ever-changing, ever-returning to the whole. If we are dust, then we are not the dust that settles, but the dust that travels—the dust that, like the stars, finds itself scattered only to be reshaped into something new.

To understand this is to grasp something beyond the immediate and the visible. It is to move past fear into recognition: that what was once bound into form returns to the vastness, not in loss, but in continuation. That what dissolves is not diminished but remade, part of a cycle stretching beyond human time. What Yeats called “a terrible beauty” is born in this transformation—terrible in its finality, beautiful in its cosmic potential.

Perhaps it is our task, then, to choose how we understand our own dust—not as the extinguishing of life, but as its return to the great fire from which it came. In this cosmic understanding, we are not merely dust returning to dust, but light returning to light—briefly kindled, then scattered again, not into oblivion, but into reunion with the luminous whole from which we emerged.

Context and influences inspiring the essay

Exploring ‘The Insemination of Venus’ by Laura Schmidt

If you find yourself without task or chore, bored beyond belief, and inclined to read a pedantic, hubristic, and discursive review interpreting a truly stunning work of art, I invite you to explore my essay (accessible at link below) on The Insemination of Venus by Laura Schmidt. To say that I find Schmidt’s work exciting and inspiring would be an understatement.

Schmidt, whom I have known for almost four decades, has recently turned in earnest to artistic endeavors following the conclusion of her legal career. Her latest work, The Insemination of Venus, is a masterful synthesis of classical themes and contemporary materials, drawing inspiration from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and which I interpret as a re-imagining of the ancient motif of the Tree of Life and as an active force of creative transformation (see also my poem below).

Abstract for Essay: The Insemination of Venus as a Modern Tree of Life

The essay explores the profound intersection of classical mythology, artistic innovation, and the enduring motif of the Tree of Life in Laura Schmidt’s multimedia work. Inspired in part by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Schmidt’s piece transforms the classical image of Venus from a passive subject of divine creation into an active force of generative imagination. Through an interpretative lens, this essay examines how The Insemination of Venus re-imagines the ancient Tree of Life—not merely as a conduit of divine will, but as a dynamic site of transformation shaped by human creativity. Drawing on traditions from Mesopotamian sacred trees to Platonic cosmology and Norse mythology, my interpretive analysis situates Schmidt’s work within a continuum of cultural expressions that depict trees as cosmic axes, vessels of metamorphosis, and symbols of the evolving relationship between nature, divinity, and artistic agency. Engaging with both the technical execution and symbolic complexity of Schmidt’s composition, this essay illuminates how art can simultaneously honor and redefine ancient archetypes, presenting the Tree of Life as a living, evolving force in the realm of artistic creation.

READ: “The INSEMINATION OF VENUS AS A MODERN TREE OF LIFE” by D.S. YARAB (2025)

And here is the poem I was inspired to write after contemplating Schmidt’s The Insemination of Venus:

Once we trembled beneath sacred boughs,

Watching gods inscribe their will on leaves,

While divine winds shook celestial branches

And fate dripped like dew from heaven’s eaves.

Now the tree grows from our own imagining,

Its copper leaves dance to earthly air,

Venus transforms not by divine decree

But through the power we ourselves dare.

Where once we sought the gods’ creation,

Now we are the force that makes stars bloom.

The moth bears witness with human eyes:

We are become the cosmic loom.

No longer supplicants beneath holy trees,

We are the garden, we are the grove.

Where once we quaked beneath the heavens,

We are become the force that moves the heavens.

Exploring Paul Klee’s Rosengarten and Emerson’s Philosophy

Paul Klee, *Rose Garden* (1920, 44, oil and pen on paper on cardboard, 49 cm x 42.5 cm), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich, CC BY-NC-SA.

Periodically, I revisit the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His writing style is sometimes jarring but just as often sublime (Henry James, in Partial Portraits (1888), observed that Emerson “never really mastered the art of composition” (p. 20) while also acknowledging that “he had frequently an exquisite eloquence” (p. 32)). The visit is always profitable.

While rereading Emerson’s perhaps most famous essay, Self-Reliance (1847), I found that after much of my recent reading focusing so heavily on things temporal, especially in the past month (e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s masterful works The Order of Time, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and Reality is Not What it Seems and Tom Siegfried’s lyrical The Number of the Heavens: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos), the following passage resonated in a manner it had not on previous readings of the essay:

“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

Such an extraordinary observation and lesson—that there is no lamentation of the past, or anticipation of the future, only presence for the rose.

Lamentation, or regret more precisely, I have long regarded as the most useless of human endeavors, if it is more than rectification of error, amends to others, and lessons learned. Anticipation, or anxiety about the future, is also too often misplaced and misdirected energy. Yes, we can and should make plans, but when the energy and effort extend beyond the necessary such that the future becomes a thief of reason, serenity, and equanimity, we are perilously close to toppling over.

The image of the rose in the above essay also brought to mind, fortuitously or not, a wonderful piece of art, Rosengarten (1920) by Paul Klee, ensconced in Lenbachhaus, an art museum in Munich.

After reading Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg’s words about Klee from Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München (2007) at the Lenbachhaus website, I readily envision Rosengarten as exemplifying the same harmonious integration of presence and timelessness that Emerson attributes to the rose. Created in 1920, the painting merges organic and constructed forms into a rhythmic whole. Klee’s garden unfolds as a grid of irregular, red-tinged rectangles, delicately framed by black lines, with roses—symbols of growth and vitality—scattered like musical notes across the composition. These roses, like Emerson’s, embody the eternal present; their rounded, spiral blooms suggest continuous life and creation. For Klee, as for Emerson, nature’s rhythms transcend human constructs of time.

Interestingly, Klee drew inspiration from music, speaking of “cultural rhythms” in his Bauhaus writings and comparing his visual compositions to musical structures. In Rosengarten, he achieves a polyphony of visual forms, where the temporal becomes spatial, and each element contributes equally to the whole. Just as Emerson’s rose is “perfect in every moment of its existence,” Klee’s garden suggests an infinite unfolding—a melody extending endlessly beyond the canvas.

Both Emerson and Klee challenge us to inhabit the present, to find harmony in life’s rhythms, and to appreciate the completeness inherent in each moment. The rose, whether in prose or paint, invites us to rise above time.