Tag: books

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.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877) Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in) Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

Elegy for the Automatons: A Reflection on Political Decline in the Orwellian State

The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico (1916-18, oil on canvas)
The Disquieting Muses (1916-18) by Giorgio de Chirico
(97.16 cm × 66 cm, oil on canvas)

Preface

This poem, Elegy for the Automatons, was inspired by George Packer’s article The Hollow Men, which appeared in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic. Packer’s article examines the political and moral collapse of certain American officials—Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who, once defenders of democratic principles, surrendered themselves to the inverted realities demanded by Donald Trump’s authority and his increasingly Orwellian authoritarian state.

Echoing the pivotal scene in Orwell’s 1984 where a Party orator is handed a note and instantly redirects his vitriol toward a different enemy “mid-sentence, without a pause,” Packer documents how key Republican figures performed their own breathtaking reversal on Ukraine policy, and describes how these officials pivoted instantly from celebrating Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s aggression to denouncing Ukraine as the enemy—all in service to Trump’s shifting personal allegiances and contempt for democratic values.

Packer also invokes Henri Bergson’s insight that the mechanical within the human evokes both laughter and horror. Yet what he describes transcends mechanical reflex: it is the slow hollowing-out of conscience itself. Once-thoughtful men become fluent automatons, mouthing words disconnected from belief, loyalty, or memory.

This poem seeks to render in elegiac form the sorrowful descent of a free polity into ritualized untruth, and the transformation of human beings into instruments of submission.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Elegy for the Automatons

In the year when the hollowing began,
and Orwell’s warning stirred too late,
it came not by fire nor iron decree,
but smiling, in the face of one man.
He bore no heavy crown, no burning sword;
only the gift of inversion:
truth was a lie, loyalty a whim,
freedom the mask of power.
A man for whom cruelty was a virtue,
and truth a broken toy at his feet;
a man who measured loyalty by abasement,
and called the strong weak and the weak strong.

Under his gaze, the names of enemies blurred,
history curled back on itself like smoke;
words, having lost their anchor, floated
as banners torn from any mast.
And a people once proud of remembering
forgot that they had ever known another day.

From this hour of unmooring
emerged the hollowing of men.

Johnson, first among the fallen,
fumbled for strength among hollow phrases,
mouth heavy with the weight of borrowed words.
Behind his thickened glass, a flicker died—
and he mistook its ashes for light.

Graham, quick to find the favor of the wind,
circled the ruin with the laughter of forgetting,
shedding oaths like old garments,
spinning from vow to vow as a moth to a dying flame,
faithless to all but the empty crown of belonging.

Rubio, once proud in the defense of liberty,
sank into the yellow chair of forgetting,
listening to the slow departure of his own voice.
Once he cried for the dignity of nations;
now he stitched the banners of surrender with empty hands.

Thus were men unmade,
not by terror, nor by war,
but by the patient grinding of truth into noise,
by the slow machinery of convenience and fear.

And we, who watched,
sang no hymns for these men,
built no statues to mark their days.
They passed like shadows over a broken dial,
automatons grinding down the hour,
till even the dust forgot their tread.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, February 28, 2025 — slipping deeper into the hollowing of the soul.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, February 28, 2025 — slipping deeper into the hollowing of the soul.

The Unopened Book

by Donald S. Yarab

Scholar in His Study by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1634
Oil on canvas, 141 × 135 cm
Collection of the National Gallery Prague, Schwarzenberg Palace
© National Gallery Prague

The unopened book, its spine uncreased,
rests on the shelf, untouched by breath.
No hand has turned its waiting leaves,
no eye has met its silent depths.

The pages sleep in folded time,
ink unmoved by thought or light—
a universe uncalled to mind,
a star unkindled in the night.

Who knows what worlds it might contain—
a lover’s vow, a tyrant’s fall,
a name that once was yours or mine,
a deathless truth, a whispered call?

The story never yet begun
is writ in ink that does not fade.
Its fate, unlike the morning sun,
has neither risen nor decayed.

And yet—another book lies bare,
its binding worn, its chapters told.
The margins smudged by time and care,
its tale rehearsed a thousandfold.

We read, we skip, we turn again,
we bookmark thoughts we dare not bind—
then falter near the closing lines,
no meaning fixed, no end designed.

A narrative half-read, half-lost,
its final thought left unexpressed—
the thread unwinds, the ink runs dry,
the reader dozes, unconfessed.

Between the two—a paradox:
the never read, the half-complete.
Which holds the weight of what we are?
Which better marks our own defeat?

Perhaps all books are mirrors dim,
reflecting what we dare not see:
the start we fear, the end we flee,
the truths we touch but never free.

So let it lie, unopened still,
or let it fall apart, well-worn—
the soul is both the waiting page,
and every word we leave unborn.

Poetry as Revelation: Engaging with “Vitruvian Man Unbound”

Michelangelo, The Awakening Slave (c. 1525–30).
A body caught between measure and becoming.

I. On Bloom and the Anxiety of Influence

As the poet of Vitruvian Man Unbound, I find myself drawn to Harold Bloom’s understanding of how poetry functions within tradition—not as mere imitation or influence, but as a creative misreading that transforms both predecessor and successor. Bloom’s vocabulary—his clinamen (poetic swerve), daemonization, and apophrades (the return of the dead)—offers a framework for understanding my own relationship with Leonardo’s iconic drawing.

Yet I would press beyond the confines of Bloom’s categorical system. The strongest poetry, as Bloom himself recognized, resists easy resolution. Vitruvian Man Unbound embodies what he called a tessera—a completion of its precursor that simultaneously preserves and undermines its foundational terms. The poem does not simply revise Leonardo; it retroactively reshapes our understanding of him. It allows us to see Vitruvian Man as an incomplete gesture, one whose implicit metaphysical longing only achieves full articulation through the poem’s unfolding of form, desire, and transcendence.

II. The Paradox of Poetic Creation as Discovery

When I began Vitruvian Man Unbound, there was no conceit of a new idea. Rather, I felt I was unearthing the obvious—articulating for the first time verses that had already been rendered, waiting to be heard.

This situates the poem not as invention but as discovery—a Renaissance conception of artistic creation. Michelangelo spoke of liberating the form already imprisoned within the marble. Leonardo, too, conceived of art as revelation through observation, uncovering structures latent in nature and proportion. I participate in that lineage: the transcendence of the circle was already latent in Leonardo’s drawing. My poem does not overwrite Vitruvian Man but unveils what it always contained.

III. Poetry as Transcription of Revealed Truth

Poetry is primarily, in my conception, the art of transcription. Poetry is ultimately truth revealed, however rendered.

This belief is ancient. Poets once invoked the Muse, believing their songs were received rather than authored. Plato cast poets as possessed vessels of divine madness. In scriptural traditions, the prophet or sage writes not from invention but from vision. In this view, the poet is not creator but conduit.

This understanding reorients poetic practice. What matters most is not novelty of theme or form but receptivity—a cultivated attentiveness to truths that ask to be heard. To compose well is to listen well. The most vital poems do not invent so much as reveal. The poet’s charge, then, is fidelity.

Vitruvian Man Unbound aspires to this kind of transcription. It draws out from Leonardo’s image the philosophical tensions embedded therein: between proportion and possibility, containment and becoming, structure and the longing to transcend it.

IV. The Poem’s Journey: From Containment to Transcendence

At its heart, my poem charts a metaphysical journey—the awakening of a consciousness confined within geometry, gradually realizing its cosmic vocation. The Vitruvian figure, bound in ratios and ruled lines, discovers within himself not mere form but flame. The movement is from being drawn to drawing, from being measured to measuring.

The poem gives voice to this paradox: “I am both bound and boundless, large and small, / Both measured part and immeasurable all.”

This is no empty contradiction. It is the philosophical heart of the work. The circle becomes “not wall but door,” not negated but reimagined. Limitation, as I came to understand, is not the enemy of freedom but its precondition. Form does not imprison; it allows the infinite to appear in the guise of the finite.

This idea resonates with multiple traditions: the Christian theology of kenosis, quantum indeterminacy, the aesthetics of the golden ratio, even the existential struggle of Camus’ Sisyphus. In Vitruvian Man Unbound, I sought to draw them all into poetic coherence.

V. Beyond Influence: Co-Creation and Transcendence

My relationship to Leonardo’s drawing is not one of mere homage or critique. The poem does not simply descend from his vision; it reconfigures how I understand that vision. In Bloom’s terms, it enacts an apophrades: the precursor is altered by the successor, the past rewritten by the presence of the present.

I acknowledged this inversion within the poem itself: “Da Vinci dreamed me into being’s start; / I dream myself anew with conscious art.”

This was not rebellion against the tradition but transcendence through deep fidelity. I did not seek to destroy Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man; I hoped to fulfill him. I entered the drawing and found the voice that seemed to have been waiting there. The Vitruvian Man, for me, ceased to be object and became subject, consciousness incarnate.

VI. Poetry as Epistemological Practice

If poetry is the transcription of revealed truth, then it is not merely aesthetic. It is epistemological. It helps us understand not only what is, but how we come to know what is. The most original poems do not dazzle through novelty alone; they resonate because they name what we already suspected was true, but had not yet heard.

Vitruvian Man Unbound aspires to such resonance. I hope it awakens a dormant dimension in Leonardo’s drawing—and perhaps, in us. I did not set out to create a new form, but to reveal the old form’s silent music. For me, it was an act not of invention, but of listening—not conquest, but witnessing. A poetry of revelation.

Thus the ink that once bound becomes the ink that reveals.

VII. Echoes of Prometheus

In reflecting on Vitruvian Man Unbound, I recognize the shadow of another unbound figure—Shelley’s Prometheus. His liberation from cosmic tyranny, his transformation into a visionary voice of harmony, and his rejection of vengeance in favor of transcendence, all resonate deeply with the arc of my poem. Like Prometheus, the Vitruvian figure is not merely released; he is revealed—as a bearer of fire, of knowledge, of poetic truth. It is not accidental that in striving toward the infinite, we find ourselves echoing those myths and verses where the infinite has already spoken.