Tag: language

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.

Words Under Siege: In Defense of a Rich and Nuanced Vocabulary

Adam Pendleton
If the function of dada, 2017
Galerie Laurent Strouk

Good Lord! First they came for delve, and now they are coming for tapestry. Will constellation be next? I just read an article titled “ChatGPT is changing the way we write. Here’s how – and why it’s a problem,” once again casting aspersions on the use of delve, insinuating that its presence in prose—whether in an essay, school or employment application, or other work—suggests AI involvement. This article also raises suspicions about the word tapestry and other “stylistic” and “scholarly” words.

At this point, I cannot help but take deep offense, as it seems that any vocabulary beyond a third-grade level—essentially, a rich and varied vocabulary—is now suspect. As I have noted before, delve is not uncommon in my writing, and I often employ tapestry and constellation metaphorically. For example, I might refer to “a constellation of factors” when carefully considering a complex issue, or speak of “the tapestry of life,” as I did in a poem where tapestry appeared in both the title and the refrain.

Moreover, I have long used multisyllabic words such as verity, prodigious, exigency, modicum, sundry, and laborious in both my writing and speech, along with Latin and other foreign language phrases—all well before AI ever became a tool available to assist anyone in writing anything. Assuredly, those words would all be marks of suspicion today, if for no other reason than that they are uncommon to those less familiar with an extensive vocabulary—who seem to prefer the vocabulary and style of Hemingway (though this observation is not to disparage Hemingway’s vocabulary or style itself).

The frequency of these articles has become so overwhelming that the suspicions they plant have now ingrained themselves in my mental landscape—so much so that, while recently re-reading a delightful book from 1983, Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers, I found my equilibrium disturbed upon encountering a form of one of these now-verboten words—delve—used in a quote from Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794):

“Generally speaking, people have a very erroneous idea of the type of talent proper to the ideal mechanician. He is not a geometrician who, delving into the theory of movement and the categories of phenomena, formulates new mechanical principles or discovers unsuspected laws of nature ….”[1]

I momentarily pondered whether Boorstin or the Marquis had engaged with AI.

I fear that the article’s call to “write clearly” and to eschew all “stylistic language” contributes to the growing pressure to purge one’s writing of any and all suspect words, lest one be accused of literary fraud. This trend will ultimately impoverish poetry, prose, and language as a whole. The insistence on reducing language to its barest bones under the guise of simplicity and her sister clarity threatens to strip away not only the beauty and nuance that more expansive language brings but also the intellectual rigor it offers—more the pity.

Perhaps, if this trend continues, we will soon see an officially approved dictionary—quite slim, of course—purged of all offending words, especially those that are multisyllabic, scholarly, or carry any hint of flourish. Most certainly, this dictionary will exclude anything exceeding two syllables or requiring a moment of deeper thought. The end result? A homogenized language, stripped of depth and elegance, where the richness of expression once celebrated is replaced by a narrow, minimalist vernacular that leaves little room for imagination or creativity. Thus do the times conspire against us.

[1] Boorstin, D. J. (1983). The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (p. 67). Random House.

The Importance of Language: A Journey Through Words

When I was but twelve years old and in the sixth grade, I was already a peculiar lad—of that, there can be no dispute. One of my distinct memories from that time is sharing with Miss Davis, my teacher, that I had purchased a dictionary, which I studied ardently each night to enrich my vocabulary. Even then, I was enamored with words and punctuation—the brick and mortar of literature and poetry—and I was learning as much about them as I could. A few years later, in high school, as I have noted elsewhere, a very dear educator, my sophomore English teacher Mrs. Calpin, honored me with a graduation gift: a thesaurus, in recognition of my love of words.

At college, I developed another peculiar habit, alongside acquiring yet another new dictionary. Whenever I coined a neologism (which I believed perfectly appropriate to do), I would record it on a sheet that I had inserted into the dictionary for future reference. That dictionary remains in my possession, though not readily at hand or in regular use, as will soon be explained. Otherwise, I would gladly provide an example of one of those neologisms.

After I finished college and law school, and was sufficiently recompensed as an attorney for the federal government, I indulged myself with the purchase of the complete hardbound set of The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a safe assumption that few homes, indeed, few offices, possess either of these gems for consultation, let alone for regular use. But the wealth of words contained in these volumes—the backbone of a rich and wondrous language—is awe-inspiring. Not once have I regretted the sum spent on their purchase, nor the richness they have added to both my writing and knowledge.

This lifelong fascination with language, along with those dictionaries and thesauruses, naturally informs my choice of words in my prose writing and poetry, where every term is carefully considered. This serves as a preface and background to a brief note I would like to append to my poem Where is Am I?

Some who have read the poem may be struck by the verse:

The shadow of a shadow,
a footfall lost to time’s soft track?

In particular, they may find footfall to be wholly unfamiliar. Of course, the vocabulary in the poem was not selected by happenstance; every word was chosen with deliberate care, and footfall was no exception. I hesitated only momentarily before selecting this word, but ultimately decided that context should guide the reader (or listener, as poems should always be recited after being read).

To clarify, I did consider alternatives such as step, trace, footprint, and mark, but I ultimately returned to footfall during the poem’s construction. Footfall is not a neologism; it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (see accompanying image of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for footfall). Footfall refers to the act of stepping—the motion and sound of a foot hitting the ground—rather than the trace or mark left behind, such as a footprint. As such, footfall captures the fleeting nature of action itself, emphasizing the transitory motion rather than the lasting trace of a footprint.

Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition – entry for footfall

To add another layer to my choice of footfall, it was not just the meaning but the sound of the word itself that carried significance. Again, poetry is to be recited, not just read. The soft, muted quality of the word, when spoken aloud, mirrors the quiet, almost imperceptible nature of the action it describes. The word begins with a gentle f sound, followed by a soft, cushioned ending—a fall that lands lightly, much like the act of stepping itself. It has an almost whispered quality, evoking the idea of a footstep that passes quietly through time, barely noticed before it fades entirely.

This auditory element of the word footfall reinforces the theme of impermanence in the poem. The word itself, in both sound and evanescence, fades even as it is spoken, much like the action it represents disappears into time’s soft track. The fleeting nature of footfall contrasts with the more solid, lasting impression suggested by alternatives like footprint or mark. Where those words imply something left behind, footfall emphasizes the moment of movement itself—the instant when the foot touches the ground, just before it lifts again, leaving no lasting trace.

It is this auditory resonance that made footfall the right choice for the verse, as it complements the poem’s exploration of the transient and fragile nature of human conscious presence and action in the universe. In pairing this word with time’s soft track, the verse captures the tension between motion and stillness, existence and disappearance, echoing the poem’s larger themes of impermanence and the passing of time.

This interpretation also explains my selection of the image of an eroding footprint, a fossilized mark in sand, as a visual metaphor for time’s imperceptible erasure of human presence, chosen to illustrate the poem. The image embodies the idea of humanity, an individual, attempting to leave a lasting mark, while acknowledging that even fossils, over time, are subject to the elements—in time’s soft track.

The word footfall also appears in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot has been a favorite of mine since I first read Murder in the Cathedral at the age of twelve or thirteen. The specific lines containing footfall open Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.