“It is the hush in a conversation—not the words, but the breath that precedes or follows them—that can speak more profoundly than the speech itself.”
Those words returned to me again and again. And in their insistence, they asked for more.
The following poetic fragment emerged in response. It is offered here as a kind of imagined rediscovery— a scroll unearthed, not written; gathered, not composed. Said to be copied from a fragment attributed to the Scribe of the Restoration, it may be read as a poetic conceit: a transformation of thought into voice, of prose into hush.
Ruach (Breath, Wind, Spirit — An Aureate Silence) Intended as a visual companion to Scroll of the Breath – Fragment III, evoking the unseen architecture of spirit and the luminous hush before the word.
Scroll of the Breath — Fragment III
It is the hush in a conversation—not the words, but the breath that precedes or follows them—that can speak more profoundly than the speech itself. (Saying attributed to the Elder in exile, during the Years of Listening.)
1 There is a hush that is not silence. It is the waiting before the word. It is the veil drawn back, not by hands, but by reverence.
2 It is the pause in the soul, where meaning prepares to enter. It is not the absence of presence, but presence unadorned.
3 And breath— Breath is not speech. It is the spirit moving before sound. It is the wind before the voice, the current beneath the utterance.
4 The sages of old did not name this breath lightly. In the tongue of the first covenant, they called it ruach— wind, breath, spirit. It moved across the waters. It entered the nostrils of clay. It bore the world on its whisper.
5 Do not rush past the hush. Do not cast out the breath. The hush is the cradle of truth. The breath is its midwife.
6 In the sacred gatherings, before the chant begins, there is a breath. It is not sung, yet the song is born of it.
7 In the way of the temple, the priest lifts the cup. But before he speaks the ancient words, there is a breath. In that breath, time bends, and the Presence leans close.
7a And in the house of the laborer, the mother bends to lift the child. But before she speaks comfort, there is a breath. In that breath, love gathers strength. In that hush, sorrow is made bearable.
8 In the theatre of the East, the dancer stands still. The motion does not begin with movement, but with breath. So too the soul.
9 The hush is not confusion. It is awe. The breath is not delay. It is consecration.
10 Blessed is the one who waits without speaking. Blessed is the one who breathes before declaring. For wisdom comes not in haste, but in readiness.
11 And if you seek the voice of the Holy One, look not in the thunder, nor in the fire, nor in the noise of many things.
12 But listen in the hush. Watch in the breath. And there— you may find what does not speak, but knows.
13 The scribe gathers what the wind leaves behind. Not with hands, but with silence. Not in speech, but in breath. He walks as dust that remembers flame. The fragments are many, but the hush makes them whole.
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.
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.
The completion of my poem Whispers of the Waning Light left an impression lingering in my thoughts, a quiet meditation on the nature of longing, time, and the elusive quality of memory. In reflecting on that poem, I found myself drawn to the word wistful—a word that seems to stretch between the weight of longing and the lightness of a dream. The following brief essay is an exploration of that thought.
Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, 1900) By Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) Oil on canvas, 70 cm x 59 cm. Ordrupgaard Musuem. Photograph Public Domain.
An audio recitation of the essay by the author.
The Weight of Longing and the Lightness of Dreams
Wistful is a wonderful word in our lexicon. It has slender shoulders but a muscular frame, and with each passing year, it grows, paradoxically enough, in vigor—able to inspire more ably imagination, poetry, memory, and vivid recall. The language with which we write, think, and contemplate is most remarkable indeed.
There is a paradox at the heart of wistfulness. It is a longing imbued with both the weight of the past and the lightness of the dream. Unlike simple nostalgia, which binds one to memory with a chain of sentiment, wistfulness carries a certain buoyancy, a gentle drift between what was and what might have been. It is not an emotion of mere loss, but rather one of continued yearning—an ache that does not wound but instead stirs, provokes, and enlivens.
Across centuries, wistful has carried shades of longing, attention, and awareness—never merely a passive sigh but a reaching toward what shimmers just beyond our grasp.
It is the mind’s way of grappling with the ethereal, of shaping dreams from recollections, of crafting possibilities from the echoes of what has already passed.
This duality—the weight of longing and the lightness of dream—has long been explored in poetry and literature. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale shimmers with this very tension, the desire to dissolve into beauty while being tethered to the mortal world. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time captures it in the way a madeleine dipped in tea can summon an entire universe of memory. Even T.S. Eliot, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, wrestles with the wistfulness of unlived potential, of questions left unanswered and paths left untaken.
Yet wistfulness is not purely literary; it is deeply personal, shaping our thoughts in quiet moments of reflection. It is the fleeting recognition of something beautiful that has passed, or the sudden awareness of an almost-forgotten dream. It is the feeling of standing at the edge of a vast, metaphorical ocean, where the horizon shimmers with the unknown, both beckoning and receding at the same time.
Perhaps this is why wistfulness endures, growing not weaker but stronger with time. It is an emotion that deepens as we collect more moments of beauty and loss, as we come to understand that our longings are not burdens but invitations—to reflect, to remember, and to dream anew.
We are a nation without reason. We are a nation without morals. We are a nation without purpose.
We have failed our inheritance. We have failed our promise. We have failed our future.
Once, we were a people who sought wisdom in the governance of reason, who fashioned our republic in the crucible of Enlightenment thought. We held that truth could be discerned, that knowledge was the safeguard against tyranny, that free inquiry was the antidote to superstition. Yet, we have cast aside the intellect of our forebears, bartering reason for the cheap currency of factional dogma, of ignorance parading as virtue.
Once, we understood that a republic, to endure, must be anchored in moral responsibility. The city upon a hill was not merely a boast—it was a charge, a demand, an expectation. Yet, we have allowed that moral vision to fragment, perverted into empty postures of righteousness, where sectarian division supplants shared virtue, and the sacred call to justice is drowned in the clamor of self-interest.
Once, we were a people of purpose, our liberties not mere indulgences but the instruments of human dignity and national strength. We were called to the defense of freedom, not merely for ourselves but for those who would follow. Yet, today, our purpose dissolves in the tide of complacency, our freedoms bartered for fleeting comforts, our equality abandoned to the rising chorus of cynicism and despair.
All factions—left, right, and center—have forsaken the principles that once defined us. Each has wrapped itself in the illusion of virtue while kneeling at the altar of Mammon. We claim fidelity to truth, but we scorn reason when it contradicts our desires. We speak of morality, yet we wield it as a weapon rather than a compass. We invoke purpose, but only as rhetoric to mask our pursuit of power and comfort.
And so we arrive at Today.
If we are honest—if we strip away our illusions and stand before the bar of judgment without recourse to excuse, evasion, or self-justification—we must confess: we are all complicit. No single faction bears this burden alone, nor can any claim the mantle of righteousness. We, the people, have chosen indulgence over discipline, grievance over responsibility, spectacle over substance. And in that choosing, we have undone the Republic.
But we are not bound to our ruin.
We must restore reason. We must restore morality. We must restore purpose.
To do so, we must abandon the golden idols who are unworthy to serve us, the oligarchs who plunder us, the ideologies that subvert reason. We must cast aside the anger, the bitterness, the division that have led us to forsake one another, that have severed us from our future and our purpose. If we are to be a people again—if we are to reclaim the inheritance we have squandered—we must choose anew. Not comfort, not grievance, not self-interest. We must choose to be worthy of the Republic, or else surrender to its final dissolution.
If we continue on our present course, where do we go?
If we have abandoned reason, morality, and purpose, what remains?
It is no longer a question of mere decline but of transformation. A Republic that ceases to be a Republic does not simply fade into irrelevance; it becomes something else, something unrecognizable to those who once believed in its founding principles. Have we already crossed that threshold? Have we slipped, not merely toward decay, but into authoritarianism?
The signs are unmistakable. A government that no longer serves its people but instead entrenches power. A citizenry that, weary of self-governance, willingly submits to rule by force or deception. A society that exalts spectacle over substance, division over unity, and vengeance over justice. These are the hallmarks of a nation no longer free in spirit, even if it still pretends to be free in form.
Authoritarianism does not always come with the fanfare of a coup or the boot of the oppressor; more often, it arrives in whispers, in the slow erosion of rights once taken for granted, in the willing abdication of responsibility by a people who have lost the will to govern themselves. It arrives when power, unchecked, ceases to be accountable. When the institutions meant to preserve liberty instead secure their own perpetuity. When law becomes a weapon, wielded not for justice but for control.
If we have not yet fallen fully into authoritarianism, then we are on its precipice. A people who no longer hold their leaders accountable, who no longer value reason, morality, or purpose, will find themselves ruled—not by wisdom, not by justice, but by those who know only how to command and demand obedience.
And so, we face a choice.
Do we accept this slow descent into tyranny, consoling ourselves with the illusion that we are still free, so long as we are comfortable? Do we resign ourselves to the idea that the Republic was always doomed, that we are powerless to reclaim it?
Or do we resist?
To resist is not merely to oppose a party or a faction. It is not to trade one demagogue for another. True resistance is the restoration of the very things we have abandoned: reason, morality, and purpose. It is the rejection of fear and cynicism, the refusal to accept the inevitability of our own undoing.
It is to say, as those before us have said in darker times: not yet, not now, not here.
Northcoast Antiquarian 