The Birth of the Root Tongue Letters
The Root Tongue Letters
The Birth of the Root Tongue Letters
Every beginning hides inside a fragment. For me, it was a collage poem - found snippets of language shuffled, broken, luminous with accident. I handed this fragment to Chatwick, my editorial companion, and asked him to weave it into a story. What returned was not only a story but a word: root tongue.
The name struck like a tuning fork. It was as if the language itself had been waiting to be spoken aloud. From that moment, I knew I had touched the edge of something larger.
Root tongue revealed itself first as a whisper, then as a framework, and finally as a path: the underlying language through which the universe converses with itself. Not English or Persian or Sanskrit, but the hidden current of communication that flows beneath them all, the Verse of Uni, speaking in stone, in leaf, in breath, in dream.
What began as a single story has grown into a constellation of stories, each one leaning toward a book. Along the way, I kept pressing Chatwick to help shape this intuition into words, refining a definition that feels both ancient and freshly coined.
And the more I contemplated and the more I looked, the more I saw. Poets, mystics, and artists across centuries have gestured toward the recognition of this current of living communication. They have sung of it, painted it, stumbled into it. But they had no name for it. Now we do.
Root tongue will be the coinage I carry forward, the name for this hidden dimension of recognition: the human encounter with the speech beneath speech, the language of the universe speaking to itself, among itself as it brings itself into infinite manifestation. Unity into infinite uniqueness and uniqueness within eternal unity.
The Root Tongue Letters will explore this discovery—part myth, part reflection, part field notes from the search for the first and most enduring language: root tongue.
The Root-Tongue Poem
even if you can talk
there comes a point
even if you can talk
the bloat and delirium
and the noisy throb
no one to dissuade
a mere distraction.
an afterthought.
there is no distance between
generations of unsung masters
in other parts of the world.
having awoken
in the moonlight
it becomes clear
a growing nostalgia
the slightly lonesome feeling.
for a moment I am encouraged
for the first time convinced
no idea what to expect
rooted in a principle that
doesn’t make any sense.
how to pluck leaves
leaves to nostrils
getting to the root
vapor trails on the tongue
of smoke and steam
all about delicacy
but for a moment.
and you might be surprised
by this intimate connection
radically simple
endlessly complex.
the ultimate long game
evolving in slow motion
in silence and solitude
pilgrimage to
presence
to the edge of
the world
no fence around it
open to beasts
well, so be it.
assembled fragments found hither and thither
Here is a new story from the above arrangement of the poem:
The traveler had always been able to speak, but one evening, under a dim blue moon, he discovered that speech had limits. Words, when she pushed too hard, swelled into bloat and delirium. They became a noisy throb, a hollow chorus that no one cared to dissuade. Speech itself revealed its trickery: a distraction, an afterthought.
In that silence, he remembered what the old ones had whispered—that there should be no distance between generations of unsung masters. Somewhere, in other corners of the earth, in other times, they too had awakened in moonlight, discovering the same threshold.
It came to her as a kind of nostalgia, tinged with loneliness: a longing not for the past but for what the past had hidden. For a moment he was encouraged, even convinced, though she had no idea what he was walking toward. She rooted himself in a principle that made no sense, as if nonsense itself were the doorway.
She bent to the ground, plucked a leaf, pressed it to his nostrils. Breath and plant mingled, and in the vapor trails rising to her tongue he tasted smoke and steam. She realized that everything was about the delicacy of the moment, about how thin the membrane was between one thing and another.
For a moment, the intimacy of this contact startled him. It was radically simple, endlessly complex, like touching the edge of a great pattern that was always forming and would never be finished. She saw the long game stretching ahead, evolving in slow motion, measured in centuries rather than seconds.
In silence and solitude, the path became a pilgrimage to presence itself. He followed it to the edge of the world, where there was no fence, nothing to hold back the wild beasts who roamed freely, unashamed, guardians of a threshold that refused to be tamed.
“Well,” she said at last, though no one answered. “So be it.”