The moment speech is born, it diminishes me; I am still searching for the version of myself that has not yet fallen into a word.
Before Sentences
While Language Has Not Yet Been Born
Philosophical Poetic Essay
Purification Poetics – Ontology of the Self
Order Now
* This audiobook is available in English only.
I am searching for the version of myself
that has not yet fallen into a word;
my tongue is asleep,
and inside me a silence expands like a womb —
it carries not my pulse,
but the vibration of first meaning;
it darkens, tightens, yet there I multiply.
I breathe, but light is not in need of letters:
it falls into the eye, burns the essence, remains in the essence.
A breath circulates in my throat — not a sound,
it has no name; yet it knows me before I know myself,
I arrive at it only afterward.
I carry a stone:
there is no writing upon it, its weight is great;
weight does not speak, but it places me where I belong.
Upon it, the map of “before becoming” appears.
A cry rises within me — “Do not give me to letters”;
truth handed over to letters falls into the market,
wears down, descends.
I turn my ear inward; a city opens inside me:
streets are signs, doors are gazes, its windows are intention.
I had no name there; my essence remains.
If speech is to come, let it be only a witness, not a verdict.
A verdict is always a little too much; witnessing is little —
here, little is much, much is little.
A sentence is a hasty agreement;
I learned its cost too late, I returned too late.
I know this:
everything poured into a sentence is slightly worn away;
I am waiting at the truest threshold
where the sentence will not arrive.
Be silent, I tell myself —
truth existed even before language was born;
I reach it only by remaining silent.
Listen before you read
Sometimes it’s easier to listen to a journey before walking it yourself.
Below, you’ll find a long-form, podcast-style conversation that explores Before Sentences in depth, from multiple angles.
​​
Note: These editorial sessions are in English. YouTube’s automatic subtitle translation can be used to follow along in other languages.
General Content and Structure
This work does not listen to speech, but to the vibration that precedes speech. It calls not toward knowledge, but toward hearing. While wandering through pre-linguistic consciousness, it constructs the region before the birth of the word — that is, silence — as a dense carrying substance; the sign as a primitive, mute grammar; the threshold where sound is still pure as a prayer; speech as a cost; and what lies beyond the sentence as a mature stillness, testing each through the language of poetic philosophy.
​
The texts open with breath and close with pulse. As gaze and shadow, finger and posture establish their own mute grammars, breath remembers its state of prayer before turning into sound. When speech appears, it demands a price; when a sentence is formed, a fragment is taken from wholeness. The true task of the text is to make that loss audible and to call the reader back from the comfort of the sentence. Intuition is preferred over proof, witnessing over judgment; to narrate becomes truthful only to the extent that it can relinquish narration.
​
The text does not draw a path; it indicates a direction. It leaves not a theorem but an intuition, not a decision but a testimony. What is sought is that the reader lose speed and regain hearing; to step out of the comfort of the sentence and enter the weight of meaning.
​
Here, words exist not to be amplified, but to withdraw. And some truths had already come into being long before language was born.
Contents
Truth Before Speech
I. The Morphology of Silence — The Pre-Verbal Field [1-10]*
II. The Age of the Sign — The First Skin of Thought [11-21]*
III. The Awakening of Sound — Phonetic Revelation [22-35]*
IV. The Construction of Speech — The Human Before the Sentence [36-48]*
V. After Sentences — The Silent Return of Language [49-58]*
The Human After Silence
​
*The numbers in square brackets refer to poem numbers, not page numbers.