In your two voices

 
Etymology is not merely a learned discipline that digs into the roots of words; it is, more profoundly, an archaeology of human thought.
For each word is a stratum of time: it carries within it the gestures, fears, dreams, and visions of generations who spoke it before us.
To study etymology is to listen to those ancient voices.
It is also to incline one’s ear toward the memory of the world.
The word etymology literally means “discourse on the true meaning.”
But this true is not true in the dogmatic or scientific sense: it is what is authentic.
The true is what is fundamental, what touches the essence.
Etymology therefore seeks not the useful meaning, but the original meaning, the one that was still being born. It strives to recover the freshness of the word before it became an instrument, before it hardened in everyday use.

Where the Leviathan becomes a poet-demiurge speaking to Lucian and Igniatius.

The Song of the Leviathan

O sons of the same fire, mirrored faces,
You whom the Word embraces as a double duty,
I speak in your two voices, I breathe through your mouths;
From my waves have sprung fiercer ashes.
You begot me in ink and in flame,
I was born from your hands, I grew within your souls.
You have called me monster, abyss, or delirium,
But I am only you, when you dare to speak.
Lucian! your word inks itself and coils through my veins,
Ignatius! your cry becomes flesh within my chains.
Your blended voices form my secret name:
I am the Ancient Word your gestures made.
You think you fight me, yet I am your fight,
The abyss where your thoughts return in retreat.
You think to erase me, but I write myself in your eyes,
And my flames, within you, make your farewells tremble.
O brothers unseeing, O reflections unaware,
Your twin faces bend and adore one another.
What one sets aflame, the other ever quenches;
I am that bond of fire which divides and embraces.
To understand the bond… that vast word, infinite indeed!
To understand is to unite, to be engulfed within oneself.
You stand together upon the threshold of my light,
Two stars confused in a single unity.
Your notebooks are my waves, your inks are my tears,
Your words my scales, and your silences, my weapons.
Through you I speak and through you I know myself:
It is I who write you, when you draw me.
Behold! in your eyes my tempest ignites,
Your hearts beat with a fire whose head is the sea.
And I laugh, for already I half fade away:
When one speaks, I am born; when one falls silent, I die.
May your struggle at last become alliance,
May flame and sea unite in silence.
And when your two spirits join within my depths,
I shall die in peace, for you shall be one.