The Candle and the Spiral: Reflections on Mortimer Brewster’s Hauntology of Language
The name Mortimer Brewster seldom tugs at the lapels of mainstream literary discourse. His slender oeuvre, published almost entirely in self-financed pamphlets between 1927 and 1933, slumbers in the footnotes of obscure bibliographies and the minds of those few initiates who stumbled upon a copy of *Lingua Infinitum* or *The Lamps of Borrowed Flame* in the sun-shattered dust of some antiquarian bookshop. And yet, as I trace his trembling marginalia and the hieroglyphs of his metaphors, I cannot help but wonder whether Brewster did not in fact glimpse—however fleetingly—the architectural shadow of language’s sacred origin.
Born to a family of disgraced spiritualists in Elyria, Ohio, in 1894, Brewster’s early life was enveloped in the psychic detritus of séances and failed prophecies. His only formal education came from devouring the remains of his father’s drooping library: Swedenborg, Boehme, and Shelley, interspersed with volumes on chirography and mystical phonetics. After intermittent employment as a railway clerk in Missouri and a typesetter in Boston, Brewster vanished for nearly a decade, resurfacing in 1926 with a series of mimeographed tracts left anonymously at university halls and city libraries across New England.
His most developed collection, *The Lamps of Borrowed Flame* (1931), remains an extraordinary, though often elliptical, attempt to graft metaphysics onto the corpus of poetic syntax. The titular poem opens:
> “When I write ‘stone’ I do not mean ‘stone’,
> But the echo of a silence grown
> Fat with names that perished
> Long before men wept alone.”[1]
Brewster’s language shivers with ontological unease; one senses that each word, for him, is a revenant—returning not to communicate, but to haunt. Indeed, the project of language, for Brewster, is not to declare but to allude: the poem is not the house but the keyhole, and we are always peering through it at something even the poet himself cannot name.
The theme recurres in his fragmentary prose work, *Lingua Infinitum* (1929), composed in a meta-poetic idiom that combines theological speculation with philological delirium. In it, we read:
> “The original lie was the misuse of naming. Adam was not given names, he was given the peril of naming. And in each name he uttered, a heaven was punctured.”[2]
This unsettling inversion of the Genesis myth demonstrates Brewster’s central anxiety: that language is intrinsically heretical—an evacuation of the divine silence into malformed idols of speech. What he proposes in its place is a return to “phonemic reverence,” a term he coined to describe an intuitive hearing-before-saying, something reminiscent of Simone Weil’s concept of ‘decreation.’ Phonemes, in Brewster’s cosmology, are fossilized angels, and the act of true poetry is an act of necromancy—as if breathing life into what never fully lived.
Philosophically, Brewster seems caught between phenomenology and mystical idealism. His awareness of Husserl is unsure—there are references to “noetic consciousness,” but they feel intuitively grasped rather than systematically studied. Yet the following excerpt from *The Visions of Sound Made Flesh* (a letter-poem never formally published, but preserved in the Hesswig Catalogue of Uncollected Papers) is strikingly Husserlian in its preoccupation with perception:
> “I do not hear the word—I hear the possibility that birthed it,
> The wet stone where it curled unborn,
> Before man had lips enough to trap it in air.”[3]
In this single stanza, Brewster accomplishes what volumes of semiotic debate strive toward: a poetic schema of logos as pre-ontological condition, not mere cultural artifact. One begins to see why Brewster, unlike his materialist contemporaries, never felt drawn to the manifestos of the Modernists. Instead he drew closer to the metaphysical soliloquies of Thomas Traherne and the psychospiritual experiments of Gustav Fechner. For Brewster, to write was not to arrange ideas on a page but to climb down Jacob’s ladder into the non-linguistic roots of being.
Perhaps this is why few can read him easily. His words open themselves like blossoms of fire, consuming the naïve reader who dares approach them armed only with conventional notions of subject, object, and verb. Take this gnomic line from *The Ashes We Speak In* (1932):
> “Meaning is a theft foiled only by the refusal to utter.”[4]
Here we confront Brewster’s deepest conviction: that true understanding is silent, that language is the scream that follows the fall. There is something terrifyingly Gnostic in this worldview, with its implication that every noun is a shard of some deeper, catastrophic forgetting.
Let us pause now—not to analyze—but to turn inwards, as Brewster himself so often demanded. For what is poetry, if not a means of walking backwards through abstraction, back through the corridors of echo, to the initial exhale that separated us from the garden? Consider, dear reader, how often our love of words masks our fear of what lies behind them. Brewster had the audacity to dwell there—to fall forward into silence with sharpened pen.
On wintry evenings, in the Monestarium’s archaic scriptorium, I often ritually recite his line:
> “Not all absence is loss. Some is sanctuary.”[1]
And in this austerity, a sobering clarity begins to gather like frost at the ankles. Brewster’s work is not complete poetry—it is a falling architecture of a lost rite. It demands from its reader not taste, but sacrifice; not analysis, but transfiguration.
He died in anonymity in 1939, the victim of an industrial accident at a matchstick factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. No obituary, no eulogy. Only lines—scribbled over cardboard, tucked in the pages of phone books, pressed into the flyleaves of Bibles gone to seed. But his is not the legacy of loud voices. His is a spiral—a candle whose flame bends toward a point we do not yet understand.
So the next time you speak, pause—listen for the phoneme blooming behind your voice. Listen for Brewster.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, phonosemantics, gnosticism
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[1] Brewster, Mortimer. *The Lamps of Borrowed Flame*. Elyria: Private Printing, 1931, p. 14.
[2] Brewster, Mortimer. *Lingua Infinitum*. Boston: Transfigural Press, 1929, p. 7.
[3] Brewster, Mortimer. “The Visions of Sound Made Flesh,” in *Uncollected Works of Mortimer Brewster*, Hesswig Catalogue MS-91/3.
[4] Brewster, Mortimer. *The Ashes We Speak In*. Providence: Iron Leaf Editions, 1932, p. 22.