OPENING THE SEALS represents poet Robert Kelly s workings, starting in 2000, with the radical suggestions by the historical linguist Patrick C. Ryan towards the reconstitution of what he calls Proto-Language a linguistic substrate, ca. 100,000 BC, to all extant human languages the real Nostratic before Nostratic, our language. Ryan argues for a set of meaning-bearing monosyllabic sounds, that work like roots or racemes or perhaps leitmotifs in subsequent languages.

In Kelly s poems, each section begins with one of the Meaning-Bearing Monosyllables, and meditates as well as I can contrive on the sound and its range of meanings. And let me say that it is the range of meanings that Ryan finds subtended or implied by the syllable that first caught my attention and excited me: not so much, then, the sense of the sound as a root, but the sound as a complex aural seal, which has to be opened to find all the meanings it proposes and thus connects . As if the secret affinities of all things and processes in the world were already encoded in these beast sounds our sweet mouths still fashion. "