Light beams bright

Light beams bright
bounced off Life's sight
springing from clouds' lofty height.

In the greens of Springs nascent murmurs
I felt the breadth of Nature's
winds and smelled
her redolent colours.

The virility of her bosomed hills,
nobility of her chiselled peaks
graced Hope's reach.

For behind the Sun lay the
vanquished
shadows of Winter's listlessness
tugging my abeyances
and fears.

Symmetry stamped onto the landscape

I wrote this while I was in Paris, on the banks of the Seine

Symmetry stamped onto
the landscape,

Arching through time, pulling
strands of man's plans
knotting them to nexuses of
excesses, sexes and blood

flooded fresh flesh with
senses measured
and let loose into the light

-Z

Homage to another master

I stumbled across a poem in the lightly dusted library that my grandfather keeps. It's only one sentence, six lines, but it grabbed me by the guts and threw me around the room:

The Cat

She was licking

the opened tin

for hours and hours

without realising

that she was drinking

her own blood.

Spyros Kyriazopoulous

Where to start? I wish I could write with this much brevity, acuity and emotion. 

In a tragic, almost Sisyphus like circle, we see a clash of life and death, of happiness and pain. The Cat, although just an animal, embodies a drive for life but it is draped in solitude, as well as in a smallness and helplessness that evokes further existential frustration. The tin is an object crafted in furnaces, moulded by man, and here discarded. It evidences the unintentional but severe consequences of our progress. It is cold and hard and left behind where it wreaks havoc.

The poem is so innocuous at first; the beginning three lines paint a charming and quaint image which gives way, suddenly and without remorse, to horror in the final unremitting line. There are almost no adjectives in this poem. The imagery has an ascetic quality, the emotional development does not rely on flowered and colourful language. There are no soaring lyrical evocations, just a stark image crafted out of everyday objects. Despite this austerity, the poem has a tragic beauty that I admire.

As an aspiring poet and erudite I hope to write with the clarity and effectiveness that Kyriazopoulous has managed in this poem.

-Z

An Autumn Afternoon

Austere limbs held the last
autumn leaves against the wind,
little brown pennants of a lost spring.
Outside a street cafe
I sat and watched their flutters
their brittle battle.

I listened to their lilts and trills,
together much more than a rustle.
Perhaps a rite to their fallen companions
scattering along the street.

An actress I once knew in spring
drove past in an old Mercedes-Benz,
silver, of course.

She was biting her nail,
perhaps nervous for an audition

I should call her and ask,
see how it went.
My own brittle battle.

Erik Satie

I thought Erik Satie deserved a bit of recognition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7DBoiyBoJ8


Satie slipped into a cerulean blue
and blew soft shards of light
heavy shadows.
He brushed a bell, ringing in quiet knells
of autumn births, new repetitions.
Old beginnings, he cut the sides of a melody circle,
straight through the left out right edge in empty space,
longing for the cool, tender reservation of
cerulean blue.

Late in the quiet of the night

Late in the quiet of the night

When even the wind is blown out,

I sit alone and listen.

This city is not dead.

Sometimes there is the low hum of a car skulking off, or

sneaking in.

The occasional fragments of laughter and music pass over.

Sometimes I hear the distant moans of lovers,

the faded shouts of drunk bergies left lost in their wines.

Once I heard the tinkle of a cat as he stalked across the lawn,

a little bell strapped to his neck, laughing out,

Destroying the tense hunt, the blood rushed chase.

But, what I always hear is the quiet.

Those dense moments when I am alone with nothing but the beat and sing,

There is no lover next to me to moan in the sticky heat of our wrapped limbs, 

or fill the quiet with open murmurs.

Maybe a bell is strapped to my neck, maybe I prefer the silence.

maybe both

A little on ignorance

Socrates, the protagonist both in narrative and in discourse of Plato’s “Apology” was described by the all knowing Oracle of Delphi as the wisest man. Socrates however, believed that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever and in order to resolve the conflict he pursued relentlessly the wise men of Athens. He badgered and questioned the poets, politicians, powerful and wealthy of Athens. In reflection, he realised that; while these men, along with all of Athens, thought themselves wise and knowledgeable they were, in fact, not. Socrates realized that the Oracle was correct, in that while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance.

Plato was put to death for his questioning of the Athenian preeminent, a true fatality of ignorance. We, on the other hand, face no such consequences for our questioning, aware of our ignorance we must come together to question, challenge and pursue with rigorous fervour its reduction.

Phi, or the golden ratio as it has been termed has the origins of its discovery in the proportions of the human body. The Egyptians centred their system of measurements on the relative proportions of their arms to forearms and forearms to hands, with phi as the common ratio between them. It was from this observation that the pyramids, with all their mind bending symmetry emerged.

The Parthenon took its proportions from Phi, as did Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”. Phi emerges in the structure of Galaxies and the Helix of DNA. It Evolves in the shape of foliage and in the shocks of markets. Melodies form in its presence and aesthetics conform to its incidence.

Of all the numbers which are used in the reasoned pursuits of man Phi is omnipresent. Ironically; the number so central to the rational appreciation of the world around us, the bodies we live in, the art we admire and the music we love is irrational. Unknowable in its entirety, phi represents the unremitting battle of man, not for wisdom, but for the reduction of ignorance.

aFlare

aFlare

Glimpses of lives lost.

flashed. and crossed.

smatters of shattered. dreams reams

of scenes torn apart.

glintered splinters of

mouths. hands.

promises

shadows of flushes rushed

dashed and touched.

fleeting breath stolen between 

.lips.

-Z

Oct 2011

Welcomes, Whys and Wherefores

Hi

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

The first question is; why should you read it? I hope that all of my posts will be interesting, most of them intelligent, and some of them entertaining. I aim to cover the wide range of topics that I am interested in, from poetry to pure mathematics. I will discuss Mozart's Operas alongside Godel's Incompleteness theorem (much more on this later). In addition I want to give some representation of what life is like as student in Cape Town, the most beautiful city in the world.

I aim, at this ambitious early stage, to make this a collection of essays, narratives,diary entries, poems, ideas, links and so on. Their unifying characteristic being that they are drawn from my experiences and thoughts. So essentially "Ex Rudis" should eventually take on a mosaic like form. When viewed close up, each post may be self contained, direct, perhaps even fragment like. But I hope that, as the collection grows, it begins to resemble, in its entirety, a representation of the way I see the world.

So, why the name "Ex Rudis"? Rudis in Latin means rough, uncultivated, raw. So this blog is about being "out of" the Rudis. This represents my desire to take what I see, feel and think about the world and refine it through writing. On a deeper level though, the word erudite comes from "Ex Rudis", and so this blog reflects my deeper desire for erudition (more on this later). In contrast, is my faith in the aesthetic, the purely sensory, the beautiful. I want to also share my experiences in this regard. So in essence then, this blog is about documenting my continuum between the Rudis and the erudite often through the interlocutor of aesthetics. From the emotional to the aesthetic, from thought to knowledge, from the the poem to the theorem. Ex Rudis is about placing little markers on the map of what is outside the wild dark cave.

-Z