In A Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood --
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks -- is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is --
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

~ Theodore Roethke

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Some beautiful footage -- shot at China's Wudang Monastery -- of martial artists demonstrating their forms, was my favorite part of Opening Dao: a short documentary film introducing some of the the basic principles of Daoism/Taoism and the martial arts.

Enjoy!

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"Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."

~ G. H. Hardy (1877-1947)

Can't help but wonder if Hardy -- in this passage from his 1940 essay "A Mathematical Apology" -- was making explicit reference to Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which had been published some nine years earlier?

Gödel's analysis began by establishing that "in any non-trivial axiomatic system, there are true theorems which cannot be proven." This set the stage for the actual Incompleteness Theorem, which rocked the boat of formalist mathematics, big-time, by demonstrating that the establishment of a set of axioms encompassing all of mathematics could never succeed. In other words, Gödel used logic and mathematics to show that logic and mathematics had some serious limitations.

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Stars burn clear
all night til dawn.

Do that yourself, and a spring
will rise in the dark with water
your deepest thirst is for.

~ Rumi

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