Sometimes conundrums lay down arms and yield
to guardians of mystical ideals.
After Gödel foiled a positivist
plot to strip Arithmetic’s mystique
and own it complete, he groomed two enigmas
until they behaved consistently enough
to mingle with, though never join, the modish
ZF clique. These were his greatest feats.
Germany stirred. Vienna Circle leader
Moritz Schlick was murdered. Needing someone
to trust, Kurt wed Adele, a cabaret girl.
Nazis annexed Austria. Moritz Schlick’s
assassin walked free. The newlyweds fled.
At Princeton, Gödel toyed with relativity
adding a balanced spin to Albert Einstein’s
universe with consequential loops in
consequential loops in time and maybe
even undermining passing time.
Albert and Kurt remained the best of friends.
Love and success should be a recipe
for joy but Gödel found it hard to swallow.
No perfect food for Platonists exists.
Nature laces fruit with fructose not
to nourish but to tempt. Paranoia
picks a theme and his was ‘Death by Poison’.
To reassure, Adele would share his spoon.
Intuition was Gödel’s champion
or Gödel was Intuition’s champion.
Either way, it wouldn’t let him rest,
demanding that he prove by means of Logic
the reign of Intuition over Logic.
Simpler to catch a breeze in a butterfly
net and pin it meadow fresh in a case.
Fixations fuelled his fear but not his frame.
A hobby might have helped. He could have gone
fishing, grown organic vegetables or
learned to cook. Instead, he chose to trawl
a shuttered space between nested infinities,
hoping to snag the shifty interface.
Simpler to cast a line from a wooden pier
and hook a fat blue wave for supper.
Adele’s strokes and long recuperation
justified his fast. A rational man
would rather wait than risk a poisoned plate.
So Gödel atrophied, until a scaffold
planed and angled braced his skin. He shrank
into a puzzle piece, ideally shaped
to fit the incomplete continuum.
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