MORS ORTS
It was fifty years ago at Aulis, on a sandstone overhang,
looking down on the white wind-blasted roofless columns
of the shrine of Cyreneian Zeus, in the soft light of a slow
dying day, that I first heard the tremulous voice that was
Ignatius Aporis. My head turned, caught by that quizzical
modulation, and I glimpsed the slight short form that I was
to sight at every turn of intellectual development through
the years to come.
Years now gone. As now Aporis.
Like rumour, that hath many tongues, legends, lies, fictions
beset him, arguing with each other for a spoil of his days.
Greek, they called him, or Syrian. From the Plate to the Don,
as a gaucho's abandoned bundle to a miner's rejected stepson.
All claimed his birth. He had six wives, or none; a fabulous
private fortune, or lived on the charity of others. Reticent,
he demurred at the multiplication of fabrications. To him,
accidents of biography were irrelevant to the raking, driven
search for understanding, for a true ratio rationis, a balance
point of light between the polar antagonism of life and death.
Founder of Christians against Christianity, and The Lost Debate,
author of 'Meaning's Onion' and 'Smarting, the Hot Salt Tears:
Lament as the Mainspring of Evolution', Aporis laboured, toiled,
until the day of his disappearance, to heal the wound of what is,
raw on the skin of what should be. In his beloved mountain heights
he stepped from sight into avalanching white, leaving behind him
words, for his memory, friends, for his threnody.
Ieaun Ignacio (Ignatius) Aporis: born Izmir (?) 1973 (?);
died (?): somewhere in the Karakoram April 2044.
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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