Featured image is a Hebrew manuscript

We explain the world we see with concepts that remain unseen. We explain the act of choosing with models unavailable to the choosers. We bridge these gulfs without knowing how it is possible. Our first guess is always epistemology, but the better bet is poetry.

Poetry and prose are not separated by any such gulf. Terseness and parallelism characterize poetry, but both can be found in prose. They form the heart of the poetic function, which beats a steady rhythm in language of all sorts. The particularly poetic enters into prose and the characteristics of prose enters into poetry. It should not then surprise us to find a vibrant poetic heart beating in the breast of scientific language.

Terseness is simple enough, and not so important for our purposes. Parallelism is deceptively simple, and the key to bridging the gulf between life and model.

When language at any level is brought close together, equivalences can create meaning. Similar looking but dissimilar sounding words can be highly significant. Related genre tropes invoked soon after one another can produce a greater effect. Each potential type of equivalence can be combined or operate independently from any other type.

Equivalence highlights difference; to equivocate is not to tautologize. Rhyming couplets produce a similar sound, but different meanings. A connection is drawn by that similarity, but meaning is made in partnership with contrast.

A man has “cried wolf,” and a parallel is drawn with a story. A man is not a story. Or this man is not that story. An equivalence has been drawn, and its value is only possible because of the differences. The man’s life does not have a clear lesson, but the story does. Parallelism can form a bridge to that lesson from the man by drawing equivalences.

The economic man is more equation than story, and men are neither equations nor stories. But even equations and stories are not completely transparent to us, any more than we as equation and story makers are to ourselves.

Economic man is largely unlike us, so putting his decisions in parallel with ours suggests something new. This “something” itself remains more concealed than unconcealed, but its arrival adds to our visible horizon. Unconcealing by drawing together several untransparent elements together: this is the mysterious effect of parallelism. Like the liar who cried wolf, the tension between clear difference and equivocation generates fresh insights. For this reason truth can flower even among false models.

Our horizons may yet be narrowed by an idolatry of the newly unconcealed. Reductionism is the name given to this class of idols. It is the project of not A because B. A table is not a table, but atoms and the void. Love is not lovely, but a brute Darwinian impulse. The world we see is an illusion, the concepts unseen are the true reality. Human experience counts for nothing, the products of human intellect are sovereign.

To eliminate A with B is to cut the threads of parallelism. These threads stitch together human intellect itself. Sovereign intellect without parallelism is little more than a chimpanzee with a crown. Without the table we see, we would not seek the atoms. The “true” reality can only come into view in parallel with the “nominal” one of appearances. The great unconcealments of the era put formal models in parallel with appearances, as the liar is put in parallel with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” With the unconcealing power of parallelism, even higher primates such as we have achieved kingly deeds.

Science must proceed poetically to proceed at all, and poetry makes meaning by drawing parallels.