ENTHEOGENIC PSYCHOLYTIC PHANTASTICANT

Parmenides’ uses of rhythm, of symmetrical juxtapositions suggest an archaic frieze. What we need to tease out, argues Karl Rein-hardt in his seminal monograph of 1916, are the rules of archaic composition. In what ways, characteristic of the Pre-Socratics, does Parmenides encapsulate the sum of his arguments in each seemingly discrete section? The mythological lineaments of the poem are not vestment or masque in the baroque sense. The mythological embodies, allows, the only direct access to the invocation and articulation of the abstract where language, prior to Aristotle, has not yet evolved key modes of logical predication. But already Gorgias the Sophist understood that Parmenides’ verses have the same imperative alignment as do the motions of thought which they strive to verbalize and unify. For Parmenides, the world is nothing but the mirror of my thought—a proposal whose enormity across millennia should never escape us. Thus poetic form becomes the natural configuration for the most radical, overwhelming yet also strange and perhaps counterintuitive of assertions: that of the identity of thought and being. This existential identity will be a determinant in the genesis and pilgrimage of western consciousness. In a sense, Descartes and Hegel are footnotes. Parmenides’ vocabulary and syntax, so far as we can make them out, enact thought as the voice of being. The cautionary ambience of prose will come later.

George Steiner; The Poetry of Thought