Intersecting Parallel Lines

I spent the first ten years of my life in the rural Ararua region of Northland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, known for its kauri gumlands. Ararua can be translated as "two (or both) 'rua'" and ara as "ways" (or "paths"), while Aotearoa is commonly referred to as "the land of the long white cloud."

The opening words of the early Christian text, the Didache, are

There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways.

In his poem The Definition of Love, the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell plays on Euclid's fifth postulate as a conceit to support the theme of his poem.

As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

The Mexican writer Alphonso Reyes wrote a haiku also citing Euclid's fifth postulate

Hai-kai de euclides
Líneas paralelas
son las convergentes
que sólo se juntan en el infinito

The final strand that led me to adopt a parallel haiku-influenced format for my continuing journey were the following words by Dutch religious philosopher Gerardus van der Leeuw

Religion and art are parallel lines which intersect only at infinity, and meet in God.

This was reinforced for me by the matters explored in Ivan Karamazov’s Euclidean Mind: the ‘Fact’ of Human Suffering and Evil  the abstract of which states

In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky addresses the problem of how to reconcile God’s goodness with the evil in the world by comparing the metaphysical implications of Ivan Karamazov’s and the Elder Zosima’s Euclidean and non-Euclidean epistemologies. For Ivan, the moral opposites of good and evil cannot be reconciled, just as two parallel lines cannot meet (Euclid’s fifth postulate). For Zosima, the symbol of the crucifix represents a meeting of the parallel lines and the moral opposites.
[The Polish Journal of Aesthetics pp. 49–62  (1/2020) DOI: 10.19205/56.20.3]

In seems possible that the path of my parallel verse compositions continues to lead me towards something like Elder Zosima’s conclusion.

ngā mihi

Stephen Bailey
(formerly writing as Hansha Teki)