Vibrate and resonate

This post is centered on the following extract, in the context of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly, from what a popular pop-guru wrote in a book of high credibility.

“Jammed together, the imaginal (my emphasis all through) cells begin to share energy and information with one another.  As a result, they begin to vibrate and resonate at the same frequency, intensifying their strength....”

As soon as I cut-and-paste the above, the red squiggly lines duly appeared under “imaginal”. That shows the limited imagination of the software. I readily understood what the author could have meant by “imaginal” – not “imaginary”, but real-yet-not-real, about-to-become-real. These “imaginal” and real cells reside side-by-side in the caterpillar as the real caterpillar cells transform themselves into real butterfly cells. “Imaginal” is a half-way house. There is some metaphor residing in this, somewhere. You may locate it, but if you do not, I am not the person to approach.

Why not? Because I speak “just like a scientist.” One needs, at the very least, to “tend to speak like a poet” to locate a metaphor. I can’t; therefore, I can’t.

There is something called “level confusion”. Explanations for a phenomenon can be found at different levels. This truism was made clear to me a long time ago, in the 1960s, as I was standing at Luz Church corner in the then Madras. There was a large electric ticker tape type of board carrying the news of the day. What was it, really? “Nothing but” a cluster of light bulbs? An electric circuit, directing each bulb on and off in a definitive sequence? The English letters that appear and vanish? The words, the sentences? Or, the news content? It all depends on at what level you are talking. No matter, all these levels are interconnected.

Do not get it into this argument as you will descend into the bottomless pit of unending debates on reductionism. But, do try to locate a level for “metaphor”. It is my guess you cannot. Even if you do, it would carry no continuity with the other levels.

I am not opposed to metaphors per se; I am not that scientific. But when metaphors use what at first sight look and feel like terms of science, yes, there is something grating. That gets me to “resonate” in the quoted passage earlier (emphasized in italics). The term has a very sharply defined meaning in science. It can be accommodated, if at all, in a non-scientific context only by diluting the meaning to almost nothing.

While I can explain resonance through science, at the level appropriate to this post, I would rather loosely say it is a spike in a response to a stimulus under specific conditions that in the normal course of things one would not expect. The phrase “intensifying their strength”, implying smooth progression, just does not convey any such sudden shift, a spike. The author must have known this. Yet, he used “resonate”, adding connected scientific terms such as vibrate, frequency. Why?

I have the freedom to be cynical. He wanted to imbue his statement with some amount of scientific authenticity. If I translated the above in his own words, it would read as, “wanted his words to resonate with science”! I am not opposed to his using metaphors, but I do have the liberty to speculate on his motives.

By the way one of the best metaphors of recent times is Dawkins’s Selfish Gene. And, I know how much trouble that got him into!  

In the small extract given at the beginning, a pop-guru is taking illegitimate recourse to a scientific term to gain credibility while his readers and followers are blissfully unaware of such nefariousness. What exactly are the “imaginal” cells doing if not resonating?

Well, I have no answers. But, if you want to know how, as the cells of the growing fetus divide and multiply they know what type of cells they have to become and where should they be located, please read about hox genes.

Your mind will resonate with science then, with and without metaphors. Science aids valid metaphors and faux metaphors cannot displace science.

Raghuram Ekambaram