What else can there be but everything? And though we cannot consider all things at once, are we really able to bean-pick, to consider one single thing, one uncolored and utterly independent notion from that interconnected, cross-wired immensity? The arts, philosophy--The Humanities, let's say--along with our understandings and misunderstandings of the sciences, natural and otherwise, and our every experience, action, and reaction--what we think we know, our opinions, and our states of mind--none are sealed off from the others, none run in discrete channels. We are the confluence of what streams through us. We read a novel that makes us think of our Uncle Barney, though there's no Barney-like character in the story, but the book evokes the feeling of what it felt like to be with him; we are startled by an abstract sculpture that recalls for us the landscape of the place our father lived after he left us and, then, are unable to really see that sculpture, or perhaps even another work by the same sculptor wholly unlike the first, even though the sculpture itself has nothing of leaving about it; or we attend a live performance of Levy's opera, Mourning Becomes Electra, and are jetted with bone-chilling rapidity back to the Iowa farm we visited long ago where we heard the all-too-human-like screams of a brown rabbit being tortured beneath a knee-high hedge--skinned alive--by a smallish barn cat. Our connections and associations help make the world easier to both comprehend and articulate. We compare, consciously or not; we draw or observe parallels. This is like that, we say. This makes me think of that other thing--similar to the mapping that makes metaphor work; perhaps, sometimes, exactly the same kind. We recreate from our contexts--not simply the current ambient circumstance or the location in which our bodies, at any given moment, might take up space, but the catalog of contexts we have absorbed throughout our lives--via those accumulations, those personal and universal recognitions, sense-and-memory associations with their fractional samenesses--and whether those connections rise up into our consciousness at a given time--say, while you're writing a review or an essay on craft--that, no doubt, is another set of active connections, a subset of the whole and, experientially, not the least bit irrevelant.In Minglements, some pieces are more mingled than others, and both the mingled and less-mingled are interspersed here in this volume, a small sampling of my own connections which, I hope you'll find to be, in one context or another, wholly or partially, straightforwardly or tangentially, related to your own.
