To read, perchance to write
“Resonance: psychological, emotional, metaphorical, aural, and imagistic resonance.”
- ZZ Packer, on being asked what makes a piece of fiction work
The New Yorker, Summer Fiction Issue, June 2010
—-
What matters most is resonance.
The same physics of pendulums
and musical strings that
captivated Galileo in 1602.
As a plucked guitar string
stores energy and releases
it over and over again,
so a word holds us;
so a string of words holds us.
Is there a difference between
the series of small earthquakes
Tesla started by accident
in his New York lab
and the pangs set off
by a latent memory recalled?
Often, the dream remembered
on waking is the same one
dreamt while awake.
The child merrily at a swing
is a demonstration of resonance.
Formulas can find how much force
in each backward and forward leaning
is required to keep going,
but simply watching a child
swinging merrily is resonant.
Time proceeds forward and
there are echoes in its wake.
What matters most is resonance.
The sound of metal on glass,
a voice through the telephone,
a song on the radio late at night.
It is a finger dipped in water
and run along the rim of crystal.
What matters most is that you find,
over and over again, that crucial
pitch at which glass must shatter.
—-
June 13, 2010
This is a great piece, I was just having an in depth conversation about resonance with my roommate a few days ago. Just to further this thought it is amazing how the passage you read, and became so immersed in, turns out to be stored energy because as you read it, it transformed back into resonating energy within you which is something I had not thought about in the past “so a string of words holds us”. As each person read that article it resonated at a different rate and effects each person differently.
When you look at resonance from a quantum perspective you will find that anything that resonates at a specific tone we can all agree to be the same tone, is actually a bunch of smaller resonating frequencies that make up a system to create one resonating frequency. if you take any one of those sub-resonating frequencies you could hardly identify it as resonance at all, but when they are together it creates an amazing experience.
The interesting thing is that these smaller resonating frequencies actually change and transform as they pass through the air and force standing waves to resonate creating a type of union and by the time it reaches each person, lets say at a concert that an audience has become immersed in, it delivers a different experience for each and every person.
This is all just from a standpoint of physical resonance, once you get into emotional and the rest you will see this very same pattern repeating itself even between something as simple as two people falling in love and sending off a new vibe too everyone around them or that knows them. As two people as individuals there emotional vibrations are different and as they become closer they form a new vibration, and you as the standing wave will now merge with the new wave they created and the experience with everyone they encounter will be different. I think you summed it up well when you said “Resonance Matters Most”. I think resonance is what makes the universe come alive. Beautifully written!
Reece
And as soon as we master physical resonance, we can finally have force fields!
Reece darling, I think I love best the scientist in you.
p.s.
There’s enough in this for a new guest post. *hint* *hint*