Greg Bales

About the Name of the Blog

One might say this blog’s early unnamedness occurred because of a fundamental lack of creativity on my part, but I prefer to think that I was giving the blog time to ripen. Aboriginal traditions assert that a child’s given name may be provisional. As he matures and seeks enlightenment, he uncovers and adopts a truer name, which he will be known by for the rest of his life. Let’s just agree that I’ve done the same with the blog, how about? All links and URLs will remain the same as before, but from here out, the blog shall be called Amalgamated.

Why Amalgamated? Not least because however abstract the concept of amalgamation might be thought, to say the word aloud fills the mouth like few words I know. It forms with a schwa in the middle of the throat, moves swiftly up to closed lips which then open wide for a true vowel. Suddenly, the tongue clicks on the soft palate, a voiced velar plosive that returns the sound to where it started. Back up to closed lips it goes before the mouth opens again, this time for a dipthong, when suddenly the tip of the tongue clicks on the hard palate twice in the same motion, unvoiced then voiced. Try it. Like a girl on a trampoline it bounces—down up, down up—but it leaves the girl suspended in midair when it’s done. It’s a thrilling word to say, and I love that about it.

The word also comes from Margaret Fuller. In Summer on the Lakes (full text from Google, Gutenberg), her 1843 travelogue of the Great Lakes, Fuller only used the word once, but what a use she put it to! Reasoning that the separation of Indians and settlers and their respective cultures weakened both, she argued that amalgamation of the cultures was “the only true and profound means of civilization.” Her point was this: when peoples interact freely, the resulting whole is made better by the strongest features of its constituents. Put another way, things are made better by addition.

Improvement through addition—amalgamation, or in another context, analogy—recurs throughout Summer on the Lakes. When Fuller “dare[s] to trust the interpreting spirit to bring me out all right at last,—establish truth through error,” she is raising it, though obliquely; she invokes it more definitively when she declares that she has gained “the poetic impression of the country at large.” That poetic impression is gained over and again by returning to a scene, such as the view of Niagara Falls or the view of a settler’s cabin, for a second glance: adding yields understanding.

I am naming the blog Amalgamated to set the notion of amalgamation—or second glances, or addition, or analogy—in front of me as a goal for the style and substance of what I write. Certainly there are other ways to think of it, such as as an amalgamation of me on the Web. But in this case, I’m referring to amalgamation as a way of writing and thinking about the world. It’s not a style of writing and or mode of thinking that I’ve been trained for or find myself naturally drawn to, but it’s a style and mode that I recognize as true. I aim to exhibit it.