[April 2023]

amalgamation

/əˌmalɡəˈmāSHən/

noun

1. the action, process, or result of combining or uniting.

Maybe, like me, whenever you see an unusual word you ask: why this one? Or perhaps that’s just poetry, which thrums through my mind always plastering the walls with rhyme and meter, endlessly sussing roots and rhythms.

I am not sure when I first read the word amalgamation, though I know it was over twenty years ago. Every time I’ve seen it since then, I’ve felt a thrill of recognition, like glancing the face of a crush across a crowded space. But I didn’t place it in a poem. Didn’t brandish it in my writing. When I said yes to this website, yes to bringing my writing back out into the world after a long stretch turned inward, it’s the first word that came to me. With you as my witness, I’ve finally approached the crush I’ve watched across the room for decades, am striking up a conversation.

Originally this word referred to combined metals. More recently, it has been used in dentistry; you might have an amalgam in your mouth, covering parts of your teeth. But roll the whole word amalgamation around on your tongue a few times and you’ll find it is stranger and larger, goes farther than that:

What does it mean to combine? What does it mean to unite?

What draws me to this word is how it captures the necessity of not just tolerating but embracing both fragmentation and wholeness. The act of combining and the act of uniting: each imply separation. The world is fragmented. And somehow we are whole. For me, this word holds the both/and. This word is about picking up the pieces of it all, forging links. This word is about “forming close unions without the complete loss of individual identities” (thank you, Merriam-Webster).

For years, I’ve been working, re-working, a novel draft. Inevitably as I do so, I work and re-work versions of myself. Who are my characters? Who am I, in relationship with them? Who are you, in relationship with my characters? Who are you, in relationship with me? It all comes back to connections, to relationship. Story is about tracking what one thing is to another, weaving these vast webs of correlations — and being woven by them. To amalgamate is to accept the journey of transformation, to be willing to become.