It occurs to me that the metaphor of “network” may be holding me (us?) back. I like to think about social networks, network effects, high-speed networks, and so forth. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But the metaphor conveys a set of telegraphic connections, criss-crossing lines with nodes at the connection points, add-a-beads, point-to-point contacts and correspondences.

When I think about resonance, something else happens in my brain.

I think about resonance effects, about social resonance environments, about sympathetic vibrations and overtones and timbres and chords. I think about symbolism, and suggestion, about most resembling unlikenesses and most unlike resemblances (the way Milton described the relation of husband and wife in a successful–and happy–marriage). I think about complexity calling to complexity, about models that simultaneously simplify and amplify the power of the original as the models make the original more present, more resonant, to our minds.

Clearly some of my enthusiasm here comes from my love of music. I don’t think that’s the whole story, though. Something about the idea of cognitive resonance (where is that book? I wish for instant ILL–or for cheaper books–or both!) helps to place the affective dimension of cognition in a resonant place in my own mind. I’m still thinking about combination and connection, sure, but now the links are not simply established or embedded or realized. They’re tuned, and moving, and exciting sympathetic motion in other links and in the crafters and perceivers and tuners of those links. Rather than elaborate telegraphy, I imagine something more like strings on an instrument, a world-instrument, that we create, tune, and play together. Intertwingling, but more.

I feel I am restating the obvious, at least for artists, for whom resonance is (often almost) all.  Or perhaps there’s no handle here. I’ll need to read and think more, and be advised more, to know.