Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
By Lawrence Weschler
A reductive description might peg this book as a collection of “essays and interviews” — but it’s much more than that. It is, after all, a book of convergences, and doesn’t that word positively thrum with exciting connotations?
Everything that Rises is a book of “unlikely alignments and beguiling resonances…[a] lavishly illustrated phantasmagoria” tracing connections and contrasts across time, space, topics, objects and entities large and small, conventional and curious.
In the introduction, Weschler cites the influence of John Berger on his own attunement to “uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhythms”, and describes how he began a collection of such things, which eventually resulted in this book. It’s refreshing to hear of the organic evolution of such a project; reassuring that gradual, longitudinal, accidental accumulation is a valid creative process!
Across sections like “Exemplary Instances” and “Political Occasions”, we encounter a range of interesting topics: Ground Zero, Pollock and galaxies, time / relativity, “The Graphics of Solidarity”, genocide, twins, trees and eyeballs, the Internet, and more. The voice seems speculative, observant, allusive; penetrating yet imprecise.
This book seems to be an excuse for an agile mind to play, to amplify resonances idly observed, and use them to get at something deeper, perhaps obliquely, about how all manner of interesting things can be observed and connected.