Lips nibbling the sounds
Your beautiful mouth
Gently tonguing the sounds
Of one single syllable
As you breathe the sounds
Of my name
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The softness of your voice Lips nibbling the sounds Your beautiful mouth Gently tonguing the sounds Of one single syllable As you breathe the sounds Of my name |
| date | 2000-12-18:19:35 |
| Poem |
Putting part of a person in your mouth is a pretty intimate act, and a name is one of the most deeply personal parts of a person. Names have the power to touch us deeply--they are used and abused with great ease, and they deserve more attention and care than they often get. Most kids get teased a lot about their names at one time or another, and those of us who got teased about everything more got teased about our names more. This can cause us to disown our names, to walk around uncertain of how to label ourselves. This seems like a minor thing, yet naming, as I argue elsewhere on this page, is an act if identification, and to not have a name is to not have an idenitity in an important sense, in the same way not having a word for a concept demotes the concept to secondary importance. Demoting yourself to secondary importance is not good. Caro loves my name. It is remarkably easy to repossess my name from the demons of the past in the light of that knowledge. |
| Names |
I've written before about the power of names. I'm going to write more here. ============== The post-modernists sometimes refer to a mythical time when people thought that words themselves had power, but we now in our sophistocation recognize that "the signifier is not the significand." Post-modernism is a strange mix of insight and nonsense, and this is part of the nonsense. Words--especially names--have power. A rose by any other name might not smell as sweet. Would a hookthorn smell as sweetly as a rose? ============== "I am the utterance of my name" So says the female deity in Thunder, Perfect Mind. John Searle takes the view that the purpose of an illocutionary act (roughly, the smallest unit of meaning in verbal communication) is to induce in the hearer a state of mind that is such that the hearer understands the motivation that caused the utterer to make the utterance. When I say, "It's raining out" I want you to realize that that is the sort of thing you would only say if it was raining out. When I utter a name, you think of a person. Who you think of, and how you think of him or her will depend very much on the name I utter and your beliefs about that person, which come from both personal report and reputation. Perhaps the name itself is capable of putting you into a state of fear or joy, depending on how you would respond to that person's actual presence. Names invoke the people they identify, and have the social role of bringing that person into the conversational universe, somehow. Making them part of the context. ================ Examples. 1) Think of the terrible scenes in "B" movies, the "win one for the Gipper" sort of things. Invoking a person's name is invoking a person's whole being. "Harry and England!" 2) "Who is John Galt?" A whole novel with a "character" who is, ultimately, nothing but the utterance of his name. 3) "I am Edmond Dantes." There is a whole genre of novels of identity, where the revelation of the multiple or true identity of one or more characters drives the dramatic tension of the piece. ==================== Caro and I have argued at length that identity depends on the identifier and the purposes of the identifier. Names are how we identify unique individuals--not as members of a class, but as individuals. To have a name--"I am become a name" writes Tennyson in Ulysses--is to have an identity. To lose your name, to disown your name, to have your name abused and trampled upon, is to lose or damage your identity. ==================== Names play the same role for individuals as concepts do for classes. But the taxonomy of names is more subtle and driven by odd verbal associations. Names like "Mouch" and "Toohey" as opposed to "Roark" and "Galt." People change their names in life sometimes for no other reason than this, and a very good reason it is, too. ==================== I am not done with names. ==================== |