The Common War: Names, Language, and Transcendental Junk
What’s in a name? Well, I’ll tell you — a ton of shit. Too few of us consider language, consider the meanings of words, consider the weights, the textures, the baggage that words carry. A name is a word, and it is the word that refers to you as a being. This considered, isn’t it strange that someone gave you your name? And isn’t it even more bizarre that they gave you your name before you were even someone? Chances are, that as you were gestating, no larger than a pistachio, the two folks that created your consciousness were already trying to think of what to call you. They hadn’t even met you! Millenials, your parents probably spent hours on babynames.com shopping for your signifier. Maybe they considered the meaning of your name: I want a name that means strong princess. Maybe that’s how they decided. Or maybe they named you after some other being. I’m sorry if that’s the case. I’m sorry your parents decided that the word which would forever represent you would be a reference to another being.
I was named Meghann by my grandmother, an old, southern racist — a woman with whom I no longer speak. The name is a derivative of the name ‘Margaret,’ — a name which is thought to have been derived from the Sanskrit word ‘मञ्जरी’ (mañjarī), which roughly translates into both,“cluster of blossoms,” and “pearl.” But my grandma didn’t know that. She had Saint Margaret in mind when she named me. Saint Margaret was the daughter of a mystic who found christianity, offered her virginity to god, and then turned down a marriage proposal from a nobleman because he wanted her to renounce her faith. When she refused, she was tortured, and then, in some insane turn of events, she was swallowed by satan in the form of a dragon, but she made it out undigested when the cross she wore irritated the satan-dragon’s belly. I shit you not. This is the legend. I guess she imagined great things, or at least, very weird things for me.
But, I don’t use that name, and that I don’t makes people uneasy. They ask questions which don’t merely come from a place of curiosity. The questions, often times, betray a desire for me to defend my decision. When this isn’t the case, I often hear, “but Meghann is a pretty name,” which suggests they imagine my choice being an aesthetic one. My mom has taken it the hardest, and forgets to call me by my chosen name every single time she refers to me. She feels as though I’ve stripped her of her natural right to name her child. Well, I concede that I have taken something from her (though certainly not a right) — something real, something that goes unquestioned, and often unnoticed — and I suffer no guilt. Quite contrarily, I feel empowered. I’ve chosen to free myself from an identity of another being’s design, and from the remnants of a lineage which I’d severed long ago. You may be thinking that it’s absurd of me to suggest that by naming me, someone assigned me an identity. In some ways, that very well may be the case. It may be absurd. But it’s worth exploring the ways in which it is a justifiable sentiment. So, lets think about names, identity, and language for a few minutes.
Part 1: That Which We Call a Rose
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
In philosophy, there’s this looming Wittgensteinian suspicion that the entire field is really just the study of language. Some philosophers have suggested that the philosophical problems which we hem and haw over are merely disagreements about the meanings of words. In some important ways, I agree, but I say this not to insult philosophy, for I think that it’s vital. Really. I say this to illustrate the importance of words and the problems of identity. Signifiers (words) and identity are two things that often become entangled, and in the case of a name, they are nearly inseparable. Perhaps they are truly, even metaphysically, inseparable. Let’s explore.
In the above passage, Juliette contemplates the weight of a word which happens to be a personal identifier — a name — which is, at the same time, something of unimaginable consequence, and just another meaningless symbol. She understands that Romeo’s Montague-ness lies not in his corporeal being, and considers that if he were signified by a different symbol — a different name — he would still be the super sexy dude she thinks he is. But — and this is a big but — he is, in some metaphysical way, a Montague, and this fact is real. It is a part of his identity. She knows that even if he does doff his name, there will still be problems, and that’s why they plan to run off together, to a place where no one knows the significance of the words ‘Montague’ and ‘Capulet.’ You see, words are encultured, as they are products of culture. Therefore, they have special contexts relevant to the cultures wherefrom they arise. Shakespear’s Veronians understand the particularities of ‘Montague’ and ‘Capulet.’ But perhaps in Verona, those words are just names of mere people who merely exist.
But names, while words, while symbols, aren’t merely anything.
I often find myself thinking and writing about words, about how they are symbols. I’ve said, “A tree isn’t a ‘tree.’ It is merely that thing which we call a ‘tree,’” more times than I can remember. I’ve self-plagiarized (though this concept makes no fucking sense to me) this again and again and again. Words are signifiers. Words are mere symbols. But names, while words, while symbols, aren’t merely anything. Names are entirely encultured words, and because of this, they are weighty, sticky, super-words. Names are indicators of alignment and references to history, sometimes many different histories.
Take, for example… the name ‘Hitler.’ Look, no one wants to be So-and-so Hitler, and this is because Adolf Hitler genocided a fucking ton of people, and now, the essence of those actions — his identity — are permanently affixed to his signifier. My name could be Prettypea Hitler — no relation — and I could be a pediatric oncologist saving the lives of sweet little babies every day of the week. But when I introduce myself to you as doctor Hitler, you will think of genocide. This is a problem — identity and signifier all tangled up in a big ball of language.
Part 2: Names as Temporal Katamaris of Abstract Meaning
Names are sticky words. We can think of them as katamaris of abstract meaning: they roll along, from generation to generation, accumulating ancestral connotations, mythologies, new definitions, and all kinds of other transcendental junk. A name like ‘Hitler’ is a katamari so large that it could definitely start accumulating planets. But this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if, instead of considering names for beings, we were considering names for non-beings, for which identity is a non-issue.
Non-beings don’t have identities, at the very least, not in the same way beings do. A chair doesn’t have an identity aside from its physical properties. It has no personal history, no desires, no fears, and what these things share is temporality. History, of course, is a product of the passage of time. Implicit to desire is time, insofar as to experience desire is to experience a lack of something at a moment in time which may or may not be resolved at a future point in time. Fear is temporal insofar as it is an imagining of an undesirable future. All other facets of identity have temporal components, and therefore, identity can only be a property of beings which experience existence temporally.
Tl;dr: a chair doesn’t experience time, and therefore, it can have no identity. So let’s think about chairs, identity, and names.
Let’s consider an alternate timeline identical to ours, but with one exception: that from the very start of modern English (I know, I know, but I’m not going there. This thing is long enough.), the word for what we call a ‘chair’ was actually the word ‘hitler.’ In both timelines, Adolf Hitler happened, but in the alternate timeline, the word ‘hitler’ would already have been a ubiquitous indicator long before Hitler-the-man came around. In this alternate timeline, we wouldn’t react to Dr. Prettypea Hitler with the same degree of disturbedness, for ‘hitler’ would have been the name of a ubiquitous object for so much longer than it had been the name of a being.
In this alternate timeline, the ‘hitler’ katamari will have grown to an enormous size by accumulating connotations of shape, of physical materials, of function, form, and usefulness. So by the time Hitler-the-man would come along, the word’s katamari would already be huge. When it accumulates “Hitler” — the name of a being and all it’s baggage— that artifact, while quite large itself, would pale in comparison to the size of the already existent katamari.
Part 3: Being Divided By Time
I hear people complain about Heidegger all the fucking time, and not just normal people who don’t want to read 500 pages of blabbering, but philosophers: abnormal people who professionally read blabber, and blabber themselves. The most common complaint by far? That he’s incomprehensible because he “makes up his own words.” Dear philosophers who say this, you need to check yourselves! You, of all people, should understand why he did this. He created words to free himself from the transcendental baggage of existent, culturally-saturated words. I mention this because it is one of the most important reasons that I chose to name myself — to free myself from the transcendental baggage of my existent name, and… of my former selves.
Let me explain. The act of being is something profoundly strange. Perhaps the strangest aspect of being is that we are not static, singular selves. We change over time. I take an unusually radical stance and believe that we are momentary selves, but let’s not go there right now because that’ll lead us down a dark and irritating path, a path which, frankly, I’m not sure I can defend. What we probably can agree on is that while that little girl at a table for one shares a common history and signifier with me, we are not exactly the same person.
Now I’m going to go a step further and say what I really mean: my childhood self and I are not the same person. Your childhood self and you are not the same person. Look, forget about philosophy for a second and let’s just focus on who we are as physical entities. Our cells are dying and being replaced at an alarming rate. In fact, our entire bodies are completely regenerated several times during the courses of our lives — of course, not all at once, but gradually. My current body shares exactly ZERO cells with the body I had when I was three. Yeah, it’s the whole “Ship of Theseus” thing, and I very much believe that once all that ship’s wood has been replaced, it’s not the same ship.
But we’re not ships. Things aren’t that simple for us, of course, because unlike non-beings, we have identities. We experience the continuity of our consciousness over time. This is to say, simply, that we remember our pasts. Some philosophers say that this is why we are who we are from birth until death despite the whole cellular replacement thing. But there’s a problem: I don’t remember anything from when I was an infant, from when I was a baby, from when I was a toddler. I don’t remember my mom taking that photo of me. I have no fucking idea why I’m sitting at a table with a sippy cup and a lit candle. So what does this mean? Well, if I don’t share a physical body with my 3 year-old self, and I have no continuity of consciousness — no memories — I think it reasonable to say that her and I are not the same person. And if this is the case, why do we have the same signifier?
Your birth-name is an existent word. It carries baggage that predates you, and it adheres you to your former selves. It identifies you with your own history. It says, in a whisper, “you’ve experienced continuity of consciousness. You are a being who experiences time. You have an identity.” This is all fine and good, but as ‘Montague’ bound Romeo to an ages-old feud that, frankly, he wanted no part of, our names bind us to the people we were, to the people we no longer are, and to the people we may wish not to have ever been.
Part 4: Names
This fucking name, ‘Meghann’, I hated it from the start. I was doofy as a child, and ‘Meghann’ is a long and somewhat serious name. Worse yet, it is so ordinary, and so very female. I never felt like it described me partially because I never really felt like a girl. For a lot of my life, I didn’t identify with the gender I was expected to present. Now, I present more comfortably and enjoyedly as a girl, as a woman, but this isn’t always the case. I consider myself gender-fluid, preferring the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them.’ Oh the expectations names carry and then impart, no, force upon us. The name ‘Meghann’ preceded me. It said to strangers — teachers, doctors, etc. — that I was a woman, and that katamari — the katamari of womanhood — is far too large and far to hot for me to touch in this piece. Sufficed to say, this made me quite uncomfortable.
But my life went on. I dealt with the genderedness of being ‘Meghann,’ and despite the discomfort, my life unfolded as it did. But with every successive year, I changed. Imagine that you have a clump of silly putty, and you begin pulling the two ends of the clump apart. The two pieces remain connected, but as you pull them further and further apart, the connective piece of putty grows thinner and thinner in relation to how long it becomes — until it breaks. This is what existing with an identity can be like. The distances between whatever current identity I had at a given time, and my past selves, grew wide. And what connected them — my values, beliefs, affiliations, relationships — grew thin. Eventually, I felt as though the person I had become was an entirely separate entity from who I used to be. It was, at this point, that I decided to change my name. And I did.
Part 5: A Conclusion
My name, ‘Louelle,’ is a derivative of the name ‘Louis’ by way of the name ‘Louella.’ It means “a well-known strife.” It is sometimes said to mean “the common war.” My last name, Denor, means, “of nothing.” It is a rejection of one’s lineage, and of one’s human exceptionalism. Take from that what you will.
