Tuesday, September 22, 2009

What's In A Name?

Two Fridays ago, at around 11 AM, I staggered downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. It was a decidedly dreary day; the sky looked like my father's homemade lentil soup and streams of rain sadly hung from the window like ribbons on bouquets of funeral flowers. I plopped down onto our amorphous blob of a couch, and stared at the silent noise box.

Click.

While mindlessly perusing what the channels had to offer me in the way of educational, pertinent content (will Michael Jackson ever be buried? will our economy self-destruct? will this man EVER learn how to dress himself?), I came across something that gelled with the atmosphere outside of the box: the 8th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

As if I had just bumped into a forgotten relative, my knee-jerk reaction was to leave the scene. How could I have forgotten this person? However, out of obligation and a bit of guilt, I sat completely still and watched the entirety of the ceremony. I'd never seen anything that simultaneously resembled a funeral and a graduation, and I was intrigued. But as they read the names of the people who died, I kept wishing that they would stop. That the names would run out, but they kept coming, and soon my face was drizzling. It wasn't out of love for this country, or familiarity with anyone who perished. It was the names.

And the pictures with the names.
And the people holding signs with the names.

And I thought, these people are only names now. They started and ended with a name, and that's the only official artifact of their existence. That, and a couple of numbers. Naturally, the people who knew these names would beg to differ, but those people are only names.

I thought, what is a name worth?

I started to think about my Uncle Charles, who spent his whole life defending and fortifying the value of his name. I thought about my great-grandmother, who transformed a perfectly good name into an obscenity. And I thought about my name. What dishonors and glories have I brought to my name at this juncture in my life? What meaning does my name hold for others? What will the other names will say about my name when I leave it behind, and how long I will I have my name?

I thought about The Crucible. At the climax of the movie/play, John Proctor is coaxed by Reverend Hale to give his name to the church, to confess to a sin that he never committed in order to evade execution. As Proctor begins to scrawl the letters that comprise his name, he suddenly realizes the value of these two words. He stops. When asked why he refuses to sign the confession, Proctor exclaims:

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"

It's not just letters he's giving away; it's his reputation, his self-worth, his dignity.

When something incredibly terrible happens that threatens the danger of a name, something so atrocious that the only option is to escape that life in the hope of living another, what does that name do? Change. In fact, there is a whole agency devoted to this renaming process: the Witness Protection Program. Our names are not only used to identify us, they are our identity.

What do we do when we first meet an unfamiliar peer in a social setting? We provide them with our name, not only as a label by which they can refer to us, but as the first step in what may become a future rapport. What do we do when someone undesirable asks for our name? We provide them with a false name, because what does it matter? We have no intention of establishing a bond with this other name.

That day, I came to this realization: names are everything.
Whether or not we choose to take stock in our own names is up to us entirely.
Our names can be besmirched, but if we know that these claims counter what we know about our names, no amount of fabricated evidence can prove us wrong.
Our lives can be stolen, but no one can ever take our names away.

Just ask the people holding the signs, year after year, name after name...