LITTLE WAVES

To be named is to be made vulnerable.  It is the vulnerability that all have and that none choose.

This morning, one of my professors asked everyone in the class to say their name and, as we went around the room, to repeat the name of every person who had gone before us.  We built a list and regurgitated it over and over, and it grew each time.

It was a bit dehumanizing.  I feel more connected to my name than I would usually imagine – more than I really knew.  I was dragged around the room, through the lips of strangers, and I was only one of many.  Just a name, just a face, just the next piece of a long recitation.  We were piled on one another, and we were still strangers, but strangers who knew each other.  Sort of.

It’s not hard, if you pay attention, to learn the names of people whom you see every day in class, even if you never speak to them.  But you’ll know, as everyone knows intuitively, that knowing the name does not mean you know the person.  If you encounter them elsewhere you cannot address them familiarly.  You’ll ask them, and you’ll know the answer, but you’ll do it anyway.  A name is too personal to throw around without permission.  “What is your name?” is not always the question it seems to be.  “May I call you as you are called?  May I indulge in that intimacy?”

No other part of you can so easily be stripped away while being so closely bound to you.  You are not your name, just as you are not your face, but you’re used to it.  You know it means you.  It feels permanent in a very impermanent way.

I almost wanted to take my name back.  That’s me, I wanted to tell them.  I’m the one you squeezed in between Will and Casey.  And they’re people, and their names mean something, too.  It is strangely personal to call someone by their name, yet we do it so often without thinking.

The following is from a writer named Mary Ruefle:

When I was a child my father often took me with him to visit various military installations, and to enter each one we had first to pass through a little gate where a guard waved at us and we were expected to wave back.  It was of course really a salute, but really it looks something like a little wave, it is a little wave, and I was struck, as a child, by the fact two strangers – my father and the guard, who most certainly did not know each other – were expressing such open and friendly affection for each other.

We do this every day.  We exchange these little waves.  Every time a person calls me by name, they’re indulging in something amazingly personal.  Teachers are frequently called by their surnames, because a relationship with a teacher is not intended to be an intimate one.  Once you’ve spoken the name of another person, you have passed a boundary into who they are.