Naming and the Namesake

At some point, my mind put this sequence together:

I imagine the narrative line is clear enough: I’ve lost some dear friends in the last few years, and in some cases, those friends have had their lives commemorated by having some fortunate young person named after them.

I’ve had the same best friends since I was 8 (literally). As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see how rare that is.

It makes going home kind of weird. I grew up in a small town, and I left when I was 18. Most of my friends from childhood are still there—really, most of the people I know from childhood in general are still there. My mom still lives in the same house I grew up in. The town has been slightly gentrified, but it hasn’t changed much overall.

This makes going home comforting but also strange. Things feel like they’ve been stuck in a time capsule. I’m never sure how to fit the adult version of myself into that space—or if I even want to.

I have a conflicted relationship with my background. It’s nice to have such old friends, but they also remind me of an oppressive and stifling time in my life.

It’s devastating when a part of that early childhood milieu passes. It reflects the destruction of an intensely local world that will be gone forever.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood lately and how to relate to it. I’ve also been thinking about naming, and how powerful the act of naming can be.

The act of giving something a name is an intervention in the world. It’s a creative act that shapes things.

A name isn’t merely a matter of convention or fashion; it conditions perception. Of course, I don’t mean that it literally changes the objective world, but it changes our experience of the world on a fundamental level. Something’s categorization is part of what gives it the effect it has on us—kind of like the studies where researchers put cheap wine in expensive bottles, which led people to rate the wine’s taste higher.

Maybe a rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet.

And, of course, naming shapes the social world of which we are all a part. It contributes a new symbol to our universe of shared references in a way that preserves and communicates meaning and lived experience. We don’t live in worlds of bland physicality; we live in networks of meaning. Naming helps shape those networks in a way that goes beyond the act itself.

In the example above, it will condition the social world of my hometown milieu. The lived atmosphere of the place is now different and will retain a resonance it wouldn’t have before.

I don’t think I’d fully appreciated the depth of that realization before my subconscious put together this photo series.