To name, names, to call, to say: I am the bearer of a name. It hardly matters which one, or perhaps it does; perhaps it is essential for me to keep reading, to read about naming someone who is not named. And so, it is a matter of names. Lately, I have been learning to name things with attention and anxiety.
I know how to name certain things: cars, T-shirts, food. To name them because these words are the name of something, because they are named in the very same moment that, in my head, they are named and, in my hand, they are carried out. This is still not the subject.
I am learning to name things I already knew how to name, but without much specificity. Weeds, for example. There are so many weeds, and beyond their generic name, each of them has a name and a surname; and like all things that are named, when they are named, they carry a history.
Weeds are undoubtedly one of the things I am becoming passionate about naming. But not only them: there are also grasses, the little flowers that appear before the others, the trees , difficult to name without leaves , some small bird, insects and larvae. Because everything has a name, and if it does not, then one must be given to it, so that it can be named, and so that its history may have a title. The title is the name.
In this un-naming and re-naming of names, I have realized something: things without a name, things that inhabited the generic, had only certain adjectives in my mind , that thing stings, what an intense yellow, that leaf has a strange shape. But without their name, those things did not have their history. Or they did, but in any case it was not accessible to me. I cannot search for what I do not know how to name.
In this process of naming new things, I very often get the name wrong, or the surname, or both, because they have a different name but they look so much like these ones or those ones. And so, in order to call them by their name, I have to look again and again, even stop them, look once more. Since when do you have hairs on your stem? Were they there yesterday? Oh , so you make flowers?
And sometimes, despite having seen them and revisited them, captured them, passed them explicitly under the magnifying glass, I still do not know their name, or at least not their full name. In that case I have to wait: wait for a change of season, for the appearance of a leaf, a fruit, a flower, a seed, in order to know who they really are.
And in the meantime, I have to keep seeing them without being able to name them, care for them without knowing who they are, what they are doing here, where they came from, who gave them their name. And in the meantime, perhaps name their neighbours, try not to obsess, because they need their own time, and they do not care about mine.