New Story (9/25)

I did the thing again where I tried to take the names out of past posts, forgetting that I’d most recently decided to keep the names in. For this reason, I’m considering adding a bit more of a formality to my posts; if I don’t, I’m too tempted to revise the previous ones. Stubborn revision is not what I’m trying to do here—what I want is the daily attempts,  not the polished stone, which is what I lean into making if I don’t set things up otherwise. This isn’t my worry stone, this is my river. The balance between formality and blockage is delicate. I chose this casual mode of blog, easy, on the google doc, almost as if it is just me here—because I knew that if I started something less casual, it would be hard for me to scratch the surface of it, especially if I took a while to write between posts, dust building up. I thought writing more posts here would give me the confidence to make the blog more formal, adding aspects of publication that are, if not irreversible, at least ritualistic—and I think I was right, I have more confidence now—but I’m still here. Perhaps soon I'll move this blog somewhere else.

I just read the chapter “Between Naming and the Unknown”  in Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, so I was already thinking about names and naming. This chapter thrills me—its subject matter is of particular interest, and I love the question “How can honoring our ‘both-ness’ change courtship into a terrain that is more egalitarian, playful, and reciprocal than the patriarchal modes of romance that seem to invite sexual violence and domination?” I too care about creating systems, including courtship systems, that allow for openness of expression, gender or otherwise. That’s why at points, this chapter upsets me: Strand blames the act of naming for shutting down or creating blockages to spaces that allow for openness of expression, and in doing so, she risks discouraging expression by timid (or stubborn) souls that might require the act of naming in order to make any mark at all. 

She implicitly compares the act of changing one’s name and pronouns to Adam’s naming in Genesis, implying that in naming themselves, (trans) people are attempting to “‘own’ [themselves] with the magic of a self-generated nominal.” Strand uses the we pronoun here—in her version, instead of themselves, she uses ourselves—but it feels false without a personal anecdote, and the use of this example brings up questions about the soundness of the argument overall. 

Naming oneself may be “escap[ing] the imposed names and strictures of our parents, our institutions, our cultural oppressions” indeed without being an attempt to “own” oneself. 

Strand begins her essay with a gloss of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, describing the protagonist’s ambiguous gender: “By the end of the performance, we observe a being who practically scintillates with complex sexuality, but who, importantly, cannot and will not be named.” Going without a name is idealized here, perhaps even fetishized. But is being without a name actually desirable? The violence of being named doesn’t exist in a vacuum but has more to do with what happens after the naming. What would it take for Viola to continue being witnessed as a full, mutable, perhaps nonbinary messenger, after her name has been revealed? 

To me, suspending the act of naming isn’t as powerful as doing the work of continuing to see complexities after the naming has occurred. Names are useful, can be fun, can hold hidden meanings or be totally without them. In this world that I have come to know through names, I wouldn’t dare deny myself one, nor would I continue to answer to a name that displeases me. 

 “Am I a man? Am I a woman? Both? Let us wait before we answer. Answers tend to end stories. What if, like Viola, we lived the question?”

The problem here is that Strand slips from names to answers in a way that would trick us into believing that they are synonyms. But answers and names are not the same. Names don’t tend to end stories. Don’t names usually begin stories? In fact, how would we begin a story without a name? The other problem is that I disagree even with the idea that answers tend to end stories. Answers are not inherently violent—if anything, it is the withdrawal from dialogue that sometimes occurs after an answer is given, the abandonment of the conversation, that is violent, neglectful. But that abandonment does not occur within the answer. It occurs after the answer. And usually, if you pay attention, the withdrawal or abandonment is not actually the end of the story.