In his essay, Hidden Name, Complex Fate, Ralph Ellison recounted his process of discovery as a child in a Negro neighborhood with the name of Ralph Waldo. Those in the ‘hood who possessed the spark of recognition at the string of names, Ralph + Waldo, and then measured those names against the small, brown boy standing in front of them, probably enjoyed a half-day of bemused laughter. This little kid in the neighborhood juxtaposed against that pointy-nosed New Englander who wrote about transcendentalism?!?! It must have seemed like a comic set-up. Ralph was not so strange a name in Ellison’s childhood in the context of that time, in that place, among his people. But, then there’s that hidden name, Waldo. Sometimes it just pops out. Out of place.
Emerson seemed to have held that name so close that he named more than one of his own children the same. Waldo, a name I only know because of that dreadful little character with a red and white striped shirt and yellow glasses. He stands out so much in a crowd, you think, as you are challenged to find him in a picture. He’s a ridiculously-dressed man with a ridiculously strange name and there’s no way it’s taking me this damned long to find that little bugger in this picture. After you do find him on the page, you are sure you don’t want to find Waldo in real life, on the street, walking down, I don’t know, Van Ness Street in San Francisco when all you want to do is get from the Mission to the Marina. Because if you saw him in “real life” then you would have to deal with him, this guy whose outward appearance mirrors so perfectly the strangeness contained in his name. That really almost never happens, does it? One thing Ellison knew: his Waldo did not match Emerson’s, if outward appearances were all that matters.
If it did, then that Dada thing Fabian does will come true. He posts two pictures of two famous people who seem totally incongruous if we just look at their names and their biographies. But place them side-by-side, these two random people will, for no apparent reason, look entirely similar in their faces and bodies. And the question always follows, as it should, what-is-the-meaning-of-this? Nothing! Or maybe something?
Another friend will do something else to punk our knowledge of names and faces. He makes a commemorative post for some celebrity who has just died. For example, Lou Reed. He will write something solemn, reverent, like “Remembering the songwriter rebel and poet of Warhol’s Factory, Lou Reed” and then attach a photo of Lou Rawls from the 70s, with a ‘fro, grinning ear to ear. You are outraged at first: “Oh man, it’s too soon to make jokes, too soon…” and then you learn to love the gag. What’s in a name? What if you have a similar name to mine, are we then similar? And what about a similar face? And why are we so damned perfectionist when it comes to the thumbnails we attach to our posts?
In Hidden Name, Ellison laments that his father, who died when he was three, was never around long enough to explain to him why he named him Ralph Waldo. After Ellison became the outstanding writer that he was, he suspected there was more than just an irony in his namesake. Perhaps his father knew the magic and intention he conjured up when he gave this child a name like Ralph Waldo. With names, you can make things happen. This is something African-Americans know how to do very, very well.
One of my stubborn American qualities is that I like the freedom of naming shit. Name this new shitty, dusty town in the middle of Texas, “Paris.” I still laugh when I drive through it. It resonates in two directions: Texas looks a lot better all of a sudden when I text someone to tell her I am in Paris. Paris looks a whole lot less romantic with strip malls and monster trucks. I am sure there is someone in Paris who has already dreamed longingly of a monster truck ripping across six lanes traffic in a roundabout during rush hour. That image of Paris is much more passend to the masculine, Greek mythological origins of the name than the little Dorf on the Seine. By the way, there is also someone in a coffeehouse in Paris, Texas, who has ordered a café au lait and taken it outside to sit with and sip on even though the temperature outside is a million degrees hot and no one would be outside walking to even stare at. But this name synchronicity, Paris, was all that it took to catch Wim Wenders’ eye.
What if this American desire to assign names with total disregard for proportion or consequence is not just bad taste and colonial privilege but also some characteristic of our self-reliance and (perhaps misguided) commandment to “trust thyself”? Emerson, that prophet of the American natural religion, whispers into our ears to avoid conformity and take the risk to just break with the system and name it what we want. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” he said. Often we Americans take it too far. Blue Ivy. Sometimes, though, not far enough. And then sometimes we create the most wonderful recombinations of ideas through names, like Ralph Waldo Ellison and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Warum darf man in Amerika das Kind nennen, was man will?” Fenja asked me a few months ago. That was after she heard my hidden, second middle name, Aronsen. Was it a family name? No, not really, but sort of. I should ask my dad what he was thinking. I think Fenja found it annoying.