What if you didn't have a name?

[Catwoman]

Try to imagine yourself without a name. Who would you be?

Remove egoistic associations from past experience, accumulated pieces of transient personality, your contrived sense of 'self'.

I have learnt that the self likes to strengthen itself through conflict. By argument, debate, identity; by pursuit of greater experience/knowledge/attractiveness, even sadness, all to strengthen your idea of who you are, or who you want to be.

This happens collectively too. We don't like peace, because we lose our collective identity. This is particularly relevant to recent events in Russia/Iraq - in fact all of human history - but I thought I would bring it up here to see what happens when we address the question individually.

What if you didn't have a name?

[jdbutler]

"Asshole" would suffice, everyone turns around to that...

[Cyber Wolf]

Are we talking names like personal identifiers (your birth name, nicknames people give you, chat/forum handles...) or titles/affiliations (Democrat, Boss, American...)? How about names that are simply descriptive of something about the person (Sitting Bull, Eric the Red...)? Or any/all?

[jaguar]

If you didn't you'd quickly gain one, many societies assign names at coming on age, when you have an identity to attach one too.

[Catwoman]

By your name I mean a symbol - encompassing everything you think you are.

Say my name is Elkie Smith. What does that mean?

'I am Elkie Smith. I work for an advertising agency and write for a hobby. My friends see me as funny, caring, precocious. My parents think I'm good at everything. I have moments of self-doubt punctuated by embarrassing arrogance. I shock people by interchanging intelligence with incredible dappiness. I have a strong sexual appetite and a passion for knowledge. My parents are divorced and I have experienced violence and sadness in my life. My first love now loves someone else. I am female, young, professional, immature, angry, happy and very, very curious.'

All these things are just fragments of a personality I have created for myself, through my past. Who would I be if all these symbols, experiences, associations were taken away from my interpretation of me? I am not a product of my past. If I removed everything subjective and irrelevant from that sentence I would be left with:

'I am alive.'

Funny, I missed that one out to begin with.

So now explore what 'being alive' means (the key is in this sentence).

[jdbutler]

Originally Posted by Catwoman

Who would I be if all these symbols, experiences, associations were taken away from my interpretation of me? I am not a product of my past. If I removed everything subjective and irrelevant from that sentence I would be left with:

'I am alive.'

So now explore what 'being alive' means (the key is in this sentence).

Interesting concept...I've often wondered what a newborn "thought", or even if it could think. It's like us older folks thinking "Where will "I" go when 'I' die". A similar question might be "Where was 'I' before I was born?'. Boggles the mind. In any event, Popeye had the answer.

[Catwoman]

Part of the key is in removing thought itself.

[jdbutler]

If one removes thought,
what has the thoughtless one wrought?
The void of Haiku?

[jaguar]

This is giving me a headache. What if you didn't have a name is rather different to what if you didn't have a past or what if you didn't think.

[Catwoman]

It's all the same. It's all identity. A name = a label you have given yourself (or that has been given to you) that is the fabrication behind who you are. I'm not saying imagine you don't have a past. I'm saying try to imagine what it would be like if your past did not contribute to who you are today - ie, all your built up knowledge, pain, relationships, travel, experiences. Of course they have happened to you. But they do not make you who you are. So what does?

I can speak to this one. I have "lost" my name in the sense that I have lost almost everything that I once used to define myself: I am a professional, a librarian and a college teacher. I love books and knowledge and I write bad poetry in my spare time. I am married to a writer and we own a three bedroom home in a nice part of a small college town in western Colorado. I make a comfortable middle class income and I save for my retirement and I have health and disability insurance. I am doing well in my career and hope to one day achieve the position of either being in charge of my own library or becoming the collection development officer for the sciences in a major university library. My father loves me and is proud of me, and I have made peace with my mother by moving 300 miles away from her.

That was then. Fast forward to one year ago today. I was homeless, living on the banks of the San Miguel River. My marriage had ended in divorce and my father had passed on. My senile Mother had been manipulated by her second husband into throwing me out on the street. The material things I had accumulated over a life time were all stolen or destroyed or hauled off to the local land fill. Every scrap of writing I had labored so hard on was destroyed. I had run through all my savings and resources long before. I could no longer hold down even the most menial job. The one thing that I had counted on to carry me through any situation - my intelligence - had been impacted by a long, slow but steady exposure to a deadly poison- carbon monoxide. I suffered from short term memory loss that impacted my ability to problem solve and carry out to completion even the simplest of tasks. I experienced odd blank outs of my current experiences. I could no longer trust my own perceptions or my ability to asess people or situations. The result was that I trusted no one else either.

I was a non person living in a tent with only my cat for company. I was 20 miles from the nearest town and didn't have gas money, and besides, my car was illegal to drive since I had no money for insurance or valid plates. There was no one to call me by my name, and that person with that name didn't exist anymore, anyhow.

I think that there on the San Miguel River I was stripped down to my most basic essence. What was left to me were my words because that part of my brain had remained pretty intact, and my spirit. I picked wild flowers and arranged them in empty soup cans and jars and put them all around my camp. I decorated the sides of my tent with sketches printed on cards that somone had given me. I bathed every day in the icey mountain waters of the San Miguel and washed my clothes in the river as well and I would put on clean clothes and make up every day because I had to look good for a very important person - myself.

I figured that the only way I could be beaten was if I stopped fighting, so when I had gas money I drove to Telluride and went to the public library and wrote letters to everyone I could think of - the state and national congress, social security, the various newspapers, and the Colorado Cross Disability Association. In my heart I carried the thought of 6,000 people living in Colorado who were going through the same sort of plight that I was - the needy disabled people of this state who must wait two years or more before getting help from the federal government. Colorado in its vast wisdom and genorosity gives its disabled $170.00 a month plus $140.00 in food stamps - nothing more, and there is NO other help out there. I wrote my letters on the behalf of those 6,000 as well as my own.

Who am I without my name? I am a fighter. I care deeply about what happens to other people, not just myself, and I look for beauty in whatever might be around me - in the wildflowers in a mountain meadow, in the face of a little girl on a city street, and in the sweet, tired eyes of the exhausted mother sitting next to me in a social services office.

Who am I without my name? I am a flawed human being, more than some and less than others, but I still have a deep intrinsic value as a person in my own right, just as we all do.

[jdbutler]

That was a very moving letter. However, I find it hard to believe that it takes two years to get some assistance, however meager. Have you tried the local County Governmental Agencies such as the Department of Human Services for the Colorado Area ( http://www.cdhs.state.co.us/) They are the agency that distributes the grant money and that fund the various county agencies. Hope the link helps.

[Trilby]

If anyone has paid into the Social Security system for any length of time they are entitled to social security disability payments (which are better than what Mari quoted) and it typically takes 2-4 months to have a decision made. The payments, if approved, start from the day of disability so at the end of an admittedly tough 2-4 months you'd get a nice big check.

[jdbutler]

It's not that clear cut, check out the hoops:http://www.disabilitybenefits101.org...htm#Disability

[Cyber Wolf]

I'd figure identity theft could potentially put someone in a situation similar to the one Mari was in. ID theft can financially ruin somebody then when they try to get help, it'd be extremely difficult and time-consuming to prove they really are who they are. And since the only 'reliable' methods of identification are those of government-issued licenses and certificates, if the government doesn't believe or denies you are who you say you are, no one else will believe either, banks, lending companies, social services, your employer... At that point, who are you anymore? You're just a body taking up space, breathing the air and eating the food of the Properly Documented Citizens.