Should a rabbit have a name?
a palindrome & commentary
Emanate: get a name.
I resist the idea of naming the rabbits who share, after all, this suburban plot of land. I only see them occasionally--right before dawn, just at sunset--& it’s Occam’s Razor more than recognition that makes me identify the one i see this morning with the one i saw last night.
Conferring a name is a big deal. It’s a berth in a tribe. Solitary hunters don’t need a name. But we, who hunt together & alone, name our prey in general, as we name the hunt & the parts of its outcome. If a dog follows us we teach it the words to get it to do what we want, & one of those is its name.
When i was younger, i resisted the name i was given, though i answered to it. Like cats, as one perceptive poet pointed out, i had a Secret Name. If there is a tribe of humans who have named themselves, i perhaps might enter that tribe. Perhaps. But i still would not endorse all their purposes accordingly.
It hasn’t been enough, for a long time, to simply belong to a tribe; or rather, the business of being-in-a-tribe (some call this “humankind”) has ramified beyond all reckoning. It’s named the parts of its naming, & numbered them. I have one of those numbers. I repeated it so often, at one time in my life, that i memorized it.
Some namers put tags on the lights in the sky, others to every separable part of the things around us, & when that wasn’t enough, they started chipping away with more & more powerful tools. I very much like the idea that there is a schema of metaphorical basic monads whose predictable interaction represents a fundamental certain knowledge of the substrate--but i know it isn’t so. That result you get when you blast atoms in a cyclotron is not a named quark (of any color), no more than the name i give to one of my fellow rabbits will cause it to heed.
Rabbits have their own way of telling, i suppose body language & pheromones, & a vocable to them is no more intentional than a fart. Down at their own level, of course, there’s no watching quarks. We can but suggest that they have a language of their own, & call it “the strong force”, & that to me is a fancy enough question-mark i can put it on a sandwich board & feel a semblance of ownership.
Like i own this plot of land which i don’t.