By Any Other Name

According to Family Education magazine, the top ten boy’s first names in 2012 were, in order, Jacob, Mason, William, Jayden, Noah, Michael, Ethan, Alexander, Aiden, and Daniel.  My first name, either as the formal “Jerome” or informal “Jerry,” appears nowhere in even the top 100 names, though the somewhat similar Jeremiah ranks 51^st.   How, I wonder, does it happen that Jerome, the name of the saint who translated the Bible into the Latin still used today as the official language of the Catholic Church, the saint whose name means “bearer of the holy word,” cannot crack the top 100, while Jeremiah, the name of the scolding Old Testament prophet, stands at 51.  The fate of the study-bound scholar, I suppose—that, and the undeniable public relations value of a charismatically condemnatory prophet calling the people to renounce their backsliding ways, repent their sins, and renew their spiritual commitment. 

Those denunciatory prophets!  They get all the attention, all the glory.  Cable TV miniseries are made about them, while the Jeromes languish in a twilit pocket of history.  Perhaps, could I gather and convince enough modern-day Jeromes to leaven their conversations with upbraid, to periodically reproach with declarations that  "Cursed are those who trust in mortals, who depend on flesh for their strength and whose hearts turn away from the Lord," the name Jerome would debut  the name chart and ascend with a bullet.

Actually, at an early period in my life, I did not like my name.  My dad had the same name.  I was a junior. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood I was referred to as “Jerry Junior.”   I resented the necessary inquiry if someone phoned asking for Jerry, “Jerry Senior or Jerry Junior?” though I took some small comfort in the question’s trochaic meter. Of course, I know now that, in my dad’s generation, naming a son after the father was unremarkable.  I know now that, at some level, those junioring seniors engage in a kind of magical thinking, seeking to extend themselves into a future they will not witness.  I know now that, in bestowing his name upon me, dad was ceremonially announcing to the world his pride in his dadship and my sonship, a kind of “This is my son, in whom I expect to be well pleased.”  I know now it was his way of throwing the grappling hook of tradition across the generations to draw them closer.

But I did not know that then.

Then, I felt somehow obscured, cloaked, as if my individuality had been commandeered and hidden behind a veil.  I wanted to stand forth uncurtained, unobscured, in the morning-crisped landscape of my own inexorable self.  I felt etcetera-ed. I did not want to be a remastered version of the original; I wanted to be my own melody. I did not want to a chipped shard from the old block; I wanted to be my own blazoned block.  I wanted to be the apple that rolled far from the tree; I wanted to be my own tree.  I wanted staccato, not legato.  I felt like a diminished thing, a permanent minor, exiled from the possibility of adulthood.  I longed for a rhetoric of discontinuity.

And then one day I didn’t.

One day I realized the name of someone is not the thingness of someone; realized that considering myself a replica was a fatalism of sorts, a shackling essentialism; realized that I could choose my own posture of being, my own orientation to the world, that all along Dad had actually been seeking to cultivate that posture, that orientation.  Suddenly, it seemed, I understood that even if we are immersed in a tradition, even if it leaves its imprint, we are not manacled by it, that it can be, must be, adapted, recontextualized, extended—a starting point from which we stray to find our own way.  I understood, finally, that I was responsible for my own architecture of character and personality, my own structure of desire, my own grammar of intent and motivation.  I understood that, sometimes, self-awareness involves running up a white flag and surrendering self-awareness.

The senior-junior relationship is, it seems to me, freighted with paradox, but, paradoxically, one that clarifies. Being a junior identified me, but it was not my identity.  Dad and I shared a name.  We shared certain interests, attitudes, physical features, mannerisms.  We shared, it seemed, a capacity to cause my mother unending frustration.  We were the same, but we were not the same.  We were complements, but we were not complementary; entangled, but not.  I imitated him, but I was not his duplicate.  As Heraclitus observed some 1500 years ago, you do “not step twice in the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." No word on whether there was a Heraclitus Sr.

The fact is, Dad and I were men of different generations, different social and cultural contexts, different values and virtues. Different contingencies of history converged in us, of which we were different expressions.  And somehow, in a way I do not fully comprehend, from that sameness and difference my specificity, my singularity as a person in my on right emerged.  And Dad’s.  He too had, was having, a life; he too embodied particularity.  Who knew?  For too long, for far too long, I didn’t.

The percentage of juniors has declined steadily since the 1960s, as parents bestow  more distinctive names on their baby boys; names more intransitive than the transitive junioring previously in fashion; names, it is thought, that will catalyze the child’s individuality.  This is wishful thinking, however; tatting lace while wearing chain-mail gloves would have a likelier prospect for success.  Only the most superficial kind of individuality is conferred by a name. Individuality will happen, if it happens, as it did with me.  A page turns, a moment unfastens, a bud blooms, a dusty landscape clears, and it emerges.  Until then, even if the abbreviation “Jr.” does not trail our name, we are all juniors.  Until we are not.  Until we become seniors.