The image of the starry sky is the vision that evokes, on a human scale, infinity. And the image of a being, of a particular thing, evokes its own name.
When exploring the subatomic levels of matter, the human being discovered what his heart knew: the fragment can be endless, the infinity of everything is not more vast, nor more overwhelming, than the infinity of one thing.
If we stop to examine the proper names, each the figure of an infinite individuality, emanate from them various types of suggestion. “Amalfi”, “Santiago”, “Samarkanda”, what fascination is the one that surrounds those sounds?
The infinity appears in every name, and perhaps in every vibration. But there is no sweeter and more unfathomable sound than our name on the lips of who loves us. For those who name and are named with love, infinity is not an unattainable amount: it is an attainable quality.
Unlike the stars, the creation of names is a human invention and an act available to anyone. As usually happens with acts available to everyone, not many come to appreciate their mystery. The academic, the scientist and the magician try to face the infinity with their eyes open. But the first path is too arid; that of the second, too short; And that of the third, too strange.
Both the names and the stars offer less body to the systemic study than to the simple contemplation. When the observed object is infinite, it may be the contemplator amateur Who is better positioned to discover something valuable.
As the Persian poet said the Kayyam:
What enigma those of those stars that roll through space!
Kayyam, hold on strong of the wisdom rope.
Be careful with the vertigo that your classmates demolish.
The vertigo of which he speaks, could not be the fascination for what flees as a star universe inside, and for what exceeds, as a name, the unfathomable chalice of a stuff?
Own names are the best fruit of poetic intelligence, and apply to what is radically difficult or impossible to express: a particular thing, unique in the world, an individuality. That with apparent ease we designate when appointing, it would be an unbeatable, unbeatable theme, for any categorical definition. However, the name suggestion is capable of expressing essential features in a concise manner.
Using or giving an adequate name does not only equals to fix them without a difficult or impossible definition, but the names granted or used successfully deliver a dark but instant knowledge of what they designate. In other words, they are poetry.
Poetry keeps an old and mysterious relationship with proper names. By virtue of this alliance, the common name of the tiger, the Alondra, the hawk, can become unmistakably own, seen from poetry.
When we continue poem inside the flight of the lark to the doors of heaven, or that of the mottled halcard launch, or glimpse the tiger that burns alive in the woodlands of the night, we recognize an omission, a splendor, that the imagination has to complete, an ellipsis of their true names, that we have never heard again those who forget the tongue of the paradise.
The imaginative poetics are the ones that find the most gold in the name of the names. And also usually delve into them the authors obsessed with the flow of existence; Being the names, precisely, the mask with which we are invited to the dance that forms conclude with death. Mask that we carry without imagining that it is our true face, or our true mask.
The name is the first brushstroke of a picture to die will give the last touch. The poets have interpreted in various ways this secret bond between names and death, even proposing ways to make fun of it. I remember a poem about a man who sought to hide from her escaping to successive names, and who ended up regretting the uselessness of that gadget.
When trying to escape towards names from the past, we can fail in the style of the alchemists and other attempts of the impossible: defeating unexpectedly in another order. We cannot take off from the neck the talisman that attracts death. Until the burning of the ingenious odyssey – scope in the name of “Nobody” – has the defect of only possible in a story other than we live. Poetic intuition is a very main door of reality, more in the room or the cave or of magic becomes the back door. Therefore, the wisest tradition is the one that takes us away from the magical utilitarianism of the names, and the one that associates the notions of name and compliance.
The arduous classic commandment, “I know who you are”, only our names fulfill it for us. And then our names are the real reverse of Dorian Gray’s story. They are still our ideal portrait, even though we ourselves are never.
The name is the target to which the arrow of our day points; And the arrow, right or fail, also bears our name. Let us not underestimate the resistance capacity of our name in the face of the crudeness of destiny. The name is a gift that in turn receives. And when you have lost and everything you have lost, you will still call yourself in the same way.
