by any other name

What's in a name? Plato identified names as essences, although he thought he was just identifying essences by name. Let me explain (it is my job after all). When I see beauty (i.e. beautiful things: a painting, flower, gesture, cliff, dress, etc.), I know that I am not seeing "beauty itself," because there is more than one beautiful thing.

Beauty seems to be a quality that beautiful things share (and violence is a quality violent things share, etc.). So Plato thought there must be an intangible essence beyond these things named 'beauty.' However, one could also conclude, based on the same observations, that essence is just a more complicated word for a name. We group things together based on a similarity and give that similarity a name. Understood this way, a name helps form our understanding of similarity. On the contrary, Plato thought names are mere titles for something we discover out there.

So what? Well, my names have been transitory over the years. My father insisted on naming me ‘Spaceship,’because I was born in a station wagon on the way to the hospital. I am not sure how he got from ‘identified motor vehicle’ to ‘unidentified flying object’ but let’s just keep in mind that the sixties were not far behind them when I was born. Anyway, my mom finally pretended to agree to the name. When she filled out the birth certificate, however, she wrote in ‘Tanya.’ My father was unaware until later. He was telling everyone my name was ‘Spaceship’ until my mother finally intervened and revealed her maneuver. My dad was happy though. They had discussed naming me after the Tanya the Guerrilla, a revolutionary that worked with the Cuba’s Communist Party in Bolivia. So I was born ‘Tanya Jean Rodriguez,’ ‘Jean’ after my mother’s mother. My parents divorced after a few years, though, and my mom decided we should use her maiden name and she enrolled me in school as ‘Tanya Jean Tannehill.’ That was my name until I decided I wanted something more hip. My hair was blue (and I was 15) so I started going by ‘Bleu.’ The French class I was taking at my junior high school inspired the spelling (I wish I could remember the name; the mascot was a frog…). So it was Bleu Tannehill’ until I got my driver’s license. At 19 years old, I discovered that my legal last name at the DMV. Suddenly I was ‘Bleu Rodriguez.’ After five years and some bizarre life experiences, I decided to return to my roots and the name ‘Tanya Rodriguez.’

Attaching myself to a variety of names and living in a million places has left me feeling fragmented. I lack that tool for understanding essence in the Platonic sense. Certainly, my essence is nothing beyond myself; my body has changed constantly, and my personality has varied as well. There have been no constants in my life, but there have been a few “consistents” (I just invented that word): my sister and my mother, for example. Yet, we all know that we can lose anyone and anything at any time. My name has just been more typical of life than names tend to be.