The Magic of Names
i wanted to start this afternoon
with a question for all of you that
you’ll see up on this slide
what do these three words all of which
begin with the letter e
have in common earthsea elendil
and aragon some of you might know the
answer
some of you may think you know maybe you
vaguely remember having read
something that had to do with these
three names
but a lot of what i want to say today is
linked to these three names
because each of these refers to
[Music]
a set of books earthy is a world that
was created
by the writer ursula leguin
it started off as a trilogy but it grew
quite rapidly
into a whole series of books and short
stories
centered around this land that had
dragons in it and wizards
and other forms of magic elendil
some of you will remember is the father
of aragon
the father of the king who returns in
the lord of the rings trilogy
and there again we have a world that is
characterized by dragons
and wizards and other forms of magic as
well as simple folk
like hobbits and then finally in
the e that you see third on this list is
the e of aragon
right aragon who is a young dragon rider
born after many years of there being no
dragon riders in a world called
allegacia now you might be wondering
why do i talk about these things today
part of it is that times of crisis give
a lot of us time to read
when we are at home working we can’t be
doing that all the time
and we therefore have more time i think
to indulge in
reading and exploration of worlds and i
was rediscovering many of these
worlds for the second time as i
went through the recent crisis but much
more importantly
what i love about these three sets of
books right then the fact that all of
them
are involved with new worlds being
created
is that in each of them there is a
particularly
interesting quality in
earth sea there is a language called the
old town
the old language in which the world got
created
and from which everything received their
names
in middle earth for tolkien
we also have the language called elvish
which the ancient
people speak and in the world of
allagasia
we have a world which speaks something
called the ancient language
now what’s really interesting about each
of these is that
you cannot lie in any of these languages
all of them are known as the true speech
and it is impossible
because anything said in the true speech
is by definition true
so it is impossible to lie or perform an
act of deceit
in these languages and what’s really
interesting
is that the names that people possess
the true names
not just the names and labels that they
happen to be given
by others but the true names of each
person
the true names of fire of rocks
of the sea of wind of the earth itself
each of these is given in the old
language
it’s given in elvish it’s given in the
old tongue of earth sea
it’s given in the ancient language of
allegations and the world of aragon
now why is this interesting because in
ursula le guin’s books
as i think applies in the rest of them
when we control
the name of something we control
the thing itself and therefore spell
casters who want to cast a spell of fire
will say the ancient name
fire and then be able to cast a spell
with it
or if they want to conjure up a wind
they will say the name
wind in the ancient language and conjure
that up
now this is all from worlds that are far
away and worlds that are distant from us
but even in the world we live in in many
cultures including the abrahamic
religions
names matter one of the first things
that adam
does as the first man in the biblical
tradition
is he gives names to the cattle to the
birds of the air to every beast of the
field to all things in other words
and it is the act of naming that gives
each of those things their unique
identity why is this important for us
because as we think about what the arts
and humanities can do
i think a lot of it boils down to the
act of naming
we are naming the complexity we are
naming the variety and subtlety and
dynamism
of all of life and as we’ve come up with
good names
those are the names that stick and help
us to understand the world around us a
whole lot better
now let’s take an example of this that
is very close to
all of our hearts how did we name
this virus that is currently the source
of so much
crisis and anxiety and stress and nerves
for everyone
we started out by calling it the wuhan
coronavirus why
because it came from the chinese city of
wuhan
gradually as it became a much more
global phenomenon and many other
countries started to have
more cases than wuhan city or china as a
whole
people started to realize that they
couldn’t name it in that way
they needed to find other names and so
we started to call it the novel
coronavirus 2019
or nkovi 2019 right as a short form
now this is also interesting because
what it suggests is that it’s novel it’s
new but it’s a coronavirus we’ve known
other coronaviruses before sars right
the severe acute respiratory syndrome
was caused by a coronavirus and this
this current virus that we face
therefore is
novel because it gives us new qualities
and it is not one that we recognized
before
but then people also realized that after
a while it was
not so novel when the virus didn’t go
away and it persisted
and it stayed with us we started to
realize it wasn’t so novel after all
and we needed to find a new name for it
and then the world health organization
settled on covet 19
as a formal name right to capture that
it is a coronavirus
it happened in 2019 and therefore that
is the current name that we have
but i do wonder will this name last
because what happens
if as it looks increasingly likely
covet 19 is around for a very long time
what if it is also kovit 20 and kovitt
21
and covet 22. the names
matter and i think the fact that we
haven’t fully settled on a name that
captures the full complexity
of the whole situation we’re in captured
by the virus
suggests that we haven’t really fully
understood it and we therefore have not
fully come to grips with the complexity
of the phenomenon
that we have to deal with here
and this is particularly important
because as we saw with the examples of
the old language
to name is to find truth and if we name
something
we give it a quality of truth that helps
us to recognize what it is and what it
isn’t
and some of the names that we’ve used to
deal with kovid
i think also show us that there have
been interesting dimensions
in each of the names that illuminate as
well as obfuscate certain aspects of the
crisis we’re in
many people talk about covet as a war
right we talk about
defeating the virus we talk about
quarantines and
clamping down on on the case numbers we
talk about flattening the curve
all of those are objects and metaphors
of war
but that name that war name for covid is
not enough
because what we find is actually when
you think about it who’s being defeated
here
who is the enemy in this war
some people refer to kovit as a journey
they say we have to take
this journey together and on that
journey we will learn
and we will acquire insights about what
exactly this virus is
but even that is an inadequate name
right because a journey suggests that we
know where we’re going
that there is a destination somewhere
but maybe there isn’t maybe there is
just this constant traveling
a constant process rather than any kind
of arriving
and that becomes interesting because we
also then can ask ourselves
who does the traveling and how do we do
it are all of us traveling in the same
way on this journey
or do some of us travel in great comfort
as we have to work from home
and knuckle down to safe distancing
measures
but others actually might experience
this as trauma or distress
that journey is not the same for
everyone which suggests to me that the
next image there the name of an ecology
if you call kovit an ecology then maybe
that helps us understand it a bit better
because we see that it’s part of a
natural process of evolution
in the world we start to understand that
actually
there are these natural life rhythms at
work in it
and maybe this is just the worlds and
the earth’s reaction to
capitalism and climate change and many
of the other
stresses and pressures that we as
humanity have put on it
but even that i think is not enough as a
name because
what we see is that the ecology
captures linkages amongst people but in
a very cold and impersonal way
in other ecologies the lion eats the
gazelle the gazelle eats
grass and there is an order of things
right a natural order
but i’m not sure that that’s always the
case with kovid because there are some
people who are suffering
in the crisis which suggests to us that
they don’t they may not
deserve it they may be suffering because
of no fault of their own
they may be deprived for certain reasons
they may not have access to
as much of the internet as others do and
therefore working from home
or staying distance from others becomes
much more difficult for them
and i think we need to start
understanding that covid is also a
community phenomenon
it’s a community because all of us have
moral relationships with those around us
and that name of community therefore
captures something very different
compared to the war the journey and the
ecology names
that have already been given to this
crisis
i think that’s important because if we
accept that naming is a key part
of what the humanities do then actually
we haven’t done a good job
yet of fully naming the complexity and
range and depth
of this whole phenomenon that all of us
find ourselves in
what i wanted to do was also give you
other examples of why naming
matters what are some of your favorite
examples of a name where when you look
at it
you feel this thrill go down your spine
and think yes that is
absolutely accurate that represents the
thing so well that it must be the true
name of this object
sometimes we get that sometimes we don’t
these for me have been examples where
i’ve looked at them and thought yes
this really captures a particular aspect
of something better than say
covetous war or ecology or community
even
has captured for the virus when barack
obama talks about the audacity of hope
in his second part of his autobiography
i think that captured the name of a time
it was about being audacious about
having large
dreams but it was also audacity of hope
it wasn’t anger it wasn’t frustration
it was hope the fact that there is
something to be optimistic about in the
future
even if we don’t necessarily feel that
way now that captured the name
and the tenor of a time when lee kuan
yew
you know decided to title one of his
books hard truths
that i think captured something as well
right hard
difficult aspects of things that we go
through and truths right fundamental
realities that we cannot run away from
and when you put them together these
hard truths capture both something about
the phenomenon he’s describing
as well as the times that he was in
and the broad challenges that a place
like singapore can face
some time ago i read a wonderful book
about identities
that all of us have by the philosopher
amateur sen
and amateusen described what he called
plural monoculturalism
the fact that in some countries and
societies we may have many different
ethnicities and religions all coexisting
but they never interact with each other
so they’re plural
because they’re all there in their
diversity but they are monocultural in
that they never actually interact with
each other
there isn’t any kind of energy between
them
that i thought captured a phenomenon
that we want to be careful about because
diverse societies like singapore and
many other parts of the world
probably don’t want to be plural
monocultures they want to have
interactions amongst the cultures and be
truly multicultural
thomas hardy in the mayor of
casterbridge describes human beings at
one point as
we fettered gods of the earth
that for me is another set of names that
is just beautiful
sends shivers down my spine whenever i
read that novel again
the fettered gods of the earth are
fettered in that we are chained we’re
imprisoned
we don’t have complete freedom but we’re
gods of the earth
we have dominion and control over other
things
we have an element of the divine in us
if you believe
several religious traditions that
believe that we are created in god’s
image
and that idea that we are therefore both
fettered and gods
at the same time is for me a truly
accurate description
of what humankind is like and therefore
the kinds of both struggles
and opportunities that we have to deal
with
the last two examples actually no let me
start with shakespeare first of all one
can’t have a
talk on humanities and and the arts
without at least mentioning shakespeare
briefly i think
and when shakespeare in hamlet right
characterized
the condition of humanity in this
dilemma of to be or not to be
i think he was naming the complexity of
life as well that we are often stuck in
this existential struggle
between an active life to be
fully ourselves or not to be right to be
alienated and fragmented from what we
are
both of those are key parts of the
dichotomy that exists for all of
humanity
and finally i wanted to share two
examples with you that are a bit more
personal
and these are the titles of my poetry
collections because i wrote many of the
poems
and then struggled for the longest time
with what to call each of the
collections
the first title morning at memory’s
border came to me
when i was actually in texas i was at a
writer’s festival and i heard so much
poetry around me that i think
i finally was able to give a name to my
own book
and i called it morning at memories
border because i think of memory as a
place
it has borders to it and when morning
comes
a lot of those delineations and those
boundaries get lit
they are illuminated in ways that were
not there in the dark of night
but each of the words matters as well
because i was writing a lot about
mornings
about memory and about borders both
physical and
literal as well as figurative ones so
put together the name worked both at the
individual words level
as well as all of them working as a
composite
similarly with the other title second
persons i called the
the book that because each poem was
written as a second person poem
addressed to a you of some kind some of
these were love letters to people
some were love letters to god some were
letters to myself but all of them were
written in the second person to a u
of some form but what was also
interesting was that book was my second
book and it meant therefore that it was
a second version of me and the name
therefore started to work on multiple
levels
and i think these are quite critical
ways of thinking
about how we name things because when we
get the name
right something falls into order about
the world that we’re in
and the more we try to do that get names
correct
the more we’ll be able to adjust to the
kind of demands that the world has of us
i think my challenge that i would leave
you with to end off the talk
is to really ask yourself what is your
true name
what would your name be in the old
tongue of earthsea
or elvish or the ancient language of
allagasia
because when we seek our true names we
start on this lifelong adventure
that in some ways never ends because
maybe our true names also change and
evolve along the way
some of this is determined by the work
we do the vocations and the missions
that we have
but most importantly my favorite word
for what i do
is calling a calling because
i’m called to do public sector work or
called to be a poet and what is it that
we call people
we call them by their names so as you go
about
listening to the calling of your own
name what i hope you will find is that
you hear it increasingly clearly
over time and that when you do find your
true name
you find that your place in the world is
truly well defined
and that you can start giving to others
as much as you receive from them
thank you very much for having me
you