Humans seem obsessed with naming things—themselves, the places they live, the species, the stars and planets. They divide time and christen the epochs, as if these things last in time. For time itself exists only to be divided, only if it is ripped into eras and millennia and moments. And we aim outside of time, as if our great naming provides the things so named the mark of the eternal. There is heaven and hell, purgatory and God. Yet the vast majority of everything that has ever lived, has never had a name.
I captured an anonymous cat in my backyard yesterday. I’d planned to have it neutered and released back into the wild. It turned out to have feline leukemia and had to be put down. It had been wild all its life. No one but I mourned its passing, and then only briefly. It had passed through life nearly unrecognized by human awareness and it would pass out of memory forever. Its existence was marked by anonymity. How many countless beings have slipped through this world’s transom without name or celebration?
Could, then, the name given a thing at birth or the ceremony which signals its entry into this world, could the history of a nation or the celebration of its profound wars, grant it a specialness which separates it out and holds it back from a nameless fate? The ineffable lives its life through a divine anonymity, through that which remains unmoved by proud tradition or culture. And everything that lives has life despite its namelessness. Millions of great trees have come and gone, and none were taller for having been bestowed a name. Vast seas have inundated the continents and regressed again, and few have been sanctified with any name or praised by lips for their reach. Did this impair the seas’ horizons or shallow their depths? It seems in our nature to name and to praise, to affix an attribution in order to confer greatness or rank. It’s in the nature of self to name itself. Faithless in its own endurance in time, it plants a flag upon the earth, only to be buried beneath it. It lives not to see its flag tatter and fray and dissolve in the nameless winds.
It seems in the nature of the vaster life to remain nameless. Confident of its own perpetuity, it allows itself to slip from form to form, dissolving from one image, resolving into the next. Eternity has no history, no name it affixes to itself. Only that beyond name cannot perish.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within