MONDO

Names are photographs

My name is Nicola. For as long as I can remember, not a day has passed without me saying, hearing, reading, writing, or even thinking my name. Omnipresent, unchanging.

As I look at the photo on the identity card, if it is true that I was this here, with this face, it is only because my name is next to the picture. Of course, I don't look like that at all.

Names survive us, along with those we give to things.

That's what names do: they survive. They cling to everything,  becoming something or someone and then live longer and beyond their hosts. Suspended there, engraved, evoking images, as light as air and as subtle as photographs. 

I do not care anymore if it is not me in that document, if I never was or if I am not any more. It doesn't matter. Because since only my name will remain (somewhere) after me, then I will only be that name in the memories of others and with each memory, a different image will appear.

I cannot think of anything more primitive than names. Names are like photographs.

I give a name to something to possess it, to make it mine. To let it enter my field of vision. Because you don't see things until you look at them, 'and you don't look at them if you don't give them a name first.

So, all these names we make appear out of thin air, that we attach to someone or something, everywhere, as I leaf through this catalogue with bargain prices on every object. 

Everything has a name in the World. The World is composed of what we know. It is made using the same material as names. But that's not all. What is the name of something that has yet to be imagined? What about the children yet to be born? That is not even a name yet? What if I no longer like the World as it is? What if it seems too greedy and inhospitable? 

Could I then give a new name to things to come? A better name? Perhaps.

Eventually, the picture on the document seems more real to me than I or the prices on this catalogue can be. Reality is so fast that to get even a glimpse of it we are forced to stop it, just to grasp a small shred of it, a name or, at most, a photograph.

The names we give draw the World, but it is not the background we are building, inside the World, there are also the names they have given us, there is us with our lives and what we would like them to be. 

What if I didn't have a name? Nowadays I would probably have a price.