The Naming

First draft of this piece was about the unsettling, instantaneous transformation of shaving my beard off. It took me back to a poem I wrote maybe 50 years ago. A poem that became a song. The chorus of the song went

My face is a face I recognise but cannot place. It’s no more me than my name.

And I realised it was Names I wanted to write about rather than Faces.

Maybe 30 years ago when I first trained as couple counsellor with Relate, we did an icebreaker in which we were asked to introduce ourselves to our neighbour by telling them our name (fair enough) and a story about it (more puzzling). What was I going to say? But it turned out everyone had a story, including me. My introduction to the potency of names.

You’ll probably be aware that over the Spring I’ve been making my My Many Companions offerings on Cherished Land. I’ll be writing more extensively about these events in my next post. They have all featured “The Naming” , a song which is essentially a list of names I’ve been given. Let me briefly tell you their stories. Think of them as old school sleeve notes if it helps.

Steve Lewis

Spoiler alert, this name doesn’t get into the song. I’ve come to see it as a rather vanilla, disguise of a name. Given to me for that very reason. To fit in. Though you need to know that no-one in my family ever called me Steve. That was my invention. For them I was always Stephen. Even now it can be a useful power play around me. Call me Stephen and I’m immediately infantilised!

Stephen was as close as anyone could get to Stella. My parents never told me this. I learnt it much later through other family members. Stella was one of my mother’s sisters. The golden one who died three days before I was born, in her forties, of 1950’s cancer. The one who’s death had a huge impact on my own life, through the way it affected my mother’s availability to be present for her new baby.

Lewis too has history. My Russian grandfather’s surname had been Peretzovitch. As an early twentieth century immigrant such a name would have been like the mark of Cain. His first name was somehow anglicised as Lewis. Someone decided to take that as our surname instead. My Dad told me his Dad had done that. Sorting through papers after my Dad died I saw the deed poll that made it offical had my his own signature on it.

Yehuda Laib

I have, what you might call, an indigenous name too. Phonetically Yehuda Laib Ben Gershon Abba. Translates, so I was told, as Judah the Lion son of My Father the Stranger. No-one ever called me by either version. The only time it was used was in synagogue at my barmitzvah. Anywhere else was too dangerous. The opposite of ‘fit in’.

There is much I could say about being a Jew. The short version is I was offered a diluted, cultural version of it with little spiritual centre, much to be ambivalent about and unspoken fear. I let it all go apart from the fear. Though the music I was exposed lodged deeper than I realised, the fear is all I managed to pass on to my daughter. Which I regret deeply now.

When my Cypriot friend Paul decided to ask people to call him Pavlos I wondered about Yehuda but it didn’t seem to matter enough. It remains an option and is who I will need to be to meet my ancestors.

Deep Cabaret

My name here is Deep Cabaret. Most of the music projects I’ve created over the last 25 years have carried that name. My music brand if you like. I even get the odd email addressed to ‘Deep’!

It was a gift from my friend and musicking mentor Pete Moser. He was MCing some kind of open mic event that I was performing at. Curating a last minute set list he came over and said “I’m putting you in the sort of deep cabaret bit. You ok with that?”. Of course I was and have worn the monika like a garland ever since. And have so often suprised myself by who I am able to be and what I’ve been able to do wearing it.

True Troubador from Before the Naming

Black Snake Promise (BSP)

These are my mythopoetic, soulcraft names.

BSP came out of Fishing for Shadow, a sequence of guided journeyings around shadow work I did with Animas Valley Insitute . Fishing lakeside I caught a black snake in my net. Later it penetrated my skin, entered my artery, arrived in my chest. So began a conversation about Forgetting and a Promise to Remember.

True Troubador from Before the Naming was given to me by Alex Hatfield at the time of my VisionQuest. Even moreso than BSP, it is a mythopoetic lanyard that helps me access an understanding of who I’m called to be as I move closer to that place Frederick Buechner pointed to “where my deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger”.

Whilst True Troubador is sort of obvious I like to think Before The Naming was a way of mirroring my resistance to learning the species names of the birds, flowers, fells I encounter. Hinting that, in meeting them all as this particular bird or flower, I am operating from an ancient place, from before Adam did his work.

And this turning ambivalence or skepticism into something to support and inspire and delight in, is part of the magic of the process of Mirroring. I think the importance of a mythopoetic name isn’t that you are somehow more special than anyone else. Each one of us has a unique eco-niche to fill. It’s not even that I believe I AM True Troubador. Rather TT is an aid to shifting my conciousness. Like fasting, questing, magic mushrooms, imaginal journeyings, or prayer, it opens a space for Mystery to do its work on me.

Your Name

You might call all of these, names I go by in particular places, for particular practices. I know, or am at least learning, how to turn up as each of them but none name all of me. I haven’t mentioned Dad, Grandad or even Lewey. We all embrace multitudes. If you have stories to tell about your namings, how they came about or how you feel about them, dear reader, I’d love to hear. Do share in the comments.