PERISCOPE

VAL SCHAFFNER

There is a kind of magic that consists in the act of naming, which harkens back to the dawn of language. Back when the world was fresh, there must have been someone in each tribe whose job it was to point to new things and improvise the sounds that would stand for them forever after.

A priest or shaman or prophet, he or she would have been. Today we might call that person a poet.

After all the simple objects and animals and feelings received their simple names, the shamans could not stop. The art of names was in their blood; it was a thrill, an obsession, a vocation. They kept looking for new sensations and situations, which grew ever more complex and far-fetched as the world ran out of the easy ones, and the combinations of sounds they attached to them grew more complicated apace, until today we have novels.

The writer, searching in frustration for the last of the new, may envy the astronomer, who can find a celestial body that no one ever saw before and, by right of discovery, decide what it shall be called, just like that: one or two words that will continue to stand for it generations hence - even, perhaps, to human colonists arriving thousands of years from now upon a planet warmed by that star. For them, the astronomer's name will be the name of the sun, a fine immortality.

On earth, geographers are clear out of new places to name, although developers of existing ones may have that privilege (with results that fail to inspire: Trump This and That, subdivisions named after the farms and trees they paved over and felled).

For physicists, there is a dwindling supply of potential new elements which, when discovered flashing evanescently in cyclopean particle machines, get called (by committee decision) things like einsteinium and fermium.

Biologists and paleontologists are luckier, with many undiscovered species yet to seek out and designate. Vladimir Nabokov may have stressed the limits of three languages in the arcane magic of his novels, but in his avocation of lepidopterist the quest was straightforward, and his shortest opus is the name of the butterfly he discovered.

There is, I once read somewhere, a dinosaur called Cuttysarkus macnelliensis, the result of a wager that took place on an expedition in the Mongolian desert. The scotch was the prize for the first scientist to uncover a new fossil, and the winner was Dr. MacNelly.

One other class of person, infinitely more numerous than poets and scientists, is today allowed the power of the name - and an almost godlike responsibility it is, for here the name is the beginning and center of what amounts to a whole new world. I am talking about parents, and the naming of children was what I had in mind to write about today.

Having worked up to the subject in my roundabout way, however, I must stop for the moment. Little hands are tugging at my trouser cuffs.

Kaya Perdita and Lia Athena are the names of my daughters. There are stories behind these names, and new stories that are growing around them day by day, and these stories I will get around to telling when I have time again.