by Eric Bies
I picture the LORD God as a child psychologist—very much of a type, vaguely professorial, plucked from the ’50s. Picture him with me: shorn and horn-rimmed, his fingernails immaculate, he’s on his way to a morning appointment. As he kneels in the garden to tie his shoe, his starched white shirtfront strains against his gut.
Thus we find the LORD, seated in his air-conditioned office, placing birds and beasts before toddling Adam, whose first instinct, amusingly, is to name. “Horse!” he yells, flailing his arms as the dapple-gray Arabian rounds a copse of palms. “Horse!” he yells again, though this time it’s a penguin sliding by on its belly.
Those who can read Hebrew tell us that adam simply means “man,” which means, for all intents and purposes, that God named the first person “Person.” Of all the uncollared dogs that showed up on the family farm in Michigan when my father was a boy—the dogs that arrived, rambled around, and were inevitably flattened on the interstate—each was known in the same fashion, without any fuss, simply as “Dog.”
Which makes one wonder, what animal was it that St. Francis of Assisi encountered on the forested slopes above Gubbio? It’s true that that particular story gets less airtime than those in which we find il Poverello preaching to the birds or kissing lepers. And yet it may just mark his greatest conversion: not from this or that religion to Catholic, or from Catholic to yet more Catholic, but from terrorizing wolf to adoring doggie. It isn’t hard to imagine Francis with a smile, allowing the bristling thing’s big paw to eclipse his palm as he takes it in his hand for a good shake, as if to say, “You have eaten some of these kind people and their pets, chewed on them and enjoyed it, and I love you still; go along now and be a new man.”
A well-known prayer, apocryphally attributed to Francis, tells us that it is by pardoning others that one is pardoned. And the notion that our inward state bears a direct relation to our outward action does sound right. But does the structure hold up analogically? Is it by harming that one is harmed? By helping that one is helped? By naming that one is named?
(Emil Cioran: “After suffering a serious illness, in certain Asian countries—in Laos, for example—one traditionally changes one’s name. What a vision lies at the origin of such a custom! Actually we should change our name after each important experience.” And imagine it: the chronically persecuted, the spectacularly paranoid, the exceedingly adventurous, we wouldn’t know what to call them. We are so surrounded by naming and names—is it any wonder we find it nearly impossible to imagine a person without one?)
Four hundred years after St. Francis formed his order, Romeo arrived at the door of Friar Laurence. He was on the verge of suicide. Earnestly seeking the knowledge of where best to strike, he asked the friar: “In what vile part of this anatomy doth my name lodge?” Thankfully, Juliet’s Nurse was standing by. She snatched away the dagger before the troubled youth could plunge the blade (and the blade wondered: could it carve the letters from his banished heart?). Yet for all its adolescent severity, Romeo’s judgment couldn’t be clearer. To be nameless is to be lifeless.
Way back in the eighth century, a thousand years before it became legal to change one’s name at will, in Japan, in the district of Yamadagori, in the province of Sanuki, a girl by the name of Golden Plum-Flower lay dying in bed. She was only in her eighteenth year—only a couple of months earlier she had been strong, graceful, supple, always smartly dressed—and yet some recent and mysterious illness had laid her low and badly ravaged her system till she was little more than skin and bone. For days on end her despairing parents had been praying on her behalf to the God-Who-Deals-With-Such-Illnesses. Then one day Golden Plum-Flower awoke from a dream with a start. Her eyes were wide because she couldn’t believe it: the God had shown up; he had really been there, standing before her, in her dream; he’d heard her family’s prayers loud and clear; he told her he wanted to help. (Help how? she asked.) It’s an odd bit of help, admittedly, but decisive. (How? how?) The Greeks called it metempsychosis. This is a violenter version of it—that is, to slingshot the soul into another body. (Another?) Yes, one of flesh and blood, like yours, but in better health: if you can overthrow the soul inside, then you get to keep on living. (What’s the catch?) Well, the target-body can’t be just anyone’s. It has to be a very specific someone’s—it must belong to a person with…the same name. (The same name?) Golden Plum-Flower.
Now, according to Lafcadio Hearn, that inveterate transcriber of the strange, there was another Golden Plum-Flower, and she wasn’t far off. In an instant, in fact, the God had bolted across the sky and arrived at her home. It was night and he made himself dark and he slipped beneath the door. Proceeding on tiptoe to the kitchen where she stood washing dishes, he silently unsheathed his magical chisel and—she spun around to scream—sunk it into her forehead.
When Golden Plum-Flower awoke the following morning, she found that her headache had gone. In fact, her entire body felt much stronger and healthier than it had in many weeks. But then, sitting bolt upright in bed, she realized at once that something else was very, very wrong. Why is the window split into four panes instead of two? What is this bowl by the bedside? Whose patterned sheets are these? In walked a man and a woman she had never set eyes on. She screamed. They screamed. She jumped out of bed and fled, running all the way back to her parents’ place, where just as much confusion greeted her, for who was this young woman attesting to be their dying daughter?
In the end, once it was proved beyond doubt that she was who she said she was (and wasn’t who she wasn’t), the two pairs of parents agreed to share the one Golden Plum-Flower. And they did so happily at that, as though this blend of one girl’s skin and another girl’s soul had been sufficient all along.