I thought hard about this one for a lot of years since writing that.
I still don’t have complete answers for myself and definitely not answers for anybody else; but i’ve explored a few things.
I wrote that in 2010; and it hits hard; in 2013, I decided to put my money where my thought was and wrote poetry inside of our state’s fictitious name database; a chain of fictitious names leading to a fictitious name that seems like my given name and it is, but it also isn’t. Celebrities do it, so I can too, I reasoned.
So here, KENNETH E UDUT is a fictitious name owned by SOMEBODY.
But is SOMEBODY?
SOMEBODY is owned by NOBODY.
So now I could say legally from 2013-2018, KENNETH E UDUT is SOMEBODY who is owned by NOBODY.
Yet it was all a fiction and yet it seemed to resemble truth.
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Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?” poem always stuck with me as a kid.
Rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.
But I thought of it a little more deeply. Is it the sweetness of a rose that makes it a rose-like thing? How much can you remove from a Rose-like thing that is not called a rose before it ceases being the thing-called-by-any-other-name-but-Rose and is something different?
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and psychologically/social; are you what you do for others? (the sweetness a Rose)
Who are you when nobody is around?
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