{"id":2840,"date":"2025-04-18T12:04:58","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T16:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2840"},"modified":"2025-04-18T12:04:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T16:04:58","slug":"you-name-this-photograph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2025\/04\/18\/you-name-this-photograph\/","title":{"rendered":"You name this photograph"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your name is the only thing you have for your entire life. Your name is always with you, a part of you, and yet your name is invisible. A ghost limb, guiding you through the world as do your feet. But your heels can develop blisters, your toes can grow warts, your toenails can cut your skin if you let them get really long. What pain does the name inflict upon the soul, if it inflicts no pain upon the body?<\/span><\/p>\n

Do our names decide our fates? Are our names the titles of our photographs, presenting themselves before the fragments of our person? Geryon doesn\u2019t express himself through spoken language, yet language precedes, and helps him conceive, his photographs. In chapter 38 of <\/span>Autobiography of Red<\/span><\/i>, Geryon has a dream in the backseat of the rental car on the way to Huaraz. He dreams that \u201ccreatures that looked\/like young dinosaurs (yet they were strangely lovely) went crashing\/through underbrush and tore\/their hides which fell behind them in long red strips. He would call\/the photograph \u2018Human Valentines.\u2019\u201d (Carson, 131).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Geryon\u2019s dream, his artistic vision, is nameless. Nor do the creatures he dreams about have names; they are \u201clike young dinosaurs\u201d (Carson, 131), but calling them dinosaurs would be wrong. They are living without language. Escaping language. The \u201clong red strips\u201d of \u201ctheir hides\u201d represent the traces of those who cannot speak in the \u201cHuman\u201d world (Carson, 131). We see these animals, these quasi-humans, these humans with red wings, but we do not hear them. We see them, but we do not See or Understand them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman Valentines\u201d: Their love for us expressed in our language, but expressing their vision. The name of the photograph precedes the photograph itself (maybe the photograph will never even be taken), but the name follows the essence of something, someone, that defies what I can write about, that defies what Geryon can say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe we grow into our names, or grow with them. Maybe our art, our lives, are nameless. Maybe this is why people change their names. Maybe some people will never feel satisfied with language. Sometimes I fear I am one of those people.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your name is the only thing you have for your entire life. Your name is always with you, a part of you, and yet your name is invisible. A ghost limb, guiding you through the world as do your feet. But your heels can develop blisters, your toes can grow warts, your toenails can cut … Continue reading You name this photograph<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5597,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5597"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}