A History of the Echoes of a Name

Isolated in time and space, a god, a dream, and a man who is insane and aware of the fact repeat an obscure statement. Those words, and their two echoes, are the subject of these pages.
    The first example is well known. It is recorded in the third chapter of the second book of Moses, called Exodus. We read there that Moses, pastor of sheep, author and protagonist of the book, asks God what His name is, and God replies: "I Am That I Am:" Before examining these mysterious words, it is perhaps worth recalling that in primitive or magical thought, names are not arbitrary symbols but a vital part of what they define. (1) Thus, the Australian aborigines receive secret names that the members of the neighboring tribe are not allowed to hear. Among the ancient Egyptians, a similar custom prevailed: each person received two names, the "little" name that was known to all and the true or "great" name that was kept hidden. According to the funerary literature, the soul runs many risks after death, and forgetting one's name (losing one's personal identity) is perhaps the greatest. It is also important to know the true names of the gods, demons, and gates to the other world. (2) Jacques Vandier writes: "It is enough to know the name of a god or of a divine creature in order to have it in one's power" (La Religion égyptienne, 1949). Similarly, De Quincey reminds us that the true name of Rome was also secret: in the last days of the Republic, Quintus Valerius Sorano committed the sacrilege of revealing it, and was executed...
    The savage hides his name so that it will not be used in magical practices that may kill, drive insane, or enslave its owner. This superstition survives in the ideas of slander and insult; we cannot tolerate our names being tied to certain words. Mauthner has analyzed and censured this mental habit.
    Moses asks God what His name is: this is not, as we have seen, a curiosity of a philological nature, but rather an attempt to ascertain who God is, or more precisely, what He is. (In the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena would write that God does not know who or what He is, because He is not a who or a what.)
    What interpretations have been made of the tremendous answer Moses heard? According to Christian theology, "I Am That I Am" declares that only God truly exists, or, as the Maggid of Mesritch taught, that only God can say the word "1." The doctrine of Spinoza, which makes all thoughts and applications the mere attributes of an eternal substance which is God, could well be an amplification of this idea. "God exists; we are the ones who do not exist;' a Mexican has similarly written.
    According to this first interpretation, "I Am That I Am" is an ontological affirmation. Others have believed that the answer avoids the question: God does not say who He is because it would exceed the comprehension of his human interlocutor. Martin Buber points out that "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" may also be translated as "I Am What I Will Be" or "I Will Be Where I Will Be." Had Moses, in the manner of Egyptian magic, asked God His name in order to have Him in his power, God would have answered: "Today I am talking with you, but tomorrow I may take on another form, including the forms of oppression, injustice, and adversity." We read this in Gog and Magog (3)
    Multiplied into the human languages-Ich Bin Der Ich Bin, Ego Sum Qui Sum, Soy El Que Soy-the sententious name of God, the name that, in spite of having many words, is more solid and impenetrable than if it were only one word, grew and reverberated through the centuries, to 1602, when Shakespeare wrote a comedy. In this comedy we glimpse, almost sideways, a cowardly and swaggering soldier who has managed, because of some scheme, to be promoted to the rank of captain. The ruse is discovered, the man is publicly disgraced, and then Shakespeare intervenes and puts in his mouth some words that reflect, as though in a broken mirror, those that the god spoke on the mountain:

Captain I'll be no more,
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.

Thus Parolles speaks, and suddenly ceases to be a conventional character in a comic farce and becomes a man and all mankind.
    The last version was produced in the 1740s, in one of the years when Swift was slowly dying, years that were perhaps for him a single unbearable moment, a form of the eternity of hell. With glacial intelligence and glacial hatred, Swift (like Flaubert) had always been fascinated by madness; perhaps because he knew that, at the end, insanity was waiting for him. In the third part of Gulliver's Travels, he imagined with meticulous loathing a race of decrepit and immoral men, given over to weak appetites they cannot satisfy; incapable of conversing with their kind, because the course of time had changed their language; or of reading, because their memories could not carry from one line to the next. One suspects that Swift imagined this horror because he feared it, or perhaps to magically exorcise it. In 1717, he said to Young, the author of Night Thoughts, "I am like that tree; I will begin to die at the top.” Those years survive for us in a few terrifying sentences. His sententious and grim character sometimes extends to what was said about him, as if those who judged him did not want to become less than he. Thackeray wrote: "To think on him is to think on the ruin of a great empire." There was nothing, however, so touching as his application of God's mysterious words.
    Deafness, dizziness, and the fear of madness leading to idiocy aggravated and deepened Swift's melancholy. He began to lose his memory. He didn't want to use glasses; he couldn't read, and he was incapable of writing. He prayed to God every day to send him death. And one evening, old and mad and wasted, he was heard repeating, we don't know whether in resignation or desperation or as one affirms or anchors oneself in one's own invulnerable personal essence: "I am that I am, I am that I am .... "
    He may have felt, I will be miserable, but I am, and I am a part of the universe, as inevitable and necessary as the others, and I am what God wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have made of me, and perhaps To be is to be all.
    Here ends the history of the sentence; I need only add, as a sort of epilogue, the words that Schopenhauer said, near death, to Eduard Grisebach:

If at times I have thought myself misfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else; for example, a deputy who cannot achieve a noble title, or the accused in a case of defamation, or a lover whom the girl disdains, or a sick man who can- not leave his house, or others who suffer similar miseries. I have not been those persons; it, in sum, has been the cloth of the clothes I have worn and thrown off. Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me? 

Precisely because he had written The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer knew very well that to be a thinker is as illusory as being a sick man or a misfortunate man, and that he was profoundly something else. Something else: the will, the dark root of Parolles, the thing that Swift was. 

[1955]

[EW]

(1) One of the Platonic dialogues, the Cratylus, discusses and seems to negate a necessary connection between words and things.

(2) The Gnostics inherited or rediscovered this unusual opinion, and they created a vast vocabulary of proper names, which Basilides (according to Irenaeus) reduced to a single cacophonous or cyclical word, "Kaulakau," a sort of universal key to all the heavens.

(3) Buber (in What Is Man?, 1938) writes that to live is to enter a strange house of the spirit, whose floor is the chessboard on which we play an unknown and unavoidable game against a changing and sometimes frightening opponent.