My sincere apologies for how long it has taken me since I last wrote. The funny thing is that I haven’t been all that busy. I have two required classes left at SCAD, which I am now halfway through. One of them is a Teaching Internship and for that, I am helping in a drawing class in the Foundations Department. The other is called Professional Practices, and is intended to make me as able to get a job as possible before I graduate and actually need to have one. I’m doing this class as an independent study due to low enrollment, so I meet with my professor once a week for half an hour. I am also doing an unofficial Teaching Internship in a Materials and Techniques class in Illustration, which has been fun. Since these are all low key courses, I decided to keep plugging away at my Hollins degree and take an online class. It’s called “Award Winning Children’s Literature,” and our texts have been recent recipients of the Newbery Award. I’ve been doing a fair amount of writing for that class each week, so I’m afraid I haven’t made much time for these updates. Later, I’ll send along some of the highlights from that course, but for now, I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve been having about names, since they have come up in many aspects of my life this quarter.
Sometimes I forget my name. I know that sounds ridiculous. What kind of idiot forgets her own name? Doesn’t knowing your name earn you a fifth of your SAT score or something? But it’s true. I think part of it is that Sarah Jackson is such a common name that there’s a whole Facebook Group for us. So to spice things up, and to help distinguish between the eight Sarahs who are inevitably also in the class or group or wherever I am, people have been giving me nicknames since I was a baby. I answer to so many different designations that when someone calls me by my original name, it sometimes catches me off guard.
But I think I sometimes forget my name for another reason. The thing is, our names serve as verbal replacements for us, so when people say “Sarah went to class,” they don’t mean the sounds “Sa” and “rah” went to class -- they mean I did. Me. This indefinable, human-shaped, five foot one and a quarter inches bundle of experiencing-experience. And that’s how names are supposed to work. Most of the time, we are so used to our names that we respond immediately and unconsciously. But every so often, I realize how arbitrary names are. I could have been named Emily or Phoebe or Maria. Would we be different people if we had different names? It would be more efficient and distinct, but we aren’t known by numbers. To call your best friend, “Person # 345,893,042,” even if you called him “042” for short, would feel as ridiculous and wooden as calling The Brothers Karamazov, Good Book #5392.
I realize I just went off the semiotic (and narcissistic) deep end, but names have such a crucial role in literature, and I have been contemplating them a lot recently. All of these questions intensify when we’re talking about books because authors select names very carefully because they are so seminal in characterization. Romeo and Juliet may have questioned the value of their own names, but Shakespeare’s most famous play is nonetheless known by them. If anything, children’s literature emphasizes naming even more strongly than adult literature. After all, so many books for children deal with characters who are growing up and figuring out who they are in relation to their community. In each of the books we’ve read so far in my Hollins class, the characters have consciously considered their names. They want to know what their names mean and who they were named after. They may be interested in making a name for themselves or they may simply want to hear someone they respect call them by name. In any event, these books agree, names are vitally important.
In one of the books, The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, the main character is orphaned as a baby. When a community of ghosts comes together to raise him, they don’t know his name. After the ghosts suggest several names based on people he resembles, his adoptive mother decides he “looks like nobody but himself . . . he looks like nobody.” So they decide to call him Nobody, Bod for short. But Bod’s nickname implicitly contradicts his given name: he is both Nobody and Bod(y).
In addition to his abbreviated name, Bod garners many other personal nicknames throughout the book from the various characters he befriends. Nicknames are, by definition, substitutes for longer names or for names which, for whatever reason, don’t seem as fitting to the person they identify. For people like Bod (and me), who have multiple names they go by, the question then arises, “which one is the most fitting? Which one really is my name?” Am I Sarah or Mouse or Smudge? Am I SJ or Sheebs or Sarah-Jackson? Or am I none of them, and they’re all just equally random words to help distinguish me from the other 6.97 billion people on the planet? Or perhaps, like T.S. Elliot’s cats, I have an “ineffable effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable singular Name” which no one knows but which somehow encapsulates exactly who I am.
These are some of the issues I was considering while designing my logo for my Professional Practices class. The point of the course is to create a professional brand for myself. If I can’t even figure out my personal identity, how am I supposed to choose a professional one? Which of my identities and styles should I emphasize?
None of our names completely expresses who we are, but each of them gives a hint, the way chapter titles do in books. Each one reveals a different part of who we are, and in the spaces between them, our story is written. A name grounds us and holds us up when we can’t tell whether we are Nobody or Somebody. They reassure us that we are indeed Somebody because there’s a specific word for us. Names make us tangible and personal.
In the end, I decided to stick with “Sarah Jackson” for my logo. That is my given name after all, and I’ve always been a fan of accuracy. It has worked well for me over the last 26 years. Since I’m planning on teaching, my professor encouraged me to have a simple, clean logo with a more academic feel. It doesn’t completely represent me or my art, and I’m sure it will change as my career unfolds, but as of today, it looks like this:
I would love to hear whether you think of your own name as central to your identity. If you had to create a logo for yourself, which of your names would you use? What font would you use? What colors?
Have a good week,
Sarah, Mouse, et al.
