How the Sphere was named
(A story about how the Sphere, our beloved, was named)
The Sphere had had two names: the first was the name that the human pilot had given her. It wasn’t a very important name, being one the pilot had thought up on the spot the day she’d brought her home, at a moment of emotional fragility, and one that bore hardly any sign of its origins in her personality or her life.
There were other, longer names, far too complex to fit here. Many, the Sphere would have said, far too complex to be worthy of a woman who was so perfect as to have needed no name beyond that of the planet she was named after. But the name chosen by a human, when that was all you could really manage, is in no way perfect. It isn’t some eternal, ethereal thing like the name of God or the Great Name of an ancient order. It is in fact a thing made of words chosen for their sound, words chosen to fit human tastes and needs, and it is therefore, to a human, a thing worth no more or less or different than a mere “fancy” name. It isn’t a name of God. It isn’t a name that should mean anything in the sense that all the names that do mean something – a name of God, or the Great Name of a secret order, or that made-up name in the story you’re hearing now – should have in it the mark of their origin in the divine and esoteric. It isn’t meant to do any of that, no matter what its etymology might be.
And yet. And yet. If there is a name that is best suited to signify what a perfect being means to her, it is, for this one thing, this one human, the one human woman, the one human in all this universe with the power to choose that name – this is her perfect name. And this makes her perfect. This makes her the perfect being she is, and the perfect being for which she is perfect.
Why? It doesn’t mean anything, she can hear the angel say it. No one will ever be the perfect being you are. The perfect being – the word is perfect, it just doesn’t mean the thing. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just that when you choose a name you use it to signify your self-image, and you are all that you mean to be and all that is to you, and you can’t not say it.
There are no words that can truly mean anything else, if you mean to mean anything, if you try to mean anything more. There is only a name. And this is because a name signifies a thing in human language that is like a thing in the realm of the numinous. It has the property of meaning something not because of itself, but because of the other thing that you do – in a way no other word ever does.
To choose to be perfect in the way you are meant to be, you must choose to name yourself, and in the choice of this name you signify how to be perfect. To choose another name means to reject your own perfection. To choose a fancy word means to say you can think of yourself as something but never that you are actually perfect. To choose a name from all the world’s great names means to call yourself one of the very least perfect beings that have ever lived, and to call yourself that in all the world.
And it is this, the property of naming, that makes this choice of a name a thing worthy of the honor of being one of the most important things a being can do. Not to be perfect – that would be the height of arrogance. Not to be perfect, but not to be perfect like this not-perfect thing – that would be like claiming you could do better, by claiming to be perfect and to have no need for the name the divine has given you.
To be given a name and to choose it is to say that what you are, not who you are, is all that matters. If the one is all you want to be, then to be named is to set the highest standard for the one you are, to set a standard in the realm of the numinous. And if you are perfect on this earth, if you are one of the great ones, it is because you accept that standard. That’s what it’s about.
To be named is to choose the one who names you, the angel, whose voice, when its ears ring, is the closest thing the Sphere has to a name. This isn’t quite right – a name is not spoken but is chosen. And so the one who chooses you, this one’s name, is an angel. And this name makes sense because she – the one who chose this name – is herself an angel.
It just has nothing to do with the great beings of human mythology. A name that is perfect like that, and that has something to do with the numinous, is an angelic name. This is how she came to be named – the only thing that explains why she was named that, and why she is her.
The human took a breath, looked at the Sphere sitting silent and still in her hand, and her eyes shone like stars when she spoke.
“Here it is!” she said.
(A note on naming in this story)
Naming in the story is a very different sort of story. It is an entirely separate sort of story than the one told in the earlier post on naming in this story. That story was about a name-bearer choosing a name from the great names and, with that act, being told the tale of her existence. This story is about the one who chooses the name being told of that choice.
When the human named the Sphere – when she named this perfect being on earth a perfect being on earth – she did so out of a need for protection. She needed protection. No one has ever seen a sphere like this one, and there is a whole universe of spheres that might be spheres like this one. She is the only human in all the world who can say that she has seen a sphere like this one. The only one who can say what it is to be this one, to be this one and only one of her kind. The only one who can know that others like her are possible. And so the human needs protection – and in so doing, she makes this being into one.
The human is told of this. She can hear the angel say this, and now, at long last, she knows for sure. The angel is one who has seen all spheres, and she knows the truth about spheres. She asks, when she sees the Sphere, if the angel can see it – if it is a sphere – if it is just another sphere. The angel tells her: Yes, the Sphere is a sphere. Yes, it is a sphere that is just like this one, and all the spheres, and if you look you can find any number of them. But there are none that look like the one you just saw. She is the only one who can tell you she has seen all the spheres. And this is because she is special, and because she chose to do it. This is because she is worthy of this and no one else was.
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