Shakespeare invented it for a Jewish girl in A Merchant of Venice. When I was fifteen I received the Oxford Complete Works from my 20 year old boyfriend for Christmas. I relished the texture of every syllable. Because I am a touch/feelings=color, and pain=color synesthete, texture is very important to me. If I could perceive colors with words, the play would be gold. Here's why:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
I read it cover to cover, but there are only two plays I've paid much attention to since: A Merchant of Venice (of course) and The Taming of the Shrew. The one which made my name is important to me because names are so important, too. My interest in the other is purely didactic. Shrew is a name I take for myself. But I tame myself, now. I do not need to be tamed. Maybe I, for a woman, for a man, for a human being or cat or carbon based life form, have an unusual ability to compartmentalize my feelings. This has broken the hearts of nice boys who liked me, because though I am kind, I have no intention of emotionally investing in anyone nice. If you lined all of my love interests up in a row, I would pick the mentally diseased drug addict over the super nice doctoral candidate every time. If you knew my narrative you, like I, would see the evidence of this story arc. It re-makes itself over and over again. I don't have feelings for nice guys. Nice guys are my brothers, and to kiss them is incestuous. There are a great number of good reasons for this behavior, which is why I intend to separate my love interests from my life interests for as long as I can bear...for the sake of my daughters, who have not yet been victims in their childhoods. Who must never be victims if I am to reverse the cycle in of my history in their lives. They will never see Mama reject the right choice. Because they must grow to make right choices. So Mama. Shrew. Bitch. INFP. Woman Who Does Not Care to Let You Know She's Probably Got A One Up in the IQ Department. These are names I accept for myself. But I am still kind. I am still sweet-natured, too. I'm a nice single mom. But I do not intend to get lonely about it.
But back to names.
High school is a confusing place for a girl from a trailer park who felt victimized by "ability grouping." There were not people from my class in said ability group, or if there were, there were very few. I was the president of a few clubs there, and an over-achiever in areas which interested me. I do not, however, test well. I only made a 30 on the ACT. I say "only" because, while a 30 is a perfectly acceptable score, the scores I made on the Language Mechanics and Reading Comprehension sections were almost perfect. There was more than a ten point spread between those scores and the score on the Science section. I do not have a difficult time understanding science, if it is interesting. The problem is, I find science just about as interesting as doorknobs.
When I made this score, my high school principal suddenly became incredibly interested in what I was doing with my life. I was just a weird poet-actress-Christian girl who he probably thought was on drugs. But after that score, he started calling me Jess. Not Jes, as my friends would have known because my friends knew my disdain for superfluous letters, but Jess. Jess Generic. Jess. Generic Jess. He did not ask for my permission to do this. He simply started calling me Jess. It drove me crazy. Not literal crazy, but a little crazy. Jessica is a very common name, Jess is a very common diminutive. But I didn't want to be considered common, because I knew I was not. I was only as common as I let myself be, and those antisocial personality traits made me disdain him even more for not accepting me until I had over-achieved.
My maiden name starts with a B. I share this name with my mother and two of my siblings. The culture of the town in which I grew up meant that most people knew my mother was "crazy." And crazy is such a dirty, dirty word. She is not crazy. She suffers from a chemical imbalance in her brain which causes her to make poor decisions. For most people, this can be remedied with a simple combination of medications. For my mother, who is what they call "treatment resistant," these medications do not always work. She has also had electro-convulsive therapy and currently has a Vagus Nerve Stimulator, which is a fancy pacemaker for her brain.
Anyway, when my mother divorce this B fellow, she fell apart. He married his high school sweetheart. They publicly humiliated her at football games. My mother became a whispered wisp of womanhood. A rumor. A pariah. I am not my mother, and I will not be those things. After I got married to Mr. W., I kept my weird last name. According to the federal government, my last name is still B. When I registered for a tax ID number for my record store, they made me hyphenate because my W name had become something like an alias. So I have been a hyphen for years. Now that I am getting divorced, I'm making it official. My degree will say B-W.
I used to write under B-W. My friend Russell gave me a nickname. Be-dub. I will continue to use B-W until I die, because it is a name I have chosen for myself. My ex-stepdaddy might have been a sack of shit, but my siblings are not. My ex-husband might have done many, many things wrong, but his stepdaddy did not, and neither have my daughters. So names, names are a complex system of symbology. Names are semiotics for beginners. I am Jessica B-W to those who don't know me well enough to call me Jes. Be-Dub. Or Jes Be-dub. But if you are reading this from a facebook link, you have seen more sources of shame than I wish you had, and for that reason, you may call me whatever you like.
Except crazy, behind my back.
Or bastard, to my face.
Though jokes are funny when they're funny. To my face, please. That's all I ask.
Because those are not names I have selected, and names can hurt the feelings of any carbon-based life form--no matter how profoundly compartmentalized her feelings may be.
