No matter how random one may be in divining names there is always a basis. The basis narrows down the randomness to certain categories of interest. After all it can take an eternity to be satiated with a name that is based solely on absolute randomness.
In the case of naming this blog site, my co-author Juju and I found ourselves in a ruthless situation of possibilities. No directions to take only Juju’s initiative to begin with the word “talk.” She Googled “talk” without knowing exactly what to find but allowing the wonder of the World Wide Web to lead us somewhere. But the wonder of the triple W turned out to be a wander into a mass of related articles, word origins, translations but before we could even get lost in the virtual jungle of “talk”, we jumped to the next word: “self.”
Juju attempted to be specific in our search by settling for the Spanish translations. Trivially for “Self” we got “mismo.” Quite interesting but not good enough since it’s registering that hyped up black and red dog tag in my head. I had to ask why Spanish? Why opt for the foreign when we could go local? In the course of discussing these, Juju has already searched for “ourselves” in Spanish too and some other words that vaguely rest in the recesses of my memory.
Apparently foreign or local was left hanging as we saw Marquis de Sade’s Juliette sitting on our table. We picked her up and enjoyed being random in flipping through the book’s over a thousand pages. Once we’ve settled for a page we gave a number for a line and another for a word from the line. And we found ourselves landing on “asses” now we can’t have that or can we? No. It could’ve well been Marquis de Sade’s humor, or Juliette’s or chance’s.
Putting aside Juliette, I got Anais Nin’s Henry and June from my bag and after a few trials, settling for the random choice of page 75, 13th line and the eighth word. However, the eighth word’s been cut off so we moved back within the line and there it was “opium enigmas.” Juju and I stared at those words then looked at each other and we knew we found the name.
The basis of our search revealed to us when we finally found what we wanted. It was all spontaneous, mostly done at random but if we hadn’t turned to our interests (neither referring to opium nor enigmas) but the literary work of Anais Nin, then up until now we would still have been searching.
As to the significance of Opium Enigmas, we’ll have to go for another session of randomness but never without a hint of basis.
Mudchocolate
December 30, 2009
8:22pm
