I Fell Off My Name

"The self that is wholly comprehended by civilization resolves itself in an element of the inhumanity which from the beginning has aspired to evade civilization. The primordial fear of losing one's own name is realized…"

—Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

I listened to the whole album fairly regularly for a couple of years or so, but didn't think much about the lyrics. But there was something about this one phrase "now you know how it feels to say I fell off my name" that grabbed me, but I was mystified as to what it meant. Until one day.

To make a long story short, I grew up Mormon, and over a long period of time a lot of things built up to one moment in which I realized that the religion was... let's say... less than true. As for why this matters to this song, there's a tradition of describing baptism as "taking upon yourself the name of Jesus Christ." When I lost my faith, I simultaneously lost the appellation. And not just "Christian" or "Mormon" moniker, but also the tradition that had been in family for a fair number of generations. It felt like I had fallen off the train that my whole network was built on, and that I didn't have anyone left. I had lost my identity.

The next time I listened to this song, I was stunned to realize that I actually had come to know how it feels to say I had fallen off my name.

For more, see: "when your religion is all DeMille." This guy is best known for The Ten Commandments (the classic). This line is a comment on how some people approach religion as in the way it is presented in that movie (or as in Samson and Delilah). That is, literally and dramatically, and even melodramatically.

In trying to piece together what parts of my Mormon heritage I could live on while embracing, and which parts I would have to discard, these lines fit well:

Just wash it down, wash the lies out from the real. With your doubts, it's all the same.

And it fits so well. I have no confidence in anything I learned in my Mormon upbringing. I still see that there are probably some good lessons I learned and good experiences I had, but it all just feels so misguided.

Anyway, this stuff sounds so pitch-perfect to my feelings that I decided to look up information on the guy singing the song. Lo and behold, this guy was raised Mormon too. He published in Dialogue for a while (a Mormon academic journal), and he's a professor at Yale these days.

see: "I write heresies and sign my name, publish and perish all the same."

("Publish or perish" being the old mantra of the yet-untenured university professor.)

Small world.

i think this song is beautiful but i can't figure out what the heck it means. sort of sounds like something about the relationship between our corporeal selves and our virtual selves?

How does one fall off their own name? It's not like it's that high off the ground. Wear a helmet. Or some elbowpads because I always fall on my elbows when I fall off my bike.