Tonight, after an all too brief visit to the gym, and all too long stretch of indecisiveness in the grocery store, I walked home and passed a woman with a “4” in the middle of her forehead.
This was on a little white sticker, the “4” in black print.
And that is all I know about the woman. She was older and did not look so happy but beyond that, I can say nothing about her. Was the number on her forehead because a grandchild stuck it there? As some reminder to herself? As an accident caused by a supermarket price label-er from the year 1970?
Or maybe her name is “4?” Though I doubt this.
Yes, in the movies people sometimes come as numbers rather than names. Assassins and futuristic killing machines mostly . . . the kids from the lab in Stranger Things too.
But names matter. They stamp us for life, hold history and tradition, would be the gift our parents mean to bequeath. While humans who communicate with one another and live together in a world of other people need labels, we seem to agree a label of letters is better than one of numbers. It may just be a historical and semiotic accident, but all seven billion of us look to prefer a life as Felix or Ferdinand rather than as “55” or “2027.”
Or number 4.
In hell, W.H. Auden says, we do not have numbers, we are numbers.
Because they seek efficiency and sort for self-interest, the systems we live with get the name-number thing backward. For them, lives should be interchangeable enough to fit into what the mall offers, the admissions officer can rank, HR can move up or down. In our roles and our commissions we are case files and cogs and the less bandwidth our labels take up on the spreadsheet the better.
Never mind for the system that in our private aims and inner working we each live a unique existence. Hell loves a good algorithm.
And God loves all numbers! (Or so I intuit from what I make of what she’s revealed 😉)