In the winding paths of a dream, where time glides on roller skates and logic rests on the green felt of a billiard table, cushions whisper unheard stories.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” 1
These words echo as the ancestral image in the mirror questions itself and its own existence.
“Just like married couples,” I thought when I woke up from this dream.
Married couples, now united by an amendment to the law in a tangle of several surnames that tries to unwind like a ball of yarn, are faced with a fundamental decision: “Move forward or get lost in the past?” Their children, heirs to these chains of names, dance on the carousel of identity, not forwards, not sideways, but in a spiral that turns endlessly on itself. Is this law reform a step forward or a dance around the fire of tradition? Even the Swiss cheese model, perforated and yet complete, leaves us without orientation in this labyrinth of identities.
In this maelstrom of countless surname combinations, where every surname holds a universe and every point in it is an undiscovered star, we search for meaning - perhaps in vain, or perhaps it is everywhere: in the spaces between the surnames, in the soft whisper of silence, in the echo of a famous name that resonates through eternity.
Does our existence and our self really depend so much on our first and last names?
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Diane Arbus ↩︎