Many years ago, in that time before cell phones, I was driving up Route I-95 when a familiar voice came on the radio singing “With a Little Help From My Friends.” The problem: I could not come up with the singer’s name. I could see his face on the album cover (which I owned), I could reel off other songs on his albums (“Dear Landlord,” “Feelin’ Alright,” “Bird on a Wire”), but I had an absolute block on his name. I had to pull over and use my flip phone to call a friend and get the answer: the fabulous Joe Cocker.
I relate this episode to suggest that not all such lapses in memory are age-related, although it can’t be denied that they seem to occur with greater frequency as we grow older. Memory loss may be too strong a term, but call it what you want, the inability to connect a name to a face or a voice is downright irritating.
I am talking about a name you “know.” This can be seen as a data retrieval breakdown: the information is up there, stored on one or more neurons, but is not immediately accessible. Sometimes the name comes up — picture those little neuronal librarians scurrying through the packed shelves of your brain — but only after the moment has passed and the information is no longer useful. Sometimes it doesn’t come up at all, and the face joins others in a blur, as Ezra Pound wrote: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough.”
What makes this so disconcerting is that we all like to be able to identify people. The most basic common decency is calling someone by his, her, or their name. Seeing familiar faces is part of the joy of living in a small town. Calling out a name is admitting someone into your community.
And it’s not just people. The natural world is full of things that benefit from being named. To be more precise, we benefit from being able to name them. For example, calling every gull a “seagull” elides the very real differences among the more than half-dozen species we have on the Outer Cape: some resident, some migratory, each with a different niche or lifestyle. The same is true for sparrows, of which more than a dozen species can be seen throughout the year.
I have written about this before (“The Futility of Naming,” Oct. 18, 2023): assigning a name to something is the beginning of knowledge. “A name is a mirror to catch the soul of a thing,” writes Susan Brind Morrow in The Names of Things.
It is remarkable in this “age of information” how deficient we are compared to those who preceded us, lived closer to the land, and had more intimate familiarity with the animals, plants, weather, sea conditions, and other factors in their lives. There was survival value in this knowledge then, and even now there is a richness in knowing. Being able to identify wild mushrooms is certainly crucial if you are going to ingest them, but knowing the names of various native plants can enrich a walk in the woods.
Common names can be silly — a pretty little yellow flower encumbered with the moniker “bastard toadflax” — but the Latin of scientific names can be quite beautiful, like the song sparrow’s Melospiza melodia. Then there are the insects — another world, mostly unknown by name to most of us. An ecologist told me that we have up to 11 different bee species on the Cape.
A walk on the flats also exposes us to the many animals that live between the tides, from horseshoe crabs to tube worms, and they all have names. In a study I helped with, Agnes Mittermayr of the Center for Coastal Studies identified more than 400 species of tiny sediment dwellers. How does she tell all the minuscule worms apart? “I look at their little faces,” she says, “and examine their mouth parts.”
And those bland barnacles attached to rock jetties? Apparently there are at least three different species, according to the Center’s Tommy Tucker. You can differentiate them “if you stare at them a lot,” Tommy says, adding that they are really “adorable.”
From Joe Cocker to the people you run into at Stop & Shop to barnacles on a rock, life presents us with a rich array of beings. It helps if we can remember what to call them.
