Your high school never taught you the secret science of names. You learn it from your breath. What you know without knowing how you know it, through the smokeless blue flame in your sternum. How to change the oncologist’s description of your wound to Healing River, and the title of your sorrow to the Fragrance of Falling.
You learn to name the kiss that created you, the Well of Parted Lips. Learn to call midnight the Undulation of the Panther. Learn sacred wariness, how silence stalks you. Learn that the absence of a story is the seed of light, sprouting a blade whose fierceness is defined by what is honed away, the fin of your pelvis slicing green oceans of moonlight before conception.
The Lord did not create this garden. You did, when you named Adam and Lilith, when you made up strange stimulating monikers, exciting the laser in your vagus nerve to burn the original hole in all your bones, not through meaning but sound, the faint but piercing Hum of blackness that maddens honey-making gods, until they spill the ointment of prophecy upon your soft naked crown.
Try it now. Invent a Word pregnant with a New Creation, a name that is magic precisely because it has never been spoken. Elves and jinn know this, as does every baby, gibbering bija mantras of ineffable power from hieroglyphs hidden in her sacred physiology, cave paintings of yak and bison on the hollow of her femur: “Um, Phwat, Bhang, Mama, Da.” Well done, child!
“Belial, Archon of the Abyss, Baoumiel, Angel of Your Left Nipple, Oroarothos, Ruling Power of the Bellybutton, Beelzebub, Keeper of Your Missing Rib, Sandolfon, Harp of Unending Exhalation at the Moment of Death.” Your mouth is a broken measuring cup that pours a terrible sea of names. And you learn from your own holy babble that the true Word is listening.
Name your fear by hearing its fingernails scratch the dark glass of sleeplessness. Hear antediluvian species groan from your chthonic shadow. Hear voluptuous saints and mystic criminals sing praise songs from the silence that tried to erase them. Hear a multitude of fatuous Zeros echoing the indigenous One. And if you truly listen, the background sigh of the Big Bang in your body.
Sometimes forgetting the Name is remembering God. You learn it from your breath.
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