What’s in a name? or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Impending Collapse

The origin of the name "Animal" (audio originally recorded for the The Cult of the New Mainstream podcast)

I was all set to go out on a date at the local rock gym with some Egyptian climber babe that I met online on one of those lousy dating apps. Her name was Mayil, but everyone knew her as Nancy. So, Nancy and I were all set to go out, until she asks me, “Hey… is Animal your real name?”

“Never met an Animal before?” I dodged. “It’s better than ‘mineral’ or ‘vegetable’, though, just barely, I’ll admit. I’m also allergic to green peas. Very strange.”

After that, crickets.

Maybe I was too cheeky to be of any use to her, which is probably true. I can be very cheeky. Maybe I struck her as some sort of escaped mental patient. Maybe she was one of these babes who’s addicted to those over the top true crime podcasts that plenty of babes seem to get their sick little kicks from all the time. Turns out, there’s a growing subspecies of modern American babe that is into schmaltzy country tunes and the episodic rehashing of grisly crimes. I get it. Life can sure be more titillating when around any average corner there might be a crook or creep chomping at the bit to get their fat sweaty fingers all over you before leaving you for dead in some derelict basement. Or, depending on your mood, maybe there’s a kidnapper down the street stealing neighborhood children for Satanic blood rituals, arranged on the dark web and paid for in untraceable crypto. Later, the kid’s corpse turns up mutilated and bloated, floating facedown in the river. Never let your guard down, this is middle America! What a bunch of sickos. Reality, proximally and for the most part, is a lot more prosaic.¹ No one wants to rape or kidnap 99.9% of people. We’re too boring, too tired, too fat and sad to be of much use to anyone but our own doughy friends and fam. At least around here. How ignominious is the bell curve! Too normal to even be the target of a sicko crime. And just who exactly has time or energy to kidnap anymore? It’s one day into the next, gone to work, home, and then into one semi compulsive, self-soothing behavior or another, rinse, repeat. We lose ourselves in the machinations of servicing other people’s needs—this is what we call ‘work,’ your basic J.O.B. We absorb other people’s opinions, their rhetoric and posturing, their comedic timing, their affectations of their constructed identities, through our interactions and whatever flavor of media we consume. We outsource our understandings, because… the alternative is elusive. And times when things don’t feel right, we find someone or something to blame. You know, those other people. The dumb ones. Who are not like us. I don’t fault anyone for anything though. The way things are doesn’t bother me, not too much anyway. Every morning I raise the white flag and declare a truce with the general mob. The Earth sometimes feels like a ridiculous, but let’s be honest, incredibly beautiful, little life raft adrift in an unimaginably dark ocean. We stumble upon our circumstances honestly. I don’t fault anyone who wants to blame capitalism—or any other goddamn -ism—or white men, or corporations, or their fucked up parents. Blame everyone, that’s what I say. Guilty as charged. And I certainly don’t fault the true crime-loving subspecies of the fine American babe for her obsession with the macabre, either. I get it. It’s natural to be drawn to violence—it’s our birthright. Violence is right there in our blood.

Would you go on a date with a guy named Animal?² I’d probably do it, but my name is Animal, so to me it’s not that out there. How closely do you identify with the name your parents gave you? Or—if you are one of the rare birds who got their handle from some other person, perhaps a name appointed to you by a court of law, or maybe by a drunk uncle Ralph, who you wound up with as your legal guardian in an unfortunate and even more unlikely turn of events, when your dear tired mom and dad died suddenly in a freak explosion in the maternity wing of the local hospital as the postpartum meth addict in the room next door accidentally blew up a wall of oxygen tanks while trying to burn rocks in a glass pipe, moments before your parents were to decide on whether to call you Maude or Caprice, and so instead, you lived another life.

What's in a name? Some small arrangement of sounds by which you are taught to respond and take notice. To the armed thugs who keep the peace, pave the city streets, and dictate the terms of your continual surrender, your name is little more than a stand-in for your bonafide designation—your serial number, which gets casually tossed around under the euphemistic label “social security.” Who’s security is at stake here? Yours or the social body? I have a sneaking feeling it’s society writ large, in an Orwellian sense, that this unique identifier is meant to serve and secure. But what do I know? I’m just some unspecialized yahoo, tucked away under a rock, way out on the dusty rim of the dwindling American empire. It’s probably above my pay grade. Serial numbers aside—it‘s your given name, and not your number, that usually winds up as the primary identifier for this strange and irreducible process that you tame by calling “your life” —as if anyone could own their life so easily, as by prefixing it with a possessive pronoun. Life—as if that one syllable was enough to specify the whole messy shebang. It's a nice word, life, but somehow four letters seem insufficient.

There’s a whole lot going on under the hood in this business of naming things, if you want to ask me. A name is a label applied to each of the tiniest humans while they’re fresh from the womb, still in a daze and mostly unaware of everything going on around them, just trying to focus on the blurry faces and incandescent lights.³ There are cultures that assign half a dozen names to a single face! I once met a woman in Mexico City who was called Maria Doña Ortega Castillo Sábado Domingo Lunes Martes Miércoles y Jueves—I mean, not exactly, but her name was so long it felt like I was being introduced to an avant-garde coordinate system to pinpoint a body’s precise circumstance in an ever-expanding universe. Like, if you looked into her name long enough, you could know not only exactly where she came from, but, if you were precocious—just exactly where she was going to wind up.

Your name, my name, the names of the features on the landscape, names as labels, names as personal brands, seals of familial origin, demonyms,⁴ aptronyms,⁵ and autonyms.⁶ We have names for everything and names for nothing. There are first names, surnames, maiden names, middle names, hyphenated last names, anglicized names, patronymic names, designations, suffixes, call signs and namesakes. And then there are all of the taken names—the noms de plume,⁷ names for witness protection, pseudonyms, nicknames, cosmetic names, name changes for gender transition, married names, aliases, freed-slave names, code names, spiritual, cult, and religious names, honorifics, and the nom de guerre.⁸ We have names that signal and names to constrict, names to stumble over during roll call, names to light up amphitheaters across the wide-eyed nation, names that mock, and names of honor—names to engrave on heavy stones set in grassy fields to mark the location of the dead.

Because I lack imagination, I will often fall back on talking about myself and my own experiences rather than making up a proper story, because, like I said, I lack imagination. So for a boob like me, starting from exactly where one finds oneself is fine, and fine, it turns out, is good enough. Maybe together we can learn something about what’s in a name if I tell you a little bit about how I’m called, and how it got to be that way. For starters, my number is 327-47-5143. How it rolls so easily off the tongue! I think I’d like to just go by that someday. Maybe put it up above my bed in giant sparkly letters, as a celebration of my apparent individuality. I think, eventually, my friends, eventually—maybe—would take to it. Maybe I would need to move away, to another town, at least a few hundred miles away, and make a whole fresh go of it. Hi, I’m 327-47-5143, and I’m new here. I’m a writer. I don’t want a day job and I only kind of want a house, and mostly the latter only because there are so many rules against just fucking camping, living in a little shelter or what not. A pup tent out in the hills would be fine. Suits me. I’m a writer, I’ll say, at least on the days I can get myself to write, instead of just flogging myself inwardly about being an awful hack, until I wind up crippled by anxiety and take a nap. It’s nice to meet you, my friends call me 327-47-5143. If you ask me, it makes sense to go nameless. To leave all that baggage unattended in the terminal, that’s what I think, if you want to ask me. Nobody was asking me anything, though. But, think of the utility! Without a name, no one could say things, like “Damian did it,” or, “Damian is a retard”—they’d have to be content with something more nondescript like a disapproving grunt. Who me? You got the wrong guy. There was this documentary about people with the last name Hitler. I never saw the film, but I read the blurb, and that got me thinking how I should definitely add a thought into this essay, or chapter, or whatever the hell this is, about that concept—how sometimes a name is completely changed by association, nothing even to do with your own choices. Can you imagine that? Being in the Hitler family? How ape!

As it turns out, number 327-47-5143 was actually the four billion, three hundred seventy-nine thousand, thirteen thousand and forty-second human to be born on Earth, which honestly made it a little hard for me to feel too special when my birthday rolls around, even with a unique serial number and all, produced and recorded for me by the government and everything. I remember the goddamned big deal they made about taking all our fingerprints in the first grade, "to help protect us from kidnappers," what a load of malarkey. More likely, statistically one of the current crop of first graders would someday be on the FBI's most wanted list for one thing or another. Taking our fingerprints to protect us—if I knew then what I know now my eyes would have probably rolled right out of my head. To the other serialized humans in my general vicinity, human number 327-47-5143 was born under the banner and known colloquially as “Damian James O'Shea,” which, so I’m told, is a proud Irish name. O’Shea, like Shea Stadium, only with an extra O apostrophe right up front, I guess to signal how goddamn Irish my mom’s family was.⁹ I was given the first name “Damian” by my mother, wonderful woman that she is. She named me after a man she didn’t know personally, but had heard of, a man known to some as “Saint Damien of Molokai” or, simply, “Father Damien,” as he was also called. This Father Damien guy was of Belgian descent and served as a priest in the Roman Catholic¹⁰ Church. He died at age 49 of a flesh-eating bacterium technically known as Hansen's disease, but more commonly as plain ol’ leprosy. Who was this Hansen person anyway, I wonder? So this guy, Damien of Molokai, my namesake, as it were, perished of an infection bourne by this flesh-eating bacterium in a government mandated quarantine on the fifth largest Hawaiian island, which was then home to a kind of viral internment camp known in the parlance of the era, as a “leper colony” during the late 1800s. That’s about all I know of this man who I was named after, although, my name isn’t even spelled the same as his. When I hear that story I think: sure sucks for all those lepers. But, everything happens for a reason. At least, I hear a whole lot of people saying that to me recently. Must be above my pay grade.

The way my birth name is spelled, is with an A at the end, and not with an E like good ol’ Father Damien. With the A-ending it is closer to the original Greek spelling, Damianos¹¹ which means “to tame,” “subdue,” or “overcome.” So, by birth, I was given this label, knowingly or not, of being the “one who overcomes.” In retrospect, my saga has been a journey of overcoming many things. Who’s isn’t, am I right? My life has been a sequence of acts to untame myself, to peer with temerity into the dark center of universal consciousness—our consciousness—yours and mine, dear reader.

When I was a boy, the name Damian was still very uncommon. I hated it. I wished I was called Mike, Dave, or Joe—anything to help me blend in. Something monosyllabic and simple to pronounce that the rakish leading man from any old TV series might be called. Jack, maybe. At the time, the primary cultural touchstone and most notable reference to the name Damian came from a so-so horror movie series called The Omen, in which a young boy named Damien (spelled with an E at the end) was an incarnation of pure evil,¹² the Son of the Devil himself, ol’ Lucifer or whatever. In the movie, this evil prick Damien is such a little shit that his babysitter hangs herself at his fifth birthday party, like, because she just can’t take it anymore. I wondered if perhaps this was why people sometimes seemed not to like me, as if by instinct. I often have thought maybe people just don’t like my face. Do you ever get that? Where you meet someone and just immediately don’t like the look of their face? All these years later, I wonder if people didn’t like me too much because they were uncomfortable with how my mind worked, like it was somehow free of some of the usual constraints. Or maybe it was because I was uncomfortable with how we all were supposed to behave like nothing unusual was going on all the time—when in reality every damn thing is just completely inexplicable, downright screwball. Or maybe it's just because I’m so damn cheeky. It's a pretty serious transgression to reflect to someone a truth about reality that they are not willing or ready to confront, because subsequently, even seeing you becomes a reminder of their own willful limitations. But it’s hard to say, because I’ve also noticed a lot of people don’t seem to pay too much attention to anything except themselves and what’s in store for them. Follow your nose! That’s what I say.

As for the middle name, James, and my erstwhile surname, O'Shea, for these, I have my maternal grandfather to thank, James T. O’Shea, rest in peace, God rest his soul, and all that. At his funeral, I got to carry his coffin into St. Patrick’s Church along with three other men of the family, pallbearers we were called, in the tiny town where I grew up. This was a pretty big deal to me. I was too sad and tired of death when my grandmother died a couple years later to make it out there for her funeral, though I loved her just the same. James T. O’Shea was the child of Irish immigrants and was raised in the Bronx. He married young and became a metal worker, staying at his job for close to five decades, welding instrumentation panels and compartments for Naval ships, and fabricating all manner of precision, made-to-order steel. He was a recovered alcoholic with a potbelly and the hard, calloused hands of a lifelong blue collar man. He met the world with a generally affable disposition, was well-liked in the community, enjoyed John Wayne movies, loved my grandmother, and had a sweet tooth he’d indulge when she wasn’t looking. When my grandmother Susan would chide him for bringing home chocolate, halvah, or salt water taffy, he would report, “They were completely overstocked on this stuff, I felt so bad for the sales girl,” making it into some kind of charity work, eating all that chocolate. Having lived for the first 6 or 7 years of my life under their roof, I loved my grandfather very dearly, and it still gives me a kick to carry his first name around, sandwiched in between my two other appellatives. Good old James T. O’Shea was widely loved as the patriarch of the family and as a result there are all manner of James’ in the family tree: uncle Jim, cousins named James, James as middle names, and so forth.

There is also the tale of how I lost the name O’Shea and came to live as a Taggart. The familial moniker Taggart came to me by way of adoption, in a courtroom in Santa Fe after my mom got remarried and ol’ step dad agreed to adopt us, the poor sap. My older brother Josh¹³ and I were adopted by my stepfather Liam P. Taggart and so we got stuck with the name of his father’s father’s father, or however that goes. Taggart is a surname of both Scottish and Irish origin, originally it was McTaggart, which is itself an anglicization of the Gaelic Mac an t-Sagairt, meaning "son of the priest". My stepfather was a quiet, conservative man, the adult child of alcoholic parents, and the first in his family to graduate from college. He became a nuclear physicist with a degree from the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca. My stepfather spent his career working for the United States government in one of the nerve centers of the military-industrial complex, way out on the dusty periphery of the nation, in the unassuming hamlet of Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the A-Bomb. And so it was in the shadow of the greatest destruction the world has ever seen that I spent most of my formative years. The surname Taggart, was given to my stepfather by his biological father, who was also a hard-working Scots-Irish American, and a veteran of the Second World War, Thomas Taggart, who spent his later years working in a print shop until he died of cancer when I was a young boy. I remember him smoking and coughing. His countenance was pained and worldly. He always scared the crap out of me as a child for some reason, his stature and comportment was intimidating. I knew him very little, mostly before my stepfather and mother were married. I never knew my own biological father, a man named John Malcolm Jones, who I met only once, long after I was fully grown. How biodad came by his names, I can only guess. Suffice it to say that the name Taggart was applied to me by way of a court proceeding, when I was perhaps 9 years old, at a time when I had already very much come to identify with my mother’s maiden name, O’Shea, which people always got wrong, until I explained to them, “you know, like Shea Stadium, but with an O up front.”

I remember carefully practicing writing out my full name, Damian James O’Shea, in those grammar school writing trainers, those notebooks with the comically large rules. By 8 years old, you’re already quite invested in an identity. There’s this other piece to the story of taking on the name Taggart: I hated it. I hated the Taggarts, I mean not really, maybe hate is too strong a word, I didn’t wish harm on them or anything, but the thought of becoming one! It made me cringe. I was loath to become associated with the Taggarts. They reminded me of Roald Dahl’s Twits, which, if you don’t know the reference, was a kid’s book about a hideous, vindictive couple living in a brick house with no windows that continuously played nasty practical jokes on each other. To me, the Taggart clan was a population in decline. They were like lumbering hippopotamuses on plush sofas, thumbing through Cat Fancy magazine and shouting at each other about the whereabouts of the television remote, surviving on a diet of stewed cabbage and oozing day-old sugary cakes. It seemed like all of them were on disability and probably about to die of heart disease at any moment. It was the last gas of the post-War slump. I was friends, by default, because of our parents' interactions, with a couple of the Taggart children, kids who eventually became my cousins through marriage and they were OK. It takes a while for life to do its dirty work and really run a person into the ground. So, when I heard my mom was going to marry into the Taggart family, I was like, oh… shit. In my stomach I had this turning feeling as I thought to myself, not me, I’ll always be an O’Shea. Didn’t loyalty mean anything anymore? I’m not joining the Skeksis. It was still a year or more after their marriage that we went to court about it all and did the whole legal adoption thing. I remember the stodgy judge staring down at me and my brother from across the cavernous courtroom, “Do you want to be adopted by this man?” I looked at my brother and he looked at me. What choice did we have? I felt like I was being reassigned from Gryffindor to Slytherin. (But, in his defense, good ol’ step dad really did a pretty OK job. It wasn’t great, but dang, probably a lot better than some people get. He was a decent guy, and so were all the Taggarts, despite how I felt about them. That’s something else I know: I’m wrong about things a lot.)¹⁴ With time, my disconcert with the reality of bearing the name of a clan that I knew with certainty to be a branch of the human tree in the throes of decay towards annihilation, even this ignominious sting dwindled. At some point I decided, fuck it, it’s really not a bad brand. Damian Taggart. Sounds like a guy with some mettle. Alright. I can work with that.

So now, after having spent most of my life under the heading “Damian Taggart,” it’s odd that I should decide to take on yet another name, and one significantly more outlandish, for no other reason than how simple a label it is: Animal. I take this as perhaps the most rote and perfunctory a description of a person as one could want. Animal, as a label, is lower even than species. I began using Animal as merely a nom de plume, after it was given to me by a dead man. And as a gift from a dead man, there was really no way I could give it back. Have you tried to return a gift to a dead person? It’s a tricky business. The weird part though is that the dead man was me. There were times that I pushed myself so hard, pushed myself to the point of near madness and physical collapse in pursuit of understanding the boundaries of my consciousness, as far as I could explore them in thought or physical exertion. One day, as if on some rollercoaster of a drug trip—only in reality I was completely sober—I nearly collapsed after looking into the mirror, seeing in place of my reflection some aberrant hallucination, a kind of hazy miasma of myself spread out over time, my face simultaneously expressing every quality and emotion I have ever, and would ever, countenance. I can’t even really describe the intensity of this experience, but to say that it was completely overwhelming and not at all comfortable. I thought I was losing my mind. In place of my face I saw my temporal entirety there in a hallucinogenic liquid instantaneousness from birth through death, expressed at once in a grotesque amalgam of the human being in toto—all the misproportioned and prepossessing passion and revulsion of it all at once. It was too much to handle the pain, regret, exaltation, and joy—this human thing that we are, all in summation. I nearly fell to the ground, catching myself on the bathroom counter. I shuddered at the thought of possibly having broken my psyche. I let out a pathetic kind of whimper, realizing I was pushing too hard and for a brief minute I wondered if I might be losing my mind, “You’re... a fucking animal,” I stuttered, speaking only to myself. I was often downright cruel to myself, setting the bar always out of reach. It was as though I could for an instant clearly see everything my form would ever be, up to and including the instant of birth and death. Was I having a psychotic break? I felt for a moment the reality that you could go over the edge and maybe not come back. Nervous that I had been pushing too hard for too long, I thought that I had better back off on the intensity of my mental and spiritual pursuit, if I wanted to stop short of going completely insane. But it was exactly this that called me, to get close to the edge, to teeter on the brink and peer out into the darkness. But I still wanted to come back, to exert whatever limited control over my mental faculties I could, to be able to participate in this performance that we call sanity. It became clear to me around the age of 20 that you can think yourself into mental illness. That it’s etiology need not be genetic or even environmental. One could simply push their own conscious mind in ways that would more or less break it. The thought is as simple as it is profound: that what we believe to be true causes psychological and physiological changes. That we can alter our natural capacity and resilience, perhaps even permanently, through activities as commonplace as rumination or superciliousness.

We are born to imitate, hardwired to pattern ourselves in response to what we see around us, absorbing the opinions and behaviors of others through media and interaction. Each input affects us in precognitive ways, that is, below our conscious awareness. These external influences fuse with our own instinct to produce an intuition about sanity. Different “sane” groups hold disparate interpretations of reality, some believe in the Prophet Muhammad, some in science, some in astrology, and so on. Any of these sometimes conflicting views might be viewed as equally sane, so long as their adherents behave according to convention, which is to say, in a manner that is conducive with coming together. It takes only a shallow investigation to see that the contemporary view on what behaviors might be considered sane are fungible. Any behavior that is bestowed with a convenient morality narrative that serves the purposes of some group that is simultaneously accredited in the halls of power¹⁵ may become exemplar of “sane” or “moral” behavior. This is at least a sufficient basis for explaining why for the Greeks or Romans pedophilia was both accepted and commonplace, or why the members of the Tutsi tribe could be butchered so readily with knives by their neighbors in Rwanda in the 1990s. It is critically important for us to understand that genocide is always carried out by sane people. It’s one thing to consider these examples, cases in which we see a clear moral difficulty, as in the case of adult-child sex or mass murder, but what of our everyday choices? Unsurprisingly, it is more difficult for us to accept that the morality we take for granted in our everyday experience is similarly arbitrary at times even at cross-purposes with our own vitality. It doesn't take too much imagination to conjure alternative morality stories that would turn sanity on its head. Such alternate morality narratives are what define a subculture and are often at the root of conflict. How one must smile at the image of a doctor in the 1930s prescribing cigarettes to a patient! Indentured servitude… slavery, anyone? What is sane today that will be madness tomorrow? Our relationship styles? Our addiction to distraction? The construction of our communities? The sheer number of us? Are we progressing toward something higher, or is it merely our tastes that are changing?

For me, the journey to the peripheries of madness wasn’t a question of belief so much as a deliberate attempt to think beyond what is possible to think, to “try on” everything and anything intellectually, to push myself to extremes, to explore the antipodes of thought, and the intensities of being. I employed many methods, including processes of dialectical and moral inversions. I am intensely curious about understanding what things are changeable in the human species and what things are fixed. This curiosity found its fuel, I am certain, in the copious pain and discomfort I have experienced in my life. The thought is: surely, this human world can be improved! Though I accept the world as it is, I am often dissatisfied with it, as I am with the performance of the global community. This may seem a paradox, and indeed it is—acceptance can only be paradoxical. The practice of acceptance extends not only to the world as-is but also to my own dissatisfaction with it, and further to my desire to figure out what is changeable, and how it might be changed—for better or worse. I am curious about new ways of being, even simply to break up the monotony of formulaic living. I despise fixed systems, philosophies, and creeds. Though I also wondered, from time to time, if I was indeed mentally ill. Especially when I found myself in throes of agony and exhaustion. I would search the internet for clues and possible diagnoses. I definitely came back positive with symptoms of major depression, bipolar, borderline personality, anxiety, PTSD, and chronic and often debilitating insomnia. There’s this real problem though with the way the world presently understands mental illness: it exists only in symptoms. There is no blood test for depression. What is all too often lost on people on both sides of the psychiatrist's desk is that often, a maladaptive set of reactions (aka the presentation of symptoms) might be the natural response of an organism to their circumstances. How often is our treatment of psychiatric illness simply geared at suppression of “symptoms” when those so-called symptoms might actually be the healthy organic response of an individual to a social environment that itself is incredibly suboptimal? My view is that the thought, I have this medical condition called depression, or bipolar, or whatever, might also be correctly viewed as a desperate attempt from an organism to manifest better ways of living. The pain of not changing has to outweigh the pain of stepping into the unknown. And that’s only part of the problem with our medical view of mental illness. Characteristics that are simply unconducive to being a docile follower, employee, passive voter, or consumer of goods are also characterized as disorders. As a teen I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, with the hilarious acronym O.D.D., by a court ordered counselor (a story for another time) but to my taste this is an example par excellence of the kind of bureaucratic quackery that turns the distinguishing features of healthy personalities into disorders to be quashed and medicated. Let the children be hyperactive! They cannot pay attention in school because it is painfully boring. Their instincts are calling them back to the forest. A dark force inside us all pulls us into the endless factory lines… Look within for the enemy, it is only ever there that it must be vanquished.

I have long been suspicious, even judgemental, of people who rename themselves, or vacillate between names, or even those who go by their middle name rather than their first—generally, I perceive such behaviors as indicators of a lack of integrity, a sort of a tacit confession of squirreliness, lack of chutzpah, or strong-mindedness. No doubt my over-critical views on this matter were informed by having various names thrust upon me—as in, I unconsciously had a “man up” sort of attitude about it: take what you are given, tough it out. I did. But, despite such defensive and perhaps ill-conceived misgivings about personal rebranding, the more I sat with the memory of that moment of dissociation during my momentary collapse in the bathroom, the more I liked the sound of that whimper, you are a savage fucking animal. No more, no less. Animal Taggart. I’ll take it, I thought.

Humans, we are taught, are somehow more than nature and the products of our minds are somehow unnatural, the conventional wisdom goes. It is through this lens that such postulations as “invasive species” make any sense, and that we might determine this or that chemical compound to be “unnatural.” In a prosaic sense, this view has much utility. It allows us to differentiate between natural systems and behaviors without human meddling from those that have the pervasive and paradigmatic fingerprint of our species. While this utility is clear, what is often lost to us is that it is, at its core, a misunderstanding held only for the convenience of certain communications. The truth is that nothing is supernatural. All activities of the human animal are also themselves purely natural phenomena, indeed, even the things we ascribe to the realm of spirit, these too are aspects of nature. Nothing is outside, beyond, or above nature. We use those distinctions also as mechanisms for convenience in our speech, so that we can hold a certain kind of discourse about nature, or about spirit versus material and so forth. It is a limitation of our tools for understanding that causes us to conflate these things (and so much more). I’ve written at some length about humans as animals, as nature, often relegating humanity at the species and geopolitical levels to little more than a dull series of massive insect hives, because when viewed from such a lowly station, many of our most definitive characteristics as an animal species come sharply into focus.¹⁶

Animal is a pretty unusual name, which is surprising given how many goddamn animals there are on this rock. It's a more memorable brand for my work as an artist. Animal, as a name, might suggest something fun or freewheeling, but also wild, unrefined, or even savage. What an ape! Most importantly to my work, it is several orders of magnitude lower in both status and specificity from a given name, or serial number for that matter. It speaks to a deeper connection to all ambulant life. Like all named entities, like you, I too have been diminutized and corralled under the crude application of a name. Yet, at each rechristening in my life, I chose to accept the labels as they were applied to me, despite any baggage. After all, what gives any symbol its power is repetition. Repeated use is the secret thrum of illumined blood that enervates a symbol with its power. Repetition is the source of the magic of the obvious, the understood, the recognized. Repeated use is far more important to the success of a brand than some inherent worthiness, design, or euphonics. (Though, a nice ring or a clean presentation never hurt.)

Animal, as evidenced by the memorable muppet of the same name, is also lighthearted and playful and I like this aspect of it because despite my occasional nihilistic outbursts, what I really want is to create a thing of beauty. To exalt the impossible dream world that ushers us forth. I used to think, when I was young, what else could even make sense in this inexplicable reality other than pulling from within oneself a beautiful and moving song? My image of myself was of the average boy strumming simple strings and straining with a plain and hamfisted determination to move the still spring air with a harmonious vibration that said sweetly to the world: I am here, for just this ephemeral instant, and for better or worse this is my song. I will sing it with everything I’ve got, letting whatever I am bleed into the aria, in spite of the bite of raging wars, in spite of the violence of being, in spite of the gulags and the private prisons, in spite of the heartbreaking grandeur of the sun that sets the land on fire—and not just in defiance of these somber faces of divinity but because of them. For me, Animal is my nom de guerre—it is my war cry. It is the thrum of a primitive drum beat that echoes forward and backward in time, the sum total of all of the hearts that have ever, or will ever, beat. To call myself Animal is a means to psyche myself up, to say: Yes, I will posture like some kind of ridiculous cartoon villain or superhero; I will transcend the mundane by being even less of an individual; I will overcome by identifying beyond species, beyond life even. I will take as my own the will of the black mold that eats away at the substructure of our cities. I will take as my own the will of the forest and the mountains. To be called Animal is a creative blank check that I write for myself: permission to step further into the space beyond whatever I have been in the past, to say yes to eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, and instinct. To be lower than an individual identity, lower than a citizen, lower than a member of a race, lower even than species—to be subterranean, to be everywhere and nowhere. Animal is a hall pass to walk corridors of inappropriate and unpopular thoughts, to deal with what comes up, however aberrant or uncomfortable. Animal is a reminder to myself not to be merely afraid and acquiescent, although there are times where both are virtues, but to be intellectually and physically fierce. Can I be free, even in my cage? Is it possible for the lion behind bars to be freer than the zookeeper? It is reminiscent of the abrogation of given names that was practiced in the Black Panther movement in the 1960s, as with Malcolm X, rallying under the prophetic motto “by any means necessary” for this is a life of means and never ends—what's important is how we move, not where we end up. There is so much undiscovered sweetness waiting to be tapped from the tree of life through the practice of deeper presence. To notice that thought itself is a process of inquisitive collapse, always and immediately underway in our energy-conserving brains, reducing the inextricable and the infinite to mere symbol, bleeding the effervescent unseen spectrum of reality into a bipolar and monolithic wash—and it is this that we esteem as knowledge. There is no enemy—only the mechanics of biology. Is there a way of being that loosens the tether of the gravity of abstraction from our collective imagination? I see that the human spirit has already outgrown the historical moment but that we have not dared to step outside…

If the realm of the human is truly to be higher than that of the animal, in habit or habitat, as our vanity and pride would have us believe—then let us at least attempt to manifest a human world that is noble, that does not enslave spirit to narrow ruts of specialization and convention. Until such a spiritual revival takes place en masse, let me be inhuman then, let me be animal—for there is more freedom in the life of the common hummingbird than there is for the Crown Prince of Arabia. Let us make a first effort to rise up at all! I shun the status we ascribe to the human. At the risk of annoying attentive readers, I will repeat a phrase I spoke in La Tierra Salvaje: the human is not the measure of the cosmos. I cannot even claim to know my own mind, let me then be honored with the lowly status of animal. I know this much: that to name something is to reduce it. Through naming we draw divisions that separate facets of the totality. Names offer us the comforting illusion that whatever we have cut from the cloth of the cosmos may be finally understood, as though essence could yield to the mind of man. Behind every name stands an irreducible and unprecedented reflection. Why the rush to make a name for oneself then? For me, freedom in spirit is enough. To some, my name may be mud, but my friends—they call me Animal.

1. Heidegger, that crotchety, abstruse Nazi bastard, always got a big kick out of saying this phrase, “proximally and for the most part,” where he could have just said, “mostly.” I guess this sure rubbed off on me, because now here I am saying it. What an ape!

2. What about a 40-something named Animal with a reputation for being headstrong and unreasonable, who’s spending down a dwindling nest egg in order to support himself writing odd autobiographical books and making art without even the slightest hint of long term plan? Every woman’s dream, uh huh. The Zen monk of honest nihilism. Living that Art Life, at last.

3. The astute reader will realize how hard it is to find a reasonable use for the phrase “fresh from the womb” and award my pluck and tenacity in this heady pursuit.

4. A ‘demonym’ is a name connected to a physical place, for instance, Santa Fean or Johannesburger.

5. A so-called ‘aptronym’ is a cloying, to my taste, somewhat desperate example of academic vocabulary meaning, a name that is “amusingly appropriate.”

6. An ‘autonym’ is the “true” name of a person or group, often used in reference to an author who uses a pen name. Or, for example, how a German would not call themselves German, but rather Deutsche.

7. A pen name, as taken by an author.

8. A war name, as taken by a warrior. For example, “Subcomandante Marcos.”

9. Parenthetically, Shea Stadium was home to the New York Mets, which was a baseball team, I think. And also the New York Jets, which might have been a football team, but I’m not really sure. Honestly, it could have been a goddamn hockey team for all I know. They were both pretty big deals when I was a kid growing up near the Big Rotten Apple. Pretty sure Shea Stadium got wrecked and turned into a parking lot for an even more important ball field, probably called The Buy Now Pay Later Field of Iffy Dreams. I’m not a sports fan, but I think it’s cool if you are. In fact, I’m a little jealous, because I see the excitement and joy it brings to so many people and I suppose there is something maybe wrong with me, because I just look at the little people kicking and throwing balls on the TV screen and think, man, who gives a shit? But, it’s a good time I guess, and big money. A lot of things are big money that I just don’t connect with. I once went to a little history museum in a small Turkish town in southern Turkey where they had a really interesting exhibit on the History of Sport. At first, and for many centuries, it seemed like sporting events didn’t wind down until someone got killed. People beat each other to death. Sometimes they were fed to lions. Sometimes the winner would be tied between two chariots and pulled apart while the crowd ate corn dogs. When you think about it, war is kind of like the ultimate sport, right? I think I’d like sports a whole lot more if people still died at the end of every game, like, the New York Mets played ball but also brutally clubbed the away team to death and they had to mop things up at half time. How much more interesting would that be? Outfield better stay sharp! Who knows. I’m just spitballing. Shea Stadium was dismantled where it stood in the NYC borough of Queens and sold off piecemeal to collectors in 2009, but this was all more or less meaningless to me since I never enjoyed team sports, probably because no one in my family followed sports [we didn’t even have a TV] and because I had weak eyes, and further, because I had such a damned hard time paying attention. The one time I tried to learn baseball, I got bored and stopped paying attention and took a ball right to the face. How the mind goes where it will! To some people—to wit, bosses, teachers, coaches, and so forth—this deficit of attention is a deficiency. But for my part, I prefer to think of it as grace.

10. The word “catholic,” lower case C, means “universal,” which I rather like. Maybe we can use it in this way and reclaim it from Rome for our own purposes. How ape!

11. The name Damian is also linked to the Greek goddess of fertility, Damia.

12. “Pure evil,” maybe an oxymoron, I guess. Maybe the whole goodman universe is one big oxymoron.

13. The human formerly known as my brother Joshua, now goes by a stereotypically female name after deciding to “be a woman.” He became she, or they, I’m not sure, and he went so far as to legally change his name in a court of law, for a second time, the first being our adoption, to one he made up. He doesn’t speak to anyone in our family anymore. Not for the last 15 years or something. I respect his wishes in this manner. And that’s that.

14. I want to linger on this point for a minute, because I’m not sure it belongs in the main text, so here’s another one of these goddamned footnotes (and, as a kind of footnote inside of this footnote, I know what you’re probably thinking: oh, how cute that he’s using all these pseudo-ironical footnotes like David Foster Wallace, that darling of the literary world and post-birth abortion, who sacrificed himself in the name of intellectual causticity. Even if that wasn’t what you were thinking about these footnotes, let me assure you that I am not trying to emulate Wallace, not even a little bit. It’s more a problem with how my brain works, let’s call it an etymologically true dilemma, in which my writing ability and skill with regards to structuring a narrative are so incredibly rudimentary that I am frequently faced with a problematic choice, namely, that I leave out whole sections of the story entirely or shove them ungraciously into these annoying footnotes. Ultimately, if my brain had its way, the whole cannon of my writing would be an endless descent into footnotes, like a Mandelbrot set of parentheticals that never close, that just probe ever further downward into the black molten womb of gravity itself.) I want to tarry here a moment and go deeper into this idea of my repulsion at the image of the Taggart family. It occurs to me that part of the reason I found them to be so aesthetically displeasing is precisely because the differences between our families were so slight: the lackluster reality of their lower-middle class existence and mean genetics really drove home exactly how little my own family had to work with. How the plight of others reflects our own! We find particularly abrasive our own hideousness reflected in the reality of others. The problem with the Taggarts wasn’t just a problem with their family or my own, it was, and is, a problem with America, and to an extent the entire human world. Behold the consummate lack of resoluteness, grace, self-reliance, and courage in our midst! We are only partially conscious creatures striving always to maintain the demands of our basic existence, living in the shadow of our own biological imperatives, many of which remain largely hidden to us, lost in the recitation of platitudes and the quasi-assurances of human vanity. Take disdain as an announcement that some unpleasant aspect of yourself is being partially unconcealed from the muddle of regular obscurity. Disgust is a revelation about our own character.

15. For example, the government or a dominant religious institution.

16. I once started a clothing brand called Human Insect, but like so many of my short-lived ventures, I never put sufficient capital or sweat into it to get it off the ground, beyond a web storefront that sat for a few years like a decaying digital ghost town.