Naming Miru

The Polynesian goddess Miru

It is our invitation to the cultured realm of existence: giving her a name. It is the first "act" and symbolic gift we bestow upon her. Naming has played an important role in every religion, and newborns have almost always been named after something or someone. Naming preserved a lineage, honored the founding elders on their way to becoming mythical figures, invoked superstition, and often predestined the faith of a child. A lot seems to be at stake, and given our felt responsibility to pass on a certain intellectual witticism, we could not simply pick from a list of common names.

It was of course obvious that we were going to call Miru, Miru.

But it hasn't always been that obvious. There must have been a time when she wasn't yet called her name, or her name itself didn't even yet exist. We cannot reconstruct that time, but we can embed her name in a body of associations to fortify the tendons of meaning (de Saussure). This inverse archeology of meaning will make clear how our understanding of her name has always depended on the associations our cultures attach to it, and there is no "pure" signification.

In pure Korean, Miru means "vast field" or "poplar tree". The Internet gives us the following meaning attached to this tree:

The ancient Celtic alphabet is comprised of 20 Ogham letters, each assigned to a particular tree and each with a particular symbolic meaning. The poplar is assigned to the Ogham for "E," Edad, and represents victory, transformation and vision.

The spirit of the poplar tree is most concerned with the earthly and mundane matters of the people in her environment. She teaches us how to endure the hardships of life and to keep our roots strong. She will help us overcome our personal fears and self doubts that may block our endeavors. She reveals to us lost and forgotten memories of our dreams through the gentle whispers of her leaves with every breeze. 

If we take the Hanja / Chinese characters Mi-Ru, we get

美婁

or "beautiful star".

In Japanese, miru means "to see" (and is also the name of a singer).

In Basque, miru means "kite".

Latin is close: Mirus means "wonderful, marvelous" - the origin of our "miracle".

In Czech, we have "miru" meaning "peace".

In Polynesian mythology, Miru "a goddess who lives in Avaiki beneath Mangaia. She intoxicates the souls of dead people with kava and then burns them eternally in her oven (also called Avaiki). The Tapairu are her daughters. Also see Tau-Titi." (wikipedia)

MIRU is an acronym for Medical Imaging Research Unit.

The miru is an aboriginal atlatl or spear thrower.

Miru is also a small village in Iran...

...and a sparkling wine from New Zealand.

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A sample meditation

I found this prepared on my computer today. Could you help me explain what it means?

meditation

You see the elements of your memory tumbling down in front of you, in a great column of swirling hot air. You can recognize people, scenes, ideas that have been important to you.See them all fall down. Seperate yourself from them all.
You are tumbling with them because you must be. No grip.
You see them moving upwards again: the smiling, loving faces, memories, ideas, all you ever lived for.Upwards or downwards movement makes no difference.

March 11. Santiago sweet.

I decide to meet someone today I call that person Sara because that's what first comes to my mind. She was not on our overnight bus to Santiago de Chile, I didn't meet her on the streets of this five million metropole with the 02 area code, neither was it the woman that sold me a ticket at the musuem entrance. She just fell down from the sky, so to speak, almost like a fictitious person. Well I said doesn't that hurt, intentionally using the negative expression to show that I had presupposed it would hurt because falling from the sky normally does. In her case, it obviously didn't hurt but how could I know? Besides, when I would have known all about her being like a feather and all I would never have talked to her and she would never have known about my existence and a lot of beautiful interaction would never have occured. So I asked her if she was hurt and looked at her arm to see if there were bruises and scratches but she was immaculate. She just smiled and told me her name was Sara and I thought something new is happening here. Well Sara I said aren't you hot, knowing that up there in the sky the temperature is a lot lower (I've been on an airplane more than once). Again I supposed Sara would feel in the same way I do, and again I was wrong. But she obviously liked my wrongness, because she smiled once more. She wasn't hot at all, she said she was rather cold because where she came from they could heat each other with their souls. I looked at her and laughed, I told her listen I put you on hold because I just wanted to let her wait. She was really beautiful and I was attracted to her but here I felt I had some power and couldn't resist to exert it. Frankly, I wanted to blow the cold air of our human condition in her face, instead of being heated up by her superhuman prettiness. Just wait for me Sara, just wait indefinitely until I come back.

Words should be fresh when they are written down. But the freshness of words cannot be measured by their individual smell or structure like fruits. They are all connected and build up a giant web that can have a dusty or a fresh aura. And there is another particularity. One moldy word can increase the freshness of its neighbours.

In Santiago we spent a night with Ronald, a Dutch translator about my age who travels with his boyfriend and works in every city for a couple of weeks before moving on. He used the same computer model as I did and would probably have the same shoe size too. It was kind of funny, like meeting someone who actually is in your skin. "How do you do it?"
We walked around a bit to explore Santiago since we were all new to the city. Ended up with a meal from the micromarket consisting of paltas (avocados), bread, bad wine, lettuce, yoghurt, and cheese. The couch was tough to unfold but it worked out fine in the end, whining and cracking like the odd coincidence of our meeting. Reflections about this were due. At least I could say something about the meaning that sticks to almost everything like dripping honey. Every cracking sound, the position of the chairs, the purring of a cat, the smell of onions that you're supposed to cut, the height of the ceiling, the bubbles that rise to the surface of your tablewater, the spiral form of the light saving bulb, it all has some gigantic symbolic meaning, it's satisfied with meaning like dough is satisfied with eggs. Don't touch anything please, the meaning might squirt all over the place.

February 8,9. Pombal built this city.

Marquise de Pombal is the Hausmann of Lisbon. The streets of Rossio are laid out like a chessboard, like Barcelona or Manhattan. That's Pombal's work. They have Pombal-style houses that are made of wood in order to make them earthquake-proof. In the 1755 earthquake the city was almost completely distroyed by the tsunami and the terrible fires. The story goes that in the neighbourhood that was spared from the fire, Alfama, was the place where the most sinful people lived (prostitutes). That made it very difficult to show that the catastrophe had happened with some hidden intention of the Almighty. The ingenious writers of a theodicea had a very hard time trying to do so. Everybody knows that. They did a good job rebuilding the city.

I spent those days writing. The memory of them was dissolved in the hot air where they were created. I didn't care. Nothing happened. Probably I had breakfast, and dinner. Probably I had nice conversations, introducing myself as the traveling writer again. The skin of a day's memory disappears at night; I am like a snake. But the written words remain. They become a thick winter coat I will need when I am old. That's my personal way to protect against the risk of getting old and being eaten alive by the sensation of utter meaninglessness. I don't save up money, I save up words. Reading them when I'm grey, reading them aloud for my old friends, will console like the looks of a beautiful woman could console us in our virile days. Ah, that souci, that unability to plunge into life without fathoming its depts, that vain wish to influence what will be left of us when we close our eyes for the last time. Does it matter if your dead head sinks into a pillow of down or on a dirty rag? I know it doesn't. But I also believe that what Heidegger tells us about Sorge is true. In some way or another we are always taking care of who we become, no matter how laugable and utterly futile this care is. And so we live a life of sex, drugs, rock'n roll and aloe vera skin cream to keep our skin moisterized and young. There will be an end to all this, but at least we can smear aloe vera all over it.

February 6.

Consumption and religion. If you buy a cup of coffee or a Patéis de Lisboa, you just put your coins on the counter without any other emotion than the great taste of this combination. It's my reason (in fact, one of my reasons) to be here in Lisbon and write in the February sun. But if you buy bigger things you know you can't afford to buy just as you please, if you realize the money you buy that thing with is finite, you think it over, you ask questions about the quality of the product. You wait until they convince you to buy it. Until you really believe in it. The act of paying is like a little prayer. Yes, there you tied yourself to your finite being again, you bought some specific product and not another one. That product is charged with meaning now. It is almost electrified with meaning. The money, the abstract Number has become product. You have taken a step in life, you climbed the stairs. The product has delivered you. when I bought my camera, this feeling did not really arouse me. There where but a few remnants of it that still made me euphoric and I wrote more pages than I normally do. So with that new camera I promise I will take pictures and exhibit them here.
Because I must take that travel thing seriously. I don't want to consume, living off what I have piled up in the past years, burning away my earnings, not earning anything new. Must not all newness be deflowered by the price tag society puts on it? I need labels. It doesn't matter how good or bad the narrative is, how good you reader find the metaphores, or the anecdotes. It only matters that it has a label, a price tag. Eleven ninetynine, that's the highest bid till date. Anybody offers any more? I felt I had to write to earn my camera back. At least to provide some justification of my being entitled to it. Because at birth we were entitled to nothing, and we are not entitled to anything we didn't explicitly suffer for, as the Calvinist mantra goes. At the same time, the clurgy is entitled to everything. But let's say I'm not entitled to it. So what?

That night in the hostel I was offered the very last bed they had available. It's always like this. It's doesn't frighten me, all the luck. It gets boring, I get used to it. I shrug my shoulders, take it for granted. I can squeeze little meaning out of it, and I know one day it will dry out. All the luck in the world, all the most improbable coincidences combined, the angelic gestures of all the selfless beings that by coincidence unheard of cross my path will then not be able to produce meaning. At the end of a lived life there awaits us only dullness, only shades of grey that leave us unmoved, detached from the sweating cycle of life itself. It will dry out at the end of our days. But it is juicy still, o yes don't you worry. So a woman with wonderful curls in her black hair enters the hostel room and asks me for a pen. Yes I say you're lucky you asked a writer and I pull out a pen while I say that, handing it to her. A writer she asks interested, how nice! O yes, and I travel in order to gather some inspiration. How nice! by the way, my name is Verity. Like truth? Yes, like truth.