[Originally posted Oct 6th 2005; while vacationing in Vermont, we decided on the name Lucy for our first child, for a girl. I don't remember the name we chose for a boy.]
We have decided on a name for our child, due on December 29th.
Lucia. Lucy.
The name means light in Latin. Lux. The word "lucid" comes from there also, meaning "clear." St Lucy's day is right around that time of year, on December 13th. It is "the year's midnight," as John Donne says in his "Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day."
From the darkness of the year will come light.
We were really stumped for a long time and even got some of those Baby Name books, which helped. I forget how we stumbled on the name Lucy, though. I've always loved that poem and used to have it memorized.
We wanted the name to have some kind of meaning without being flaky. We wanted it, for example, to be something you could prefix to the expression "..., it's time for dinner!" or "..., stop spending so much time on the internet!"
St Lucy was a Martyr born in Syracuse in the third century, back when Diocletian was persecuting Christians. She was, at one point, condemned to a life of imprisonment; but God caused her body to become so heavy and dense as to be immoveable, and so she couldn't go to the place of her defilement.
Many of the statues of St Lucy show her holding a bowl or sometimes a plate with a pair of eyes in them. Diocletian's subsequent persecution (he really hated Christians...) of Lucy was to have her eyes gouged out. But her orbs were miraculously restored by God. Light and vision. Blindness and sight. Innocence and strength. Rods and cones.
St Lucy played an important role in a novel I read recently that I liked very much, Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey. It was about a guy who makes a living "acting" as a statue and who collects random things. On one occasion he visits a church and is drawn to a statue of St Lucy. As he is gazing at it, he sees a neighbor of his, a woman named Anna Tap who is losing her eyesight. She enters the church with a friend who is guiding her. She wants to visit St Lucy too. She says to her friend:
Describe to me the last saint on the left.
It is a young woman, Miss Tap.
It is Saint Lucy. What is she holding?
A plate.
What is on the plate?
A pair of eyes.
At which point Anna Tap says, in a chapter called "Sacred Monologue," "I come here for those eyes. I have been looking after Saint Lucy for several months now. When I first saw her, she was like the others, she was so ill and frayed, and her paint was peeling everywhere." But now Saint Lucy offers hope for Anna's own suffering.
In Sweden, there is a custom on St Lucy's day that the daughter of the house walks around with a crown of candles and wakes the household. I can see why in these Nordic countries a ceremony of light would be so important and ritualized, not to say why the entrance of light would be personified.
Lucia is also the name of James Joyce's daughter, though we don't want the Italian pronunciation. Plus the connotation is odd. Lucia Joyce suffered from schizophrenia, a fact that brings with it a certain amount of awkwardness for reasons better left unsaid. Joyce loved his daughter very much and struggled with her illness: he struggled to deal with it and he struggled to understand it. There is a famous story of Joyce talking with Karl Jung about his daughter's situation. He asked the famous psychologist what the difference was between how he used language (in works such as Finnegans Wake) and how his daughter used language in her disjointed, disconnected, personally allusive way. Jung responded. "You dive. She falls."
While those around him were trying to shield him from his daughter, Joyce took the duties of fatherhood very seriously, trying to see a connection between his own art and her illness. He resisted when others tried to hospitalize her, even though it was probably in her best interest in the long run.
Come, light.
Daughter? Cadent a latere tuo mille, et decem millia a dextris tuis, tibi autem non adpropinquabit malum.
