For today we have naming of parts.

Naming of Parts  (that's a link, by the way)

All memoir is naming of parts. What you really want to say will inevitably be too big to just tell, because in order to do that right you must first piece it together and understand it. Stories, especially our stories, are made up of innumerable little parts.
Mark Doty could have simply told us: "I'm irreconcilably estranged from my father because I'm gay and because I publish his faults to the reading public." Instead, visited his childhood school. He tried to find the home he lived in when he was seven years old, and he relived the details and moments of his adolescence bit by bit. Those parts, put together, let him see and understand what his life had been and still was, and they also let the reader enter into his life just a little by seeing the parts fit together one by one.
For instance, before I can look back and say, "I was a reckless child," before I can use such an all-encompassing word as "reckless," which in my case I have not got yet, I must have naming of parts.
There is the part where I ran away from home and strolled about the streets of my little Guatemalan city for the afternoon, taking a particular expedition to the ancient prison to peer around its stone gateways in hopes of seeing grizzled prisoners shuffling about the courtyard in chains and squinting at the guards.
There is the part where I stacked every mattress in the house onto my bed so I could reach my high window, then climbed on top of them, my treasures at hand in a Snoopy duffel bag, and prayed with all my might that the house would spontaneously burn down so that I could jump out the window, wreathed in flames and smoke like some kind of brave heroine. Or at least like Nancy Drew.
There is the part where I wandered off from where my father was with the ropes and harnesses and decided to climb a cliff by myself with no equipment but my old sneakers. Or the part where I walked six miles through the veldt without telling anyone and ended up jogging in controlled panic, looking behind me and singing "American Pie" very loudly to keep the baboons away. Or the part where I thought it was a good idea to drive from Florida to Nebraska all at once without stopping.
Those are the parts of recklessness, which in my case I have got.
We process reality by naming of parts.
If you are to tell your story you must first put it together from its various parts so that you can see it. If I am to read your story in such a way that it becomes mine, too, I need to approach it the way you do. In pieces that fit together to make an image of a reality that existed and will exist still in your mind and in mine. Which in our case we will get, together.

The majesty and burning of the lobster's death

Well, maybe I don't want to "Consider the Lobster"! Have you "considered" that, Mr. David Foster Wallace? You with your three-word name that must be said all in one, like bon appetit or menage a trois, but far less enjoyable. Maybe I don't need to think about the questionable questionings of the people who actually have the money and the initiative to locate and purchase a live lobster.
The one time I ate lobster was in a Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, where I munched on a bit of my mother's leftovers under the hard glass stare of the baby alligator head I'd bought in the restaurant's gift shop. It's not that I wouldn't have cared at all about the horrid fate of the marine crustacean I was chewing on; it's just that I cared a bit more about the fate of the baby alligator whose head still sits on my brother's bookshelf back home. The alligator has a face.
I could put a lobster in boiling water and watch as its futile claws clambered against burning metal of the pot. I could stand and listen to the clattering of lid and the whistle that isn't the lobster's scream after all but means death all the same. I do not say that I would enjoy it, but I could do it.
When I was young I washed the dishes after dinner and I would stand very still and hold my father's big French knife after I had dried it, staring at the inert blade in my hand and at my little brother playing on the floor, and know in an instant certainty that a twitch of my hand would kill him.
That certainty is why I do not care about the lobster's death. If I myself (and not just soldiers and not just madmen and not just children with guns in war-torn countries) have the capacity within a single twitch to kill a human being, I cannot stop to consider the lobster.


And anyway, I don't really like lobster.

P.S. In reference to David Foster Wallace's footnote: The idea that the use of the words "beef" for the meat of a cow and "pork" for the meat of a pig originates in some inherent need to separate philosophically the creature from the comestible, although intriguing, is not irrefutable. An explanation for the use of these words can be found in the socioeconomic climate of medieval England, in which the words developed into their current state.