Who Am I?

I never intended to be so many things. There is so much to do, so much that’s worth doing, there are so many possibilities, I can’t do just one thing. I want to be everything. I want to know everything. I want to believe in everything. I want to see and do everything!

So much you can imagine, a thicket of contradictions that would drive you to madness and back again, if it worked, or to death if not. I survived, and here after all is just some of my life’s work. To paraphrase Bill Watterson in Calvin & Hobbes: I have been put on this Earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now, I am so far behind, I may never die.

By way of explanation then: my name, Evans, descends from an early memory – my father, telling me in a middle-class fifties Queensland accent that the Bloody English stole our name when the bastards usurped the old country. He made it EE-vfanzs like a war-cry, not the repressive-short E /ɛ/ and a /ə/ of English. That would be Ifans in the original language, not Evans. You can imagine one bureaucrat asserting “That’s not how you spell Ifans” and the next “That’s not how you pronounce Evans” in two very confusing but official stamps.

Saying this here doesn’t mean I’ve changed my surname, or that I am trying for more than one identity; just that my old man and I do finally understand what that story meant, and with it the long musical vowels and layered consonants of Welsh: scripted in the international phonetic alphabet, it’s /^|i:vænz/. The webpage URL encodes a long e = i and voiced v = f as in E-vans.

So yes, I am stealing back that lovely, bold, ancient name, and for a while I may have to be both. But call me Gaelen, ask me anything: michaelgifans@gmail.com

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