Why Dunbar?

So today my lifting partner and good friend asked me where the name Dunbar came from. Well, sadly, there is no real story here. I guess I became aware of the name from the 19th century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

According to Wikipedia, “Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War … Dunbar's work is known for its colorful language and use of dialect, and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure.”  

Here, if you like poetry, is what some consider to be his most important poem:

ODE TO ETHIOPIA

O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.

Sad days were those—ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spred its leaves so fresh and young—
Its blossoms now are blowing.

On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbour;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring their forges smoke,
They sit in honest labour.

They tread the fields where honour calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.

Be proud, my race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.

Thou hast the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism.
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.

No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forgot the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
and proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory.
 
So with all this said, let me tell you that I am not really referencing Paul Laurence Dunbar through the name, I am simply speculating on how the word Dunbar entered my psyche. I must have studied him in some literature class and remembered the name.

So upon further searching Wikipedia, I now know there is also something called Dunbar’s Number. Wikipedia reports:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical … limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than [Dunbar’s number] generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group … Dunbar's number has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known [in the past], a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
 
I’m not so sure I can manage 230 people in a stable social relationship. In fact, I’m not sure I even know what a stable social relationship means. My wife will tell you that I can barely remember the way my immediate family is related to one another. On the other hand, she is remarkably good at relating how some tangential acquaintance is socially connected to us and where said person grew up, how many siblings they have, the major and minor joys and disappointments of said person’s life, and sometimes even detailed information about said person’s extended family. Amazing to me, but second nature to her. Even though much of what she can do is technically excluded from the system, maybe she should be called “Dunbar.” Her number is way above 230; my number is about 12 I think. But this too is not the answer to “Why Dunbar?”

The answer is that a few years ago I was a passenger in my wife’s car and, as I sometimes do, I was acting silly with the kids. Out of the blue I pronounced that they could no longer refer to me as Dad or by any other name. That from that point forward I would only recognize Dunbar as my name. When they asked why, I simply said, “Because I’m Dunbar.” So this is the origin. If you want to ask, and for those who have asked, the response remains the same, “Because I’m Dunbar.”

The story goes that when readers asked William Faulkner for further explanation of his works, he would tell them reread, that all the explanation is in the work. After all discussing art risks making the art banal: Discussing Dunbar risks making Dunbar banal.