"Making The Struggle With Darkness Narrower": Lists And What They Tell Us About Ourselves

You may not realise it when verticalizing vegetables for your weekly grocery shop, but list-making occupies a strikingly important role in our lives. Over the course of human history, lists have made significant, if under-acknowledged, contributions to human consciousness, to cultural developments, and to the nature of communication.

The earliest complete writing system is thought to have been developed in ancient Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, 3000 years BC. The very earliest forms constituted – according to the anthropologist, Jack Goody – clay tags or tablets inscribed with names and objects; effectively a ledger system born from the economic and administrative demands of bureaucratic Mesopotamian society.

These ‘lists’ pertained to receipt-keeping, allocation of resources, payments, and records of expenditure. Goody says, “It is not literary works, then, but administrative lists that dominate the uses of writing in ancient Mesopotamia” (The Domestication Of The Savage Mind, 1977). Lists are, it would seem, as representative a case of developments in human consciousness as other early modes of writing.

These auspicious matrices provide a glimpse into social hierarchy, custom, and the nature of all kinds of exchange, both interpersonal and more broadly socioeconomic. Lists helped to formulate the foundations of an epistemic architecture that we still use today. As early as 3000 BC, texts intended for study were discovered; these practiced the grouping of information into what might be considered an early conception of ‘subject matter’. Much later down the line, these systems of classification would result in the first encyclopaedia.

The creation of early list-like systems marked a seismic transition from oral to written communication. For the first time, written forms lent physical significance – material externalisation – to things otherwise ideated.

Lists, however, differ from speech in one crucial aspect: the material nature of a list means it can be revised or reordered. Its contents might be retrospectively dismantled and rearranged in a way speech cannot. What facilitates this is, in part, is a list’s inherent lack of context. It hangs in space like a mobile; but does not necessarily betray a clear sense of its governing logic – of what holds it together.

I found a list I had written in my diary recently which read:

Ads

Library

Christmas

Karst

Nuala

Colours

George, present

Retrospectively, I wondered whether I had placed these in descending order of importance. Or whether they were things I’d known I would forget; or things I wanted to discuss – I couldn’t tell you. For all the apparent conviction of the neat little matrix, I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what held those things together. They were suddenly very disparate despite their objective order.

As Goody states: “Listing encourages the ordering of items, by number, by initial sound, by category etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility, at the same time as making them more abstract.” In other words, lists might emphasise the boundaries of categories at the same time as they call into question the nature of the classifying system.

Lists are, peculiarly, at once haphazard and formulaic; the order of things can itself become an item of information when understood correctly, according to Eric Griffiths. But the order is not always clear, objectively, retrospectively or subliminally. Lists force us to question our dialectical urges.

Humanity’s incessant list-making is symptomatic of our desire for some kind of straightforwardness, or program of priority. Lists seem both to reward and frustrate this impulse – they provide the illusion of order, whilst calling into question the relatedness of things. There is something strangely human in this desire to find a governing unity where none might exist.

Lists abound in modern day society. Jump onto the App Store and a litany of apps pops up espousing the virtues of list-making: To Do List & Planner, Todoist, Todoery, Wunderlist, TickTick… The list really does go on. Bullet Journaling – a tool to boost productivity – rose steeply to prominence around 2018. It’s inventor, the digital product designer, Ryder Carroll, formulated the method to combat his own struggles with ADHD.  It is a utilitarian approach to embracing the blank page, involving a system of lists and indexing to break down tasks into manageable chunks. Carroll had, “Come to understand his notebook as a crucial tool for the mind, a way to turn intangible thoughts into more concrete written ideas that could be more easily manipulated.”

It is one thing to have an idea, another to develop it, and Bullet Journaling was scooped up as an ‘easy’ solution to remedy organisational inertia. It’s still booming now. Perhaps, then, the appeal of list-making lies in the promise of future action.

Bea Wilson notes, “The brain craves completion and a list provides a solution.”  In her London Review of Books piece ‘What Dettol Can’t Fix: A Life In Lists,’ she explores the list-making of Elizabeth Young, a diplomat’s wife living in the latter half of the 20th century. It is a touching example of an individual’s efforts to repair the disjointedness of life through lists, even as everything else falls apart (Young suffered from severe depression and post-natal depression throughout her life).

Young’s lists – which she made constantly – are instructive and poignant signposts to what life must have been like for an unhappy, rich, married woman living in the mid-20th century. Many are comprised of objects befitting her social circumstances: furniture to be acquired for their regular international moves; food for stuffy but glamorous parties; the clothes that would be worn at those parties. Objects of the upper-middle-class furnish her world: “Eiderdown, potpourri, cigarette case, backgammon, small table, hotplate.”  Things that would be noticed, and noted, by others.

In some ways Young’s lists provide a strangely chilling insight into a culture where the objects that surrounded you were taken as a measure of your character. Wilson notes the “brittle, dispiriting” nullity of one of Young’s lists ahead of a drinks gathering: “The food of chit-chat and empty show:”

1 Cold Cooked Turkey
2 Tin Spam
½ Kilo Ham
40 Crab Patties (2 tins crawfish)
2 Large mousses of tongue
1 Bowl Russian salad, 1 bowl cabbage salad
60 Bread rolls

Her lists convey a sense of stifling social etiquette as well as the workings of a frustrated individual mind. "List everything," she writes to herself at the top of one of them. Lists are a piling up of providence. A way to account for the expectations of others. Yet – inconsequential as they might first seem – they also become, for a modern audience, a way of reconstructing a person across the divide of years; from the trails of ink left on the page and the ghost of a life now over.

I often look back at lists made by my grandmother and my mother; in doing so, I can hear the squeak of a key turning in the lock of their past logic. Lists remind us of life’s plurality; they imply “andness.” They seem to fail wondrously to do what we want them to: to simplify elements of life into a harmonious whole. Yet in failing to do so, they are triumphant in reminding us of the inexhaustibility of our own volition; and of the world. Lists have stayed the course of human psychological development. Their ability to hint at what we might do or become next, in a world so full of uncertainty, will always be a comfort. That is not illusory at all.  

In Georges Eliot’s  Middlemarch, one of the most admirable, and perhaps delusional qualities, of the character Dorothea is that she wants life to embody some kind of meaningful unity: "I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me... That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." Life, of course, cannot be consigned to a tower of ivory; it cannot be shrunk down and afforded clear borders, even if a page, and the words on it, can.

But the fact that Dorothea tries to effect something that is in reality impossible – a life where order is the governing virtue – matters less than the intention behind such a failed plan. It comforts her nonetheless. Perhaps that is a little like a list.

BY FREYA MORRIS