Revisions to this essay have been on my to-do list for weeks. I didn’t ignore the list so much as it was absorbed into a larger body of deadlines, the way a conglomerate outcrop looks singular and imposing from a distance, but digging around exposes the bits it’s composed of. I have a list somewhere of the materials that make up conglomerate outcrops in southwest Saskatchewan. I made that list to avoid work on a poem that uses the word “conglomerate.”
As people do, I write practical, purpose-built lists even when I suspect I will neglect them. They are like snapshots—Christmas lists, pre-travel lists, lists of party supplies and guests. They are occasionally poignant, even painful, in that they document plans perhaps not realized, or not realized as one hoped. Lists are a way to linger in the prospect, which itself feels like a guilty pleasure in that they postpone the risk of failure.
Many lists in my notebooks have grown from research toward poems, essays, or teaching. Research can seem an indulgence even when it’s inspired by purpose—whole days wandering among facts and ideas, unclear on whether any of it will prove useful. But some of my lists don’t appear to have a purpose, or a purpose other than allowing research to stray beyond relevance, outside the boundaries of “a productive use of one’s time.” That these lists are hastily titled doesn’t clarify intent or outcome. Undated, they don’t even qualify as proper note taking, and my notebook offers no clues of chronology. Some entries are partially indecipherable:
– Dame Ethel Walker – Venice – smoke – hanging [illegible] – projects that never happen. Seminar
1/2-second possibility – passive nihilism – trains – motel rod measurement [?] – knowledge real or [illegible] – forest of yellow leaves – WB – God [circled].
Part I
There is no Part II.
Literature and the literary adjacent are full of lists. Joan Didion’s famous packing list when setting out on reporting assignments (her go bag held a mohair throw and a typewriter) occupies the same Venn diagram subset as her writing: aspirational, practical, impossible. The Atlantic ’s list of famous literary lists suggests that the pleasure of cataloguing infiltrates, even comprises, a writer’s work. The labyrinthine list of bookshop sections in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler begins with “Books You Haven’t Read.” The entirety of Joe Brainard’s I Remember is an inventory of what he remembers. Whether arising from ambition, imagination, or memory, part of the pleasure of lists, for writers and for readers, is structural. Games rely on rules and keep score—even crows and octopuses like to arrange things in order.
In the privacy of notebooks, lists live a different life. Some exist largely as traces of the act of attention, the conceptual material of their connection having eroded away. Absent a centre of gravity, they are hardly lists at all. Intention and occasion are exposed as ephemeral, and what the purpose of these lists may have been no longer matters. Liberated from project, they have been spared the fate of becoming content. They have eluded expectation and, thus, disappointment. Only curiosity remains, both before and after the fact. These lists are little anarchic wastes of time. Valueless in terms of product, they remind me of the higher value of pointless acts of attention, and to love what is incomplete.
I’ve kept a few lists that are not my own—that appear in letters from friends, or sticky notes of grocery lists in my mom’s neat handwriting: spinach, cat food, batteries, beer. Financial records in my dad’s hand frame a long narrative of routine and change on the farm. Since his death, I’ve started a list of things he said. The first thing a cowboy does when he gets a vehicle is he takes the hood off and throws it in the ditch. There was a context to this, though maybe all it means is that sometimes these things happen, and only the cowboys know why.
