The structure, frame, and slippage of a list
How we make sense of the world and how the world resists it nonetheless
My middle child apparently does not like to read. I had no clue this was his position until I was at a school meeting recently, hearing from professionals working to best support him in that environment. The behavioral analyst who mentioned this was also eager to point out that, after she asked if he liked reading and he responded in the negative, he paused contemplatively and then said: “well, only with my mom.”
It could be our wildly deep and bonded relationship, sure. But I also do voices. My Gerald and Piggie are pretty hilarious. One of my favorite book series to read aloud with my tread-worn voices, though, is Frog and Toad. When I read Frog’s indefatigable enthusiasm and Toad’s bah-humbug trepidation, I am able to channel my own childhood of hearing these stories, my reading of them to my eldest child, and my listening of Arnold Lobel’s own recordings into two lively, alive, and flawed creatures—two beautiful friends, read as they should be with humility and humanity.
As a child, one of my favorite stories from the series was The List. It remains up there with A Lost Button, The Surprise, and Ice Cream. In The List, Toad wakes up and decides to write a list of the many things he needs to do that day. Each time he completes a task, he crosses it off his list. Everything is going grandly, but then—as life so often does, intervening to undo order—there is a strong gust of wind that blows the list right out of Toad’s hand. “Help!” Toad cries out. “My list is blowing away. What will I do without my list?” Frog suggests running after it to catch it, but Toad says he cannot do that because “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!”
I used to turn to my father when I needed to make a big decision. He seemed to know the world in ways I didn’t seem capable of, and I thought he would be able to direct me one way or another. But instead, his most frequent response was “well, why don’t you make a list?” This seemed to me—a terminably indecisive being—a clean and resolute way of handling the confusing messiness of life, by sorting it out into pros and cons. If I could just make the right list, it seemed, the correct decision would unmask itself by the weight of graphite on paper alone. A list, it seemed, had the capacity to solve my problems…if only a list had the capacity to solve my problems.
Making choices based on listing what’s good or bad is a very mathematical way of approaching indecision. It assumes, as is the case with math, that there is a right answer. However, as Ellen Langer is keen to point out, it hardly matters at all which choice you make. Pro and con lists can be deeply flawed and are inherently biased and narrow in their perspective. Rather than worrying about making the right decision, Langer advises us to “make the decision right.” And if you do make a decision that you feel is wrong, Langer might advise you to stop wallowing and find the positive in it—”regret is mindless,” because in its grips you presume the choice you didn’t make would have been better in some unknown conditional way.
Langer can be blunt…and honestly, I love it. But I had two of my own wise gurus along the path of decision-making who shifted me into a similar mindset, but perhaps with more gentle nudging. The summer in between my sophomore and junior years in college I worked on a migratory songbird study on the Alaska Peninsula. My stint there with U.S. Fish and Wildlife began on Mother Goose Lake, a gorgeous, isolated glacial body of water at the foot of an active volcano. A few days before my weeks-long service was set to end, I was invited to join the existing crew at another field site on Becharof Lake for a few more weeks of work.
I was nineteen and didn’t know what to do. For a frightened, routine-loving introvert, getting to Alaska at all had been a feat. The week before I was set to leave, I got a distressing phone call. A young fieldworker, not much older than I, had gone missing and was most likely dead. They surmised that he had probably sunk into the mudflats while walking across the edges of the lake. With the lake being a creation of glacial melt, the water was so cold it would have immobilized him immediately.
I was frozen. I had been nervous anyway. The Alaskan wilderness seemed to me a frightening place for a young woman to go on her first solo trip far away from her family. There would be no comforts of home—no plumbing, no running water, no heat, no showers, no electricity...no connection. The lack of connection was the most frightening part of it all. I would be living for over a month in a small cabin on a lake, arriving by float plane (along with supplies.) I would have no way to contact family or loved ones other than postcards or letters. It was likely that most of the steps I would take were to be over land that had never been touched by another human being. I had already been scared of going. Now I was terrified. The wildness of the place seemed confirmed. I was risking my life to go. At this point in my life this all sounds almost ridiculous, but at the time it felt very real to me. This was a dangerous place where I could die just out walking, I believed. In fact, that had happened.
I fought my instincts very hard to get to Alaska in the first place. Now, set to go home—my mind already returning to soft couches, dinners made by my mom, and my own bathroom—I felt torn, unsure, and unmoored. My first love was transferring from our site to the other site, so that was a draw. But even that wasn’t enough to overcome my inborn hesitancy to newness, that deer-in-the-headlights fear of the uncertain. Helen, an older volunteer who painted sweeping, evocative abstract works back in Sacramento, sat down next to me on the beach one evening after one of my daily dips in the freezing water. Confiding in her that I wasn’t sure what to do, I waited tentatively in her pregnant pause, knowing some wisdom was likely about to grace me. “We never regret what we did, however it turns out,” she counseled me. “But we most certainly regret those things we never did.” Same Langer wine, different bottle.
A few years later, I drank again from the spirits of someone who had divined much more from life’s landscape than I could infer at the time. I was sitting in the office of one of my favorite professors—who also happened to be one of my thesis advisors and an instructor whose classes I took regardless of what he was teaching—when he offered me a story. I don’t recall there being any precipitating event—no particular decision I was agonizing over—but I think he recognized some of himself in me and felt a soft ache for the “right”-seeking person I was repeatedly trying to be. He told me that when he was a student at Berkeley, he used to sit on a rock near Point Isabel and try to think himself through the hard decisions. Finally, a professor of his at the time told him he needed to do, not sit. He needed to move, not ponder. The rest would flow from movement itself.
Beyond the pros and cons embedded in a list, which deceptively offers to tip the scales of a decision one way or another, is a third choice: the quiet non-choice, the deferral, the refusal to act, the shutting down of the choice that prompted the list. It was a choice I often took and one which my various mentors wisely observed as a tendency in me—the choice that lies beyond leaning yes to one side or the other; it was the choice to say no altogether. My lists always allowed quietly this fifth column and yet never forced me to confront this internal enemy head-on.
A list can offer reassurance of many kinds. It can offer the illusion of sorting the world into an intelligible and meaningful order where answers add up by themselves. Sometimes its mere existence, as in Toad’s list, offers a structure for life and its endless days—a way to line up what needs to be done and a path towards easy fulfillment as each is successively accomplished. As psychologist David Cohen explains, lists appeal to us because “they dampen anxiety about the chaos of life; they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to; and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month.” Lists are containers for our intentions, our wildest dreams even. A list can be a wish, a bucket list, a list of goals you intend to achieve before you get your next job, before you get married, or before you die. Lists can be a way of journaling, of committing clearly to intentions. Curious or unusual information gets thrown into lists to seem more interesting or more cohesive. Lists are made by us and also of us. Lists of persons assessed is how we collect our taxes. We make lists to order and describe the world and then we are incorporated back into the world through lists, our lives themselves becoming but one line in a massive book of people from the past, if we are indeed lucky enough even to be remembered at all.
Other lists offer a different kind of order, a measurement of the best, the most, the worst of something. Way before David Letterman’s famous Top Ten lists, there was perhaps the original Top Ten—the Ten Commandments. If lists are flexible frameworks for cohering relationships, the linkage here is prohibition, thus cementing human nature’s tendency to act out of bounds when acting as agents without the structure a list of rules offers and the fealty it can more easily and directly require.
Lists have always been vessels for what matters most to us. And our most enduring vessels also inscribe lists into our values and principles. The relationship circles back. Religious texts often contain lists. The Old Testament’s Book of Numbers begins and ends with a census of the Hebrew people. The vastness of the Hindu divine and its manifestation in different nature-based and abstract forces helps explain the lists of deities in the Rig Veda.
Even further back, epic literature contains much that serves as mnemonic structure—memory tricks designed to carry oral history. But something magical happens in these ancient catalogues—they transform the mundane act of record-keeping into sing-song music, into poetry itself. Think of the ship catalogue in The Iliad, or how Virgil lists the Italic peoples, or Lucan cataloguing Caesar's troops after crossing the Rubicon. These were memory aids, for sure, but they were also ways of etching cultural and social knowledge on time’s expanse, prayers to the unknown and otherwise unknowing future.
Indeed, when do lists tip over to become stories? Or, to the contrary, when do the very embodied and present lives of the past become their own lists of sorts in the sometimes dry, partitioned space of history? Lists appear entirely mundane, so familiar that
we barely even notice them—they are mere tools to remember things and events (shopping lists, calendars) and to plan ahead (to-do lists, grocery lists, bucket lists). The new technologies further support our list-making propensity: the Internet consists of numerous lists in various forms, from the list-structure of Google and the entries on a news page all the way to social media services and hugely popular sites such as Buzzfeed or Listserve, which are made up of nothing but lists. The newly coined blend “listicle” (list + article) describes the phenomenon of condensing information into the form of a list.” (Eva von Contzen, “The Limits of Narration”)
Yet, the minute you presume the list’s stability, it opens up a precariousness and mutability. The oral epic may have contained catalogues for repeatability’s sake—the carrying along and forward of history so to speak—but every new author was offered the opportunity of experimentation and alteration in style through “by imitating, emulating, revising, alluding to, subverting, undermining, and creatively reinventing the form of the catalogue.”
The list is not actually stable, though it pretends to be. And in that instability, where experimentation and creativity may lie, lists can also be carriers of something more threatening. Lists of the most popular, the hottest, lists of citizens and immigrants. One of our most popular social media tools, Facebook, itself began as a sort of list—a directory of Harvard students where various ratings were often posted and shared, as much as its stated goal was to help students find each other.
Lists can divide us into separate camps. Despite their seeming clarity, lists are shifty. Are they meant to organize? Order? Convince? Collect? Describe? Amuse? Shame? Threaten? Do they tell us what they purport to convey? What does an Honors list, for example, actually tell us about which students truly engaged in their learning, which ones genuinely tried? What does a county’s death records tell us of those unknown lives—entire histories of their own which, at the end of it all, become just the stark letters of a name that was—in one way or another—their entire story the day they began. Lists can wisely condense complex ideas just as easily as they can amplify simplified distortions. A list can manipulate and yet appear quite straightforward. A list can wrap up your very life and deem it something you would never recognize, let alone endorse.
Perhaps this is why fiction has found itself captured by the idea of the prosaic list. The List, it turns out, is a surprisingly popular book title. It is the title of a dystopian YA book where those in control have limited known and spoken words amongst the populace to a mere five hundred. It turns up as the title of many a suspense novel where the lists in concern hold terrible secrets or require compromising covenants or foretell of people who will soon die one by one. I once began a poem called “backs of poems” with these lines:
on the backs of poems
I make lists
phone bill
update blog
milk, eggs, take iron pill
ice knees
raw cacoa
email prof, see forest through trees
ups tracking
legal file?
make pie, expose what’s lacking
dry clean dress
find lover
land of conjecture, fallible guess
on the backs of poems
I write poems
glacial stillness
fathoms deep
you cut
you cut
I ache for sleep
on the backs of poems
weighs a world
Can the prosaic nature of a list indeed be so heavy? Sometimes. Other times, lists offer expansiveness beyond the order they impose. I have found in writing my lists of “65 things” that when a list is stretched to gargantuan size, your thinking is required to expand equally as you asked to see incisively into the “aboutness” or the “thingness” of something which may have once appeared so plain and known. In these, lists become a sort of narrative, or perhaps a “non-narrative” as von Contzen suggests, an amorphous abstraction whose shape is determined by the lilt and lattice of the narrative into which it is placed. Perhaps, as von Contzen surmises, the literary list “is a non-form; it is the narrative and literary “Other” that does not narrate. The list as abstraction is a device and a practice, inextricably linked to the list-maker and her cognitive input.”
Ultimately the list is both a shape (and a shape-shifter) and an instrument. And instruments can be played in unfathomably varied tunes. Historically, the list has served to itemize knowledge—it has been used as an aid to memory, administration, or instruction. A dictionary stores the words of a particular language through the ordering of its alphabet. A calendar splits up endless time into concrete and discrete units—for example a year into months, weeks, and days. A genealogy orders personal history through branching arms of family trees, yet possesses the power to connect an otherwise unimportant individual to legacies of royalty, political import, or ancient fame of one sort or another.
A list is a form, and, as medievalist Christopher Cannon explains, it is a form that contains both a thing and a thought. Thereby, a useful analysis of its form “takes neither a thing nor a thought as its analytic object but, rather, the common ground between them; its founding premise is that form is that which thought and things have in common.” A list, as such, is a conversation between writer and intention, idea and constellated components, or psychological distortion and previously disparate or perplexing itemization. A list is similar to the geologic strata of the Grand Canyon—a thing unto itself containing itemization (in this case time as recorded through rock) in continual dialogue with change: climate, water, systems, human interaction. And like the Grand Canyon, a list can become more than itself in story, in cultural memory, or in literature.
In his novels, University of Freiburg Professor Monika Fludernik notes, author Charles Dickens “delighted in long lists, which he employed for a variety of different functions, parodic and satiric, impressionistic and for the purpose of psychological analysis.” Indeed, literary lists, she suggests, “deploy the listing of large numbers of items to focus on the psychological, cognitive, and ideological effects of multiplicity.” She hypothesizes that the Victorian period may be a time when the literary list transitioned from mirroring the practical list used in quotidian reality to a verisimilitudinous parody echoing inner life to introduce varieties of confusion, exaggeration, or violence we experience and filter the world into our own manifestations of reality.
A list is sequential, yet so is language as Jorge Luis Borges knew long before LLMs began their prediction-based didacticism. In The Aleph, he attempts to describe the infinite nature of space within the space and time of language…through his own list aspiring to the infinite:
What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can. On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror.
We make lists to contain the world, but it constantly escapes our framing—around the edges, in the thought that cannot circumscribe the itemizations, in the conversation that continues between items and the process that brought them together, in the illusions it continually creates that make us believe in our lists until they are just eyes watching us in the mirror and not guides leading us towards any whiff of enlightenment.
A list may disrupt the very order a list claims to pronounce. A list, contrary to our expectations, is the dialectic that breaks down the very possibility of description, narration, authorship, and order. As in conflict, so with a list. Contradiction and opposition are not to be resolved. Thought evolves through the form itself. A list may be a counterintuitive window through the simple, the banal, the sequential, the informational, the utilitarian, and the disparate into some of our most profound questions.
At the end of The List, after looking for the lost list all day, Frog observes that it is getting dark and suggests sleep. Toad perks up, remembering that “Go to sleep” was the last thing on his list. He writes the directive in the sand and then crosses it out. The story ends with Frog and Toad peacefully retiring for the night. But through a grown-up's eyes, we know the sand cannot hold what we desire to order. And we know that sleep is not a peaceful answer, but only the beginning of another day. The list slips, we slip on the list, and we awake on the shifting sands of tomorrow.