I enjoy making lists.
The list of the men I’ve slept with. The list of things I’m terrified of. The list of my favorite poems written by women in Spanish…
Never “to do” lists, of course. Although one can appreciate the frisson of crossing off item after item, tingling self-righteously with the thrilling awareness of one’s own Teutonic efficiency. I’m sure it can be powerfully satisfying. The problem is that whenever I do write a “to do” list, on occasion, I seldom end up accomplishing any of the tasks I’ve set myself. In fact, once I’ve written such a list, I tend neurotically to avoid consulting it ever again, and grow more and more guilt-ridden and anxious at my dismal failure to get anything done—until, mercifully, I somehow contrive to forget about the whole thing.
The list of gifts I’ve re-gifted. The list of substances I’m allergic to, but only in imagination. The list of musical passages that can reliably make me cry…
Fun lists—the ones that aren’t boringly needy and imperative—they’re the ones I like. Composing them gives you a feeling very like the one that comes from collecting. You know: stamps, pebbles, jazz records, vintage fascist tracts, shrunken heads, cookie jars, butterflies, dolls’ houses… You add things up; you classify them; you impose order; you exult in a quiet, acquisitive delight. It’s all so reassuring somehow.
The list of polysyllabic interjections that make me laugh. The list of musical instruments I wished I played…
Lists are made up of words, of course; and collections are made up of things. But, conveniently, these things can, on occasion, just turn out be words—because, words are things too, after all. Or, alternatively, you could just think of a collection as an embodied list. In any case, going from a list to a collection, what I feel you gain is exhaustivity as a tantalizing horizon: the promise of completeness, the dream of wholeness, of closure. For the true collector though, this ultimate goal can, thankfully, never be realized—because there is always more junk to acquire and to sort, and therefore more life to live. If only fools could learn to love the dark, and renounce taking the final inventory of all their yesterdays! They would live forever.
The list of secrets I keep. The list of toys I’ve lost. The list of friend’s I’ve forgotten to invite…
But, more seriously, what collections can yield is an opening to a higher (and more useful) level of abstraction: categories.
The list of counts in the indictment. The list of endangered frog species in Brazil. The list of common misconceptions…
There’s an aboriginal language of Australia—called Dyirbal—famous among linguists for an amusing feature. It doesn’t use feminine and masculine as grammatical categories, like French, for example, or say Swedish; nor does it forgo gender inflection altogether like modern English. Instead, it has five “noun classes,” each of which carries its own grammatical mark. One of these classes is composed of all the words that refer to “women, fire, and dangerous things”—which is funny, and, well, anthropologically sexist I suppose, but also sort of empowering. (I’m speaking here not only as a dangersome woman—hear me roar!—but also as an improvisational epistemologist.)
The list of weapons of mass destruction I keep in my desk drawer. The list of mystical experiences I’ve never had. The list of people I love unselfishly…
Lists, then collections, then categories… You sort stuff out empirically, but always also metaphorically, it seems to me. You look for similarities or common features or family resemblances or homologies. And this allows you to associate objects—sometimes apparently wildly miscellaneous—by a kind of benign magical operation, and to transform them into congruous elements of a common set. And the set itself is thereby endowed with meaning.
The list of arguments for the existence of God. The list of people I’m jealous of. The list of activities I find boring. The list of food I won’t eat, for no particular reason…
The ideas we have about the world as a whole or about the flood of experience or about art or about formal systems like mathematics, or about what you like—they’re quite burdensome to synthesize. I mean: I feel I’m able to do it, more or less, but only in bits and pieces—and only on occasion. It’s difficult. The effort to make things cohere strikes me as costly. Well, at least if you’re not faking it; if you endeavor to do it in a way that is genuinely mindful of coherence and committed to it.
The list of organs in the human body. The list of possible permutations of a given string. The list of nonzero solutions to the equation x2 = 3y2 + 3z2. The list of most eruptively revolting substances…
I suppose the reason I like the humble list so much because, in its primitive way, it does allow you to grasp something substantial about the world, even if you feel yourself unequal to the task of more cogently gathering up the odds and ends of experience and somehow holding their taxing profusion tidily in your mind. Maybe all you can muster is a kind of functional mess. That’s how I feel, most of the time. And anyway, I’m not sure consistent, rational, all-encompassing systems of concepts actually are up to the task of faithfully elucidating reality. So I don’t disdain cruder, jerry rigged contrivances. And I’m afraid my idiosyncratic gesticulations in the direction of order will have to do in a pinch.
The list of cartoon characters who wear Mexican sombreros. The list of all the useless purchases I’ve ever made. The list of poisonous flavors available at Morbid Ice, an imaginary chain of ice-cream shops aimed at suicidal people with a sweet tooth…
Idealism, the main branch of Western philosophy since Plato, insists otherwise though. It claims that concepts themselves are what’s real. That they don’t just hold reality conveniently together for us, making it, at least to some extent, intelligible; but rather that they are the very stuff of the world, as it exists beyond the illusions of our sense perceptions. And moreover, that it’s possible to articulate all of these concepts into some sort of total, self-consistent system, thus uncovering the constitutive process underlying all phenomena.
The list of venereal diseases I’ve avoided so far. The list of unstable elements in the periodic table. The list of ways I’ve ever ruthlessly exerted my will to power. The list of Moomin books written and illustrated by Tove Jansson…
This strikes me as somehow implausible. I guess that makes me a materialist. Or perhaps merely an empiricist? In any case, I’ve had t-shirts printed (which you can purchase here) to celebrate my coming out.
The list of video games considered “the best.” The list of defensible reasons you could give, if you could time-travel only once, in favor of killing the baby Marcel Duchamp rather than the baby Hitler…
Now most of my materialist/nominalist/empiricist buddies and I (you know: Lucretius, William of Occam, Hume, Marx, Deleuze… the gang), we’re convinced instead that ideas, concepts—they’re merely the tools we use to understand the onrushing immanent jumble of the material universe, as we perceive it. They are handles with which to grasp this external reality, punctuation to make it “legible,” molds to cast its raw material into humanly knowable forms. These concepts, we fudge them together with our minds, and they exist only as patterns in our brains. In fact, not only do ideas exist as patterns in our brain, but contemporary cognitive science tells us that the mind itself likewise emerges as a complex, composite, evolving, self-reflexive, physical meta-pattern within the physical substrate of our brains (and extended nervous system).
The list of sailors on the Lusitania who knew how to yodel. The list of lewd feminist ventriloquists who, from time to time, like to “give their pussy a voice.” The list of children saved by the great hero Irena Sendler, righteous among the nations…
Thus sense experiences, driven through a reflexive process of representation, classification and interpretation, allow this materially embodied mind of ours to interact with the equally material world at large.
The list of Thai films that (disappointingly) don’t feature any ghosts. The list of hapless enemies crushed by Ashurbanipal, “king of the world.” The list of fruits that come from the Caucasus…
It’s important to note that concepts don’t pre-exist their formulation, unless perhaps as a sort of evolutionarily derived “cognitive intuition” that inchoately recognizes potentially meaningful regularities before linguistic articulation is able to emerge.
The list of African countries by GDP per capita. The list of Nobel Prize winners who suffer from hemorrhoids…
Once formulated though, concepts are able to carry out their functions as taxonomic categories, as hermeneutic operators, as “content management systems,” if you like, that contribute to shaping the deluge of experiential data we gather into a manageable and coherent whole—or at least into pragmatically useful, if fragmentary, networks of meaning.
The list of arbitrary “disorders” described by the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The list of names you can call a coward. The list of bridges in Königsberg…
But despite the many and subtle conceptual tools we may fashion for ourselves, it is possible that the ultimate nature of reality—whatever that happens to be—ends up being absolutely beyond our ken after all. Maybe because its laws are too abstract, or too alien; or because our rationality is too limited an instrument; or because a somewhat aberrant species of great apes living on a dust particle somewhere in a galactic suburb was never meant to unravel the deepest mysteries of a staggeringly large and old universe, possibly altogether unfathomable in principle.
The list of sex acts requiring a trampoline. The list of pop dance crazes started by an Australian. The list of well-meaning political initiatives that led to appalling consequences…
Ludwig Wittgenstein thought the big problems of philosophy had to do with people’s tendency to use language incorrectly, so that the best we could do in terms of knowing the world, was actually to clarify how we use language, and perhaps to give up trying to understand what lay beyond its rigorously circumscribed domain of application—or at least to stop trying to understand it through language. Certain things, he held, can’t be explained at all, and instead need to be shown: “Whereof one cannot speak; thereof one must be silent.” Which, moreover, is quite a cold thing to say to an imperfectly Anglophone Chinese waiter.
The list of birds of paradise who feel sad because they always dance alone. The list of satisfying ways you can tell someone to fuck off. The list of male haute couture fashion designers who aren’t homosexuals. The list of literary tropes that Victor Hugo never used…
At about the same time Kurt Gödel, another cerebral Austrian, used the sharpest and most ironclad logic unassailably to demonstrate that any logical system we might devise—provided it is sufficiently complex to allow for self-reflexive propositions—and therefore our rationality itself, has only a limited capacity to establish what is true. He showed that the truth-value of perfectly formulated answers to impeccably formulated questions—representing vast sweeps of potential thought—would necessarily forever remain undecidable. (Blah!)
The list of cutlery that should never be used at a picnic. The list of impossible to finger dominant seventh chord voicings on a guitar. The list of mistakes for which I will never apologize…
But at least we still have the lists—to tally up all the things; to reckon their multiplicity; to have and to hold them; to see them float by on our stream of consciousness, and then sink down again into the churning myriad from which they momentarily sprang.
The lists of religious chants that require a kazoo. The list of units of length appropriate for making astronomical measurements. The list of #1 hits by Abba.
The Buddha himself was quite an inveterate list maker: the Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, the Five Hindrances, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, the Eightfold Path…
The list of lists composed as playful, ironic motifs. The list of all of the people and all of the things ever. The list of the sentient beings who still suffer. The list of the dead and of the survivors…
They all add up, in the end. Perhaps even to something.
