Lists for lovers of lists

Or, a way to manage the passage of time and the changing of seasons

On the first day of April 1960, poet and playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote a series of lists chronicling things she likes, and those she hates, alongside regrets and plans for the future. I saw these lists, written in delightful lilting hand on a yellow legal pad, at an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum some years ago. The lists are funny, prescient (hates included “silly white people” which, yes), steamy (“the inside of a lovely woman’s mouth”), and sometimes a bit tragic (on the list of things she hated, “her homosexuality”). She began making these lists at 23 and called them “Myself in Notes.”

I, too, am a lover of lists. I make them for more than mere to-do’s - the basest function of a list in my opinion. Lists can be odes, categorizations and reflections. They can be a quiet means of imposing order in chaotic times. These days we face a devastating litany of horrors - deadly airborne illnesses, climate catastrophe, and the plague of capitalism, all compounded by neo-colonial white supremacy which would have us work ourselves quite to death. So, perhaps lists can serve as meditations on the moment and respite from it as well. 

Here are some of mine:

A list of beautiful things around my home: 

• pottery made by steady hands, 

• leaves reaching for sunlight, 

• books of poetry with exclamations and stars in the margins, 

• seeds sprouting, 

• steam rising from a mug, 

• blown glass, 

• stained glass, 

• grains in jars, 

• art on walls,  

• a desperately-loved copy of The Bluest Eye looking a bit worse for the wear, 

• the whir of the ceiling fan, 

• flower petals blooming and then dropping to the table.

A list of sounds I love: 

• a person sometimes humming, 

• the click of the television turning off, and,

• onions and garlic sizzling in some oil (cross-listed on: list of things that smell divine).

Like so many folks, I have been struggling to read at my pre-pandemic pace. So, here is a list of that which sustains me when I cannot read: 

• a stack of old journals to spend some time with who I was all those years ago (this one is a double edge, the bad poetry astounds!), 

• audiobooks (all the better if they are read by their author, a private reading in the late night hours is a real treat), 

• Cookbooks (does not have to be accompanied by actual cooking), 

• making thematic playlists (“sad songs that make me feel happy somehow,”and “songs about rivers”), and,

• Picking up a book I’ve read many times and just flipping open to a page and reading it, then calling it a day.

A list of things I am successfully avoiding on this, my vacation: 

• news podcasts and

• depressing nonfiction.

A list of things I am unsuccessfully avoiding on this, my vacation: 

• worry about occurring and impending disaster, 

• Facebook and Insta, 

• depressing (but beautiful) fiction, and,

• reflections on the horror of colonization.

A list of things I can do to feel better on any given day (we might all try and make such list): 

• Make some art, and show it to no one (this part is important for any and all of us who are suffer from perfectionism (a direct manifestation of white supremacy in which we are measured by external standards of success)),

• Research past eras of plague (morbid, but can offer effective context), 

• A meandering phone call with a friend,

• Writing an angry email to one of our hateful legislators,

• Writing a loving note to one of the ones fighting hard for us,

• Giving some money to mutual aid efforts, and,

• Reading a statistic about how vast the universe is and how small I am, and spend anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes actively pondering that fact (I.e. The Observable Universe is the region of the universe containing all the matter that can be observed from Earth or the space based telescopes and probes that we’ve sent out. There are, at the very least, 2 trillion galaxies in the Observable Universe. Its diameter is approximately 100 billion light years. Staggering. And yet, the Observable Universe is a mere sliver of the Entire Universe.). 

For me, like for many of you, this summer has been full of loss and grief. I have struggled to find order and meaning in the long, hot days. This kind of ordering and listing has offered me some semblance of specificity when forces of suffering seem diffuse and omnipresent. For Lorraine, specificity was the road to the universal. In a 1959 interview with Studs Terkel she said, “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.” In these times of general anxiety and sorrow, I wish each of you a moment to revel in the specificity of that which delights and sustains you.