Brain Food #834: Lists and the messiness of living

What remains of what have failed to be is who we eventually become

Thoughts of the day

There are countless reasons to justify why our brains love lists, more than what could ever be contained in a list itself. Perhaps making lists is a form of managing chaos, or relieving anxiety. Lists can be vehicles of hope, serving as reminders of what we once thought of as possible. Or vehicles of memory, containers of ideas and thoughts that can be offloaded from our brains, to leave space for something else.

“We make lists because we don't want to die,” said Umberto Eco. Because we can list both what happened in the past, as evidence of our existence, but also list what we would still like to do in the future, as evidence of our survival.

Lists can also be helpful igniters of creativity, somewhere to go when there is no obvious place to start. In this light, poet and artist Bernadette Mayer wrote a list of journal ideas. Most, if not all of them, are relatable and graspable, and can be a starting point for countless creative projects:

Journals of: 
* dreams 
* food 
* finances 
* writing ideas 
* love 
* ideas for architects
* city design ideas
* beautiful and/or ugly sights
* a history of one's own writing life, written daily
* reading/music/art, etc. encountered each day
* rooms 
* elaborations on weather
* people one sees-description
* subway, bus, car or other trips (e.g., the same bus trip written about
every day) 
* pleasures and/or pain
* life's everyday machinery: phones, stoves, computers, etc.
* answering machine messages
* round or rectangular things, other shapes
* color 
* light 
* daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc.
* the body and its parts
* clocks/time-keeping
* tenant-landlord situations
* telephone calls (taped?)
* skies 
* dangers 
* mail 
* sounds 
* coincidences & connections
* times of solitude

(You can find Mayer's complete list of writing prompts here)

Whenever there is a lack of inspiration, its origin tends to be not a change in what our surroundings offer us, but how we perceive them. This can relate to anything, from moving a creative project along to solving a difficult problem at work, or elsewhere. The everyday can become mundane only if we let it, distracted by the ‘one day’. Instead of looking for something new, we can look at something in a new way.

If the list seems long and the feeling it generates is not one of potential but of dread, it is good to remember that our relationship with lists should be not one of finishing them, but about taking from them, following what Oliver Burkeman describes as the ‘river, not a bucket’ mentality. Like a collection of books at home, always outnumbering the number of books we will ever manage to read, lists can be treated like libraries, there to serve us when we need them.

Maybe there is nothing so mundane after all. It is this life that we have that we can draw inspiration from, and it is the way we perceive and portray it that matters. As for the list of items and where to start, as always, just pick the one that speaks to you the most.

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As a bonus, here is a strangely comforting poem by Mayer, written in the form of a list, featuring the ordinary tasks one must do and the things one must overcome to pursue and sustain one’s purpose. Lists will remind us of our failures, the messiness of living, and all of what should be done. But what is left of what we have failed to be or do is who we eventually become.

Failures in Infinitives
by Bernadette Mayer

why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
to listen to while working in the kitchen
to know enough to do grownups work in the world
to transcend my attitude
to an enforced poverty
to be able to expect my checks
to arrive on time in the mail
to not always expect that they will not
to forget my mother's attitudes on humility or
to continue
to assume them without suffering
to forget how my mother taunted my father
about money, my sister about i cant say it
failure to forget mother and father enough
to be older, to forget them
to forget my obsessive uncle
to remember them some other way
to remember their bigotry accurately
to cease to dream about lions which always is
to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion's mouth
to assuage its anger, this is not a failure
to notice that's how they were; failure
to repot the plants
to be neat
to create & maintain clear surfaces
to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
and not a table
to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk
to listen to more popular music
to learn the lyrics
to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care; failure
to love objects
to find them valuable in any way; failure
to preserve objects
to buy them and
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
to remember how to spell failure; failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach; failure
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing
to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
to write a thousand poems in an hour
to do an epic, open the unwashed window
to let in you know who and
to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns
to just let us know, we will
to paint your ceilings & walls for free

From Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, which could be considered a list of moments, presented as photographs

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