Collecting the Ingredients
Making Lists
What does making lists do for you?
This week, I decided to research “Pleasure Lists.” Namely, I wanted to know, What's in a list? What do the lists we make say about ourselves? I didn’t find much in the way of Pleasure Lists per se, but I did come across a book from 1989 called JourneyNotes that offered a little bit of insight into the pleasures of list-making.
The diaristic nature of making lists is an artform in itself. The way we gather, synthesize, and regurgitate information provides an anthropological portrait of the list’s author.
You make a list in no particular order. You don’t worry about interspersing personal comments between the milk and eggs and lettuce. You’re inconsistent because the list is private.
Are you digital or handwritten? Personal or public? Thoughtful or automatic?
Some other takeaways from my excavation into list-making:
Lists are places for imagination, sources for memory, notes to keep track of.
A list is timeless, eternal, endless, yet bound to a certain moment in time.
A list is an archaeological find.
A list is a symbol of a world greater than itself.
A list of pleasures as a way to create more pleasure in your life.
So, what can a list give you?
It’s a summary of what you need, want, or have, or see at a particular moment in time. It’s a survey, an overview, a summary of the crucial facts of the state of one aspect of your life. It’s a kind of blueprint that can be a guide to the future.
Mull it over and if you’re moved to, send me a list of your own.
Wondering what is The Pleasure Lists?
After seeing an image of Bertolt Brecht's Pleasures poem-list, I decided to use this as an prompt for people to submit their own list of pleasures. What happened was an outpouring of entries, which made me think there was something to this phenomenon. Read more at last week’s post below:
And please share! The Pleasure Lists is meant to be a collaborative project that calls people from all over to write, read, and share their pleasures — a global community of artists, writers, and pondering minds alike.