Listing

LISTING TO PORT 

(A Tale of Three Hairdos)

It’s that time of year when we've celebrated . . . and listed . . . 

1. We’ve tallied up who’s been naughty, who’s nice. 

2. We’ve checked our lists, twice. 

3. Including lists of presents. 

5. Chimneys . . . 

6. Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen . . . . 

7. We’ve listed our NY’s resolutions . . . one of mine having been to create a blog. . . . and an annotated metalist.  

Of notable listerati: Kyger, Swift, Shonagon, Borges.

You may blame this on former UCSB professor Hugh Kenner, unerring guide through, among other things, the savage indignation of eighteenth-century satire.

Kenner tended to conduct class the way he wrote--to wit:

~ The Pound Era

. . . Kenner being that being who would barge though the door of the classroom with his hair standing on end like an animal in a state of fabulously feral fright: like the bear in former Kenner student Joanne Kyger’s poem “Destruction,” which consists of a list of the bear’s urges after walking literally through the door of a cabin. He downs apples, limes, dates, 35 pounds of granola. . . .

He rips down the Green Tara poster from the wall . . . 

. . . and knocks over the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching a woman bathing. 


He raids the medicine cabinet, licking up all the LSD, peyote, psilocybin, Amanita . . . . 

Except that Hugh’s hair was never pumped full of fright. In fact, as one colleague noted, it appeared to be electrified by sheer brain power: "He could appear as a slightly alien if benign presence, member of a species closely related to humans yet clearly superior in intelligence." 

Having licked up and masticated all the juicy lists in Gulliver's Travels, Kenner would spit them out in class with the aim of nourishing his students with fare fit for fashioning better papers. More pungent lists.

Regurgitating Jonathn Swift’s list of specimens of human curs —"a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor”—Kenner would point out how each is contaminated or corrupted simply by osmotic exchange with the slime on either side. Thus, making a Politician something between a Gamester and a Whore-master. An Attorney a coagulate of briber (Suborner) and Traitor. 

Kenner would point out that the same sort of contagion can bless whole series of chapters, paragraphs, sections, stanzas. . . . 

In her listing Kyger (who was poet Gary Snyder’s first wife) makes the fantasies of (a) religious vision (the Tibetan Goddess Tara) and (b) the male gaze (a Persian dandy's vision of a bathing siren) something somewhere between, though less appetizing than, granola and hallucinogens. .  

Meanwhile, back in Japan's "Floating World," we find Sei Shonagon: often accused of jumping the gun to become the world’s first "blogger." 

She would--as if gathering plum blossoms or wild berries or mushrooms--dip her brush in ink and conjure up for us her world, a world of 

Chinese brocade 

last year’s paper fan 

the grain of wood in a Buddhist statue. . . . 

Thus, Shonagon lists various categories of things: 

elegant things 

infuriating things 

things that arouse fond memories 

For things that make the heart beat faster: 

sparrows feeding their young 

passing a place where babies are playing 

to sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt 

to notice that one's elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy 

to see a gentleman stop his carriage before one's gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival 

to wash one's hair, make one's toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure 

it is night and one is expecting a visitor. . . . suddenly one is startled by the sound of raindrops, which the wind blows against the shutters . . . 

For things that have lost their power:

a large boat which is high and dry in a creek at ebb tide

a woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains

a large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air 

a man of little remaining importance reprimanding his inferior(s) . . . 

Last, a list that violates all sense of order, our need to make lists, and our distaste for chaos: a specimen of set theory in senescence. 

To that end Borges quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia advising that animals (in this instance, I add: resembling citizens of these united states) are divided into “belonging to the Emperor: embalmed, tame, suckling pigs, sirens, fabulous, stray dogs, included in the present classification, frenzied, innumerable, drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, et cetera, having just broken the water pitcher, that from a long way off look like flies.”

Recommended Reading:

 David Greer, “The Lists of a Lady-in-Waiting, A Portrait of the Author of The Pillow Book,”Kyoto Journal.