List

Wednesday 31 July 2024

The Remainder

article

  1. Speculatively derived from the reconstructed:
    1. Proto-Indo-European *leys- meaning ‘trace’ or ‘track’ (for example, lāst in Old English gives ‘footprint’) and;
    2. Proto-Germanic līstǭ meaning ‘edge’, ‘strip’ or ‘band’ (weavers read ‘selvage’).
  2. In the Middle Ages these roots give līste and listre in Old English and Old French respectively, as well as lista in Medieval or ‘vulgar’ Latin, with definitions similar to the Proto-Germanic – ‘hem’, ‘border’, ‘band’, ‘strip of fabric’ or paper.
  3. Cognate with the Proto-Germanic listiz – meaning ‘art’ or ‘craft’ – formed from *lizaną (itself formed from *leys) meaning to ‘know’ or ‘understand’. In the Old English poem Christ III – found in the Exeter Book – one reads:
    1. Ne þæt ænig mæg oþrum gesecgan
      mid hu micle elne æghwylc wille
      þurh ealle list lifes tiligan.1
    2. [No one can speak to another how with great vigor anyone would strive after life and spirit by every art ]2
  4. Perhaps the idea of ‘understanding’ cannot be separated from the material substrate – the strip of paper – which evidences it? That knowledge has forever been bordered, de- and re-territorialized, according to property?
  5. In Middle English (c1430) we find a translation of French Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (in English, The pilgrimage of the lyf of the manhode) which describes the accomplished verb – to ‘list’ – along the edges of a green bag:
    1. The scrippe was of greene selk and heeng bi a greene tissu
      Lysted it was wel queynteliche with xij. belles of siluer
    2. [The bag was of green silk and hung by a green ribbon. It was neatly edged with twelve silver bells.]
  6. A sentiment which finds itself easily applied to a whole host of military contexts, as in The romance of Guy of Warwick – a part of the Matter of England3 – and the gilding of a knight’s shield:
    1. Girt he was wiþ a gode brond
      Wele kerueand, bi-forn his hond
      A targe listed wiþ gold
    2. He was girded with a good sword,
      Very sharp, before his hand,
      A shield edged with gold
  7. A confluence of borderings.
  8. Elsewhere, in Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, we hear of another list – the list of ‘listening’ – present in Old English and somewhat archaic already by his time.
    1. 'Tis a brave army,
      And full of purpose.
      Music of the hautboys as under the stage
    2. Peace! What noise?
    3. List, _list!_
    4. Hark!
    5. Music i' the air.
    6. Under the earth.
    7. It signs well, does it not?
    8. No.
  9. And again – in the late C14th – the ‘list’ of desire (perhaps formed out of lust) in, for example, Sir Gaiwan and The Green Knight:
    1. Þenne lyst þe lady to loke on þe knyȝt,
      Þenne com ho of hir closet with mony cler burdez
      Ho watz þe fayrest in felle, of flesche and of lyre,
      And of compas and colour and costes, of alle oþer,
    2. [Then 't was the lady's will to see that knight with eye,
      With many a maiden fair she cometh from her place,
      Fairest was she in skin, in figure, and in face,
      Of height and colour too, in every way so fair.]
  10. So that now we might have ‘the list-less’ – the ‘slothful’ or ‘idle’ – those without desire or direction, defined as such from the C15th onward but expertly so in the Huguenot Abel Boyer’s fascinating – if morally conservative – The English Theophrastus: Or The Manners of the Age written in 1702:
    1. Religion does improve the Underſtandings of Men, by ſubduing their Luſts, and moderating their Paſſions, which ſully and darken their Minds, even by a natural Influence. Intemperance and Senſuality, and Fleſhly Luſts, do debaſe Mens Minds, and clog their Spirits, make them groſs and foul, liſtleſs and unactive.4
  11. Obviously to be ‘listless’ in this way implies an idea of ‘listfullness’ – a peculiarly Protestant (or indeed Huguenot) conception of productivity – but no such word exists. Instead, perhaps, one may demonstrate such productivity in the act of list-taking and -making itself – a sense of the word developed during this time period, from the 1600’s on; and perfectly demonstrated in Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintillans (or Sacred poems and priuate eiaculations) written in 1650:
    1. When night comes, list thy deeds; make plain the way
      'Twixt Heaven, and thee; block it not with delays,
      But perfect all before thou sleep'st; Then say
      Ther's one Sun more strung on my Bead of days.
  12. And now, following Vaughan’s guidance, the moral character of such productive list-makers must be brought into sharp relief. As the administration of daily life in an increasingly colonised world became more-and-more complex, the production of all kinds of lists became a matter of utmost importance (and betray, to a contemporary audience, the crimes of their authors). In William Waller Hening’s C19th reproduction of the Statutes at Large: Collection Laws of Virginia (themselves compiled in 1658) we read of a list compiled under the section heading ‘What Persons are Tithable’:
    1. Tithable persons, who: All important male servants of whatever age. All negroes imported and Indian servants, male or female, 16 years old. Native christians and free persons imported under 16, excepted. Lists to be presented to clerk of county court, and there recorded.5
  13. On the Zong Massacre of 1781 (in which 130 enslaved African people were murdered for insurance money) historian Ian Baucom articulates the surreal success of this ‘monetarizing anatomization of the body’ and of the logs of such ships, he writes:
    1. “...what we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of become a ‘type’: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money. [... The log of the Ranger…] is a long and repetitive list, one whose reiterative predictably both requests the eye not so much to read as to skim and one whose flattened pathos solicits the reader’s indulgence for horror banalized, horror catalogued”
  14. Lists are truly modern. Lists are what make the modern, modern? What make it awful?
  15. In the 1962 Glossary of Terms for Automatic Data Processing, compiled by the British Standards Institution, list is defined as such:
    1. …to print every relevant item of input data on the general basis of one line of print per card.
  16. Georges Perec – a novelist and member of the Oulipo collective – was obsessed with lists. His 1978 novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) was partially constructed using a series of 42 x 10 elements lists, from which themes, plot points and actions were prompted. In the book itself he writes:
    1. Which is the odd item in the following list:
      French, short, polysyllabic, written, visible, printed, masculine, word, singular, American, odd?
  17. The Wikipedia page a ‘List of lists of lists’ begins:
    1. "List of lists" redirects here. For a non-comprehensive list of Wikipedia lists, see Wikipedia:Contents/Lists. For all lists on Wikipedia, see Category:Lists. "LoLoL" redirects here. For the Chilean town, see Lolol. For the internet slang, see LOL. This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Footnotes

  1. https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a03_01.htm (1315) ↩

  2. https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/christ-iii/ ↩

  3. A loose corpus of Medieval literature that in general deals with the locations, characters and themes concerning England, English history, or English cultural mores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_England ↩

  4. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-english-theophrastus_1708/page/10/mode/2up ↩

  5. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036018417&seq=484&q1=negroes ↩