Things That List

By Matilda Leyser

“The idea that memory is linear…is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself – can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind?” Penelope Lively, “A Life in Books.”

In English “an awareness of time as past or present is woven deep into the structure of our language. The language in which Sei Shonogan wrote was capable of using verb inflections to indicate nuances that make English verb tenses seem clumsy…A narration of a past event….could simply proceed in a time-neutral verb form.” Meredith McKinney, Introduction to The Pillow Book.

“With the passing years/ My years grow old upon me/ yet when I see/ the lovely flower of spring/ I forget age and time.” (The Pillow Book 19)

In the language I speak, in the ‘court’ that is the culture I live inside, we conceive of time spatially: the future is in front of us, the past behind us. Time is a dot to dot drawing game: connect up all the seconds in sequence, every numbered dot, and a horizontal line emerges, reaching backwards, stretching forwards, a road along which we travel – the primary metaphor for life, a journey, which we write and read from left to right. In Sei Shonogan’s Pillow Book time is also described in spatial terms but there is rather more space, more options available, than only forwards or back. The joined up dots may form a circle rather than a line, and I can even dispense with joining up the dots altogether and either jump from one to another or stay with a single dot and sail along on it in the continuous present.

Things that just keep passing by – A boat with its sail up.
People’s age.
Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. (205)

The boat, the generations, the seasons do not pass by, they keep on passing by, so that, if I am reading it right as the words pass into English, their passage contains a paradox. The first image places us as a spectator, watching a boat. For the boat to pass by us it would eventually have to leave our field of vision, to go from dot ‘A’ to dot ‘B’, from 2008 to 2009, passing away into the past, out of sight. But it does not. Impossibly, it just keeps passing by. As we sail from a spatial to a temporal image the one shapes our experience of the other so that rather than being a road in front of us, time is water all around us, and our life within it is a boat that just keeps on passing by.

Our spatial conception of time in turn shapes our ideas of story. Stories, in a backwards/forwards ‘dot to dot’ drawing are chronological. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end—this is how the deity Chronos dictates that I must structure my narrative in order for it to make sense. Even if I choose to start in the middle and flash back to the start, before returning to find the end, I am still working within this same structure. So it is that I have been schooled in plotting my way through this annotation by working from point to point. If one point does not ‘pass by’ to the next, linking to it and leading the argument forwards, there will be no story—the dots will not be joined and all I will have succeeded in producing is just a list.

Things an annotation is not: “An annotation is not a book review, a plot summary, a heap of random reactions, a digest of published criticisms of the work, an exercise in the application of esoteric literary theory, or an assessment of the author’s philosophy of life, biography, or place of history.” Jeanne Mackin, “The Art of Critical Writing” handout.

Things that can be meant by the word ‘list’:
A series of names or other items written or printed together in a meaningful grouping or sequence so as to constitute a record: a list of members.
a strip of cloth or other material.
to prepare (ground) for planting by making ridges and furrows
a careening, or leaning to one side, as of a ship
to like or desire.
to listen to. (from Dictionary.com)

The Pillow Book not only contains lists but could be described in its entirety as one long list, “a series of items written…together in a meaningful grouping…so as to constitute a record: a list of members.’ Shonogan, describing her work’s genesis at its end, recalls The Empress’ question on receiving a gift of some paper, “What do you think we could write on this?…They are copying Records of the Historian over at His Majesty’s court” (255). Shonogan takes up the challenge of creating another kind of record, ‘a list of members’, things that define her membership to the world of her court. Her list is not governed by ‘Chronos’, a cause and effect historical sequence, a ‘to do’ or ‘was done’ list of left to right actions, but a lyrical list of allusion, so that words do not press on, leaning forwards but, as in a pun, they leap wittily sideways, simultaneous meanings vertically, concurrently present – they ‘list’ in more ways than one. “List: to like or desire, to listen to, to lean to one side, to prepare ground for planting…”

The Pillow Book lists a world in which things can be two (or more) things at once; different times, spaces, scales, meanings can coincide inside its pages, the animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, poetic and prosaic, side by side.

Things that are near yet far—The Miyanobe festival. Relationships between siblings or relatives who don’t like each other. The winding path up to Kurama Temple.
The first day of the New year, seen from the last day of the old.
Things that are far yet near—Paradise. The course of a boat.
Relations between men and women. (162-163)

Japan and England; The 11th Century and the 21st; A writer and a reader.
As a 21st Century English reader, Shonogan’s lists teach me about intimacy from afar, how near distant meanings are to each other. When I have the courage to relinquish chronology, the ‘Chronos’ logic of sequential critical thinking and story-telling, I see that what emerges is not ‘just a list’ but rather that lists are all there ever are. All of language is revealed as a list, or even a list of lists, for every word is in fact the title of a list, as in a dictionary—comprising an inventory of human experience. Even within Shonogan’s simplest lists—lists of mountains, rivers, plants, birds – we are made aware that the items being listed are not simply natural forms but linguistic constructs. The act of naming, that primal moment when a word, a sound, attaches to a concept inside a mind, the moment when classification occurs, is dramatized:

River Pools- Kashiko Pool. I wonder what hidden depths someone saw in its heart, to give it such a name (16)

Shonogan shows the hidden depths and surface play within language itself, the ‘near yet far’, ‘far yet near’ relationship between language and that which it lists. She writes lists of “Things that look ordinary but become extraordinary when written” (150), differentiating the name from the thing. But, whilst at times duplicitous, the act of naming, of listing, is presented in The Pillow Book as primarily an act of love, of ‘Okashi’ in the Japanese (xxii), an act of standing at the edge of Kashiko Pool, wondering, seeking the hidden depths in the heart of experience.

“O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I shall give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labell’d to my will: as item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin and so forth” (Twelfth Night Act 1 scene 4)

Hard-hearted Olivia flirts with a long literary tradition of listing, naming, as a power-game of possession–‘I name therefore I own,’ I stick in the flag, the pin, and classify you as me, as mine, and therefore keep my own identity, my story, stable, drawing a line from dot to dot and date to date. In the Pillow Book ownership, authorship does not involve being the first man, Adam, to name, but rather prestige is awarded for being the quick-witted woman to quote or allude to previous namings, creating a complex web across space and time.

Shonagon, Sei, and Meredith McKinney. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. London: Penguin Books, 2006.