THE FIRST SIGN of my little nephew’s moving closer to adulthood wasn’t when he used a cuss word for the first time—he still hasn’t, I must hasten to add—but when he said “etcetera.” I think he was around six years old. Records of his height and weight were being maintained by his parents and pediatrician, but it was his growing into language—lisping, mispronouncing, and, most of all, his daily acquisition of words—that excited me. Suddenly, without any kind of preparation or announcement, he had used the word: etcetera, a word that could hold the entire world in it. It could mean only one thing—he had grown aware of the world, and he had grown up.
A few years later, preparing for a Bangla test, he was writing answers to a quiz that his mother had set up for him. It was an exercise from Bangla grammar—“shondhi bichhed”; he would have to break up a word to reveal the two words that had come together, poetically, sometimes by design, sometimes almost accidentally, to form it. It was fun, even though I still struggle to accept his growing at this pace, to see him breaking up words as he had once broken toy cars. One of the words in the test was “ityadi.” Tuku, as I call my nephew, wrote the answer quickly, without patience: “iti + adi.”
Ityadi—“iti” and “adi,” the end and the beginning, from the end to the beginning.
Etcetera—“et,” meaning “and,” and “cetera,” “the rest.” This has the sense of leftovers.
What does this difference in name for a similar concept—one having the sense of including everything, the other the sense of remainder—imply for those who live in these languages? How do the two concepts affect creative practice? When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world?
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I remembered my own life as a student in the second grade. It was the last day of exams—first the Bangla test, and then we were free to play and have a picnic on the school playground. “What toys do you have?” That was the last question in the test. I, in a rush to submit my answer, wrote, “I have many toys.” At six, I must have expected “many” to do all the work, to help my teacher see all the toys in my house. The teacher couldn’t—“many” didn’t do the work. My mother was summoned to school—her daughter was too lazy to write a simple list.
At first I was scolded, and then, with time, turned into a family joke—I became an example of the student my brother and cousins were never to be, someone who, in excitement, could write “many” to escape from the task of writing down a list of nouns. Pursued by this anecdote, I’ve been compelled to wonder about the implication of this for writing in general. What makes Melville write pages and pages about the whale oil industry and someone like myself, a six-year-old girl, condense her world of toys into a word such as “many”? When does a writer—or a painter or filmmaker—decide that “etcetera” will do the work? Or the moment when the camera, mimicking the eye, tries to ensure that everything is given the dignity of attention—that nothing has been reduced to an etcetera?
Take this famous poem by Wordsworth, often anthologized as “The Daffodils”:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Notice the words that group: “crowd,” “host,” “continuous,” “milky way,” “never-ending line,” “ten thousand,” “company.” It is not just the contrast between the crowdedness of these words and the loneliness and solitude that the poetic “I” experiences in the first and last stanzas. It is the etceterization of what is being seen: the daffodils, whose individual specificity Wordsworth elides in his urge to give the reader their perimeter and volume. To be able to do that, he etceterizes the presentation of the daffodils.
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To give myself a break from time to time while writing this essay, I went to YouTube. I found a new video from the food channel Ottolenghi Test Kitchen. Chef Yotam Ottolenghi and his team were launching their 2022 cookbook, titled Extra Good Things. I’m struck by—perhaps because of what I’d been thinking and writing about—the word “extra.” What constitutes the category “extra”? Ottolenghi uses the word to mean an ingredient that he’s used for a recipe that can be used for another—a main ingredient of a dish adding something “extra” to another dish. It’s a useful working definition to begin with, one we are all intuitively familiar with—something that holds central attention in one context need not receive the same spotlight in another, thus pushing it into the category of “etcetera.” Besides our own, for instance, we are largely extras in other people’s weddings, which is why it is considered bad form to dress up more than the bride.
What is the “extra” in a sentence, in a paragraph, in a view, in a scene from a film—and what makes it both extra and necessary as a subliminal presence? I have tried elsewhere to understand this concept through the categories of surplus and uselessness. Concepts like extra, etcetera, and ityadi might help us grasp the decision-making process of selection and rejection that is the spine of the creative act. Robinson Crusoe, returning to the site of his shipwreck, discovers things that he could use: provisions that would keep him alive for some time, and, unexpectedly, writing material—paper and ink. He carries them back to his island and decides to keep a journal of everything he sees there. A few months later, realizing that he is running out of stationery, he makes an important decision—from now on, he will only record “significant” events in his notebook. I think of this moment as loaded with analogous significance: it is the moment when Crusoe will have to select and reject, and in doing so, he will turn from journal keeper into artist.
Every artist has to go through this process of selection and omission every moment, deciding what should be spotlighted in a line or paragraph and what should be seen as etcetera. This is a responsibility I often emphasize to my students—that by selecting a word, they are rejecting every other possible word that could have lived in that line or sentence, just as by choosing someone as our partner we are rejecting every other person who could have been in that position. I once heard Ocean Vuong compare the selection-rejection process (he didn’t use these words) to Noah’s decision-making about who he wanted on his ark. Expanding upon this metaphor, we can see that this decision of what will constitute the etcetera is not a function of “craft” but a spiritual choice that determines the entire tone and politics of a work of art. Would the third animal of every species have become an etcetera on Noah’s ark?
“Extra,” I’ve lately come to know, is Gen Z dialect for someone trying too hard or overreacting. Is this “extra” also “etcetera”? Who is the extra or etcetera on Noah’s ark? Is the repetitive last line of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—“And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep”—etcetera? It is for emphasis, of course, and also does the work of a refrain, in the manner of a gentle whipping such as might stir the horse in the poem back on its journey. Perhaps because Robert Frost believes that even the etcetera must be given the dignity of centrality, he allows the line a perfect echo—it closes the poem. What is the difference between such a poetic etcetera and our everyday communications where such repetition or emphasis might begin to sound like nagging? I’m trying to understand the relationship between etcetera and the poetic. Take the well-worn words often attributed to Michelangelo: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Here, the chiseled-away marble might be misconstrued as etcetera, but that is not the kind of thing I mean.
Here are some examples of what I have in mind. Consider the phrase “among others,” which one finds, for instance, in author bios that list prominent titles and well-reputed publication venues. In it is the manifestation of a hierarchy that etceterization creates—some works are considered important enough to be mentioned, while others are relegated to a surplus or remainder in a descending order, like the chief of army staff to the anonymity of the foot soldier. This, then, is one thing etcetera does—it renders items grouped together anonymous. Etcetera, therefore, isn’t as innocent—or casual—as it might seem. It is clearly political. Think of the caption of a newspaper photograph of a group of persons; usually only the names of the famous are registered, and the rest are turned into etceteras (the way that some actors are called “extras”). While what will be dubbed etcetera is crucial to creativity and the risk-taking it involves, the process also simultaneously denies specificity to who and what has been etceterized. Thus, it is a manifestation of power—it’s not a coincidence that “authority” derives from “author.”
The etcetera is background, something that is part of a scene or sentence—it cannot be done away with, and yet it needn’t be paid much attention: this seems to be the ethic of the creative process. A close approximation of this decision-making process might be how we decide to crop photos—isolating our face and body from a group, for example, or cutting out the sky to highlight our presence. What motivates us to cut some parts of an image while retaining others?
“And so on.” That’s another etcetera phrase. Where could it have come from, and what could we learn from its impulse? How old is this phrase in the English language?
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In order to see how different people with different temperaments and ambitions use the etcetera, I turn now to three poems by two Indian poets writing in English about a similar scene.
The first poem was written by Nissim Ezekiel in 1972:
Irani Restaurant Instructions
Please
Do not spit
Do not sit more
Pay promptly, time is valuable
Do not write letter
without order refreshment
Do not comb,
hair is spoiling floor
Do not make mischiefs in cabin
our waiter is reporting
Come again
All are welcome whatever cast
If not satisfied tell us
otherwise tell others
GOD IS GREAT
The other two poems are by the bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar, both written possibly a few years before Ezekiel’s:
Irani Restaurant Bombay
the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake
decompose carefully in a cracked showcase;
distracted only by a fly on the make
as it finds in a loafer’s wrist an operational base.dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat
breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon
if it disturb the pond; the road, neat
as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden.the thirsty loafer sees the stylized perfection
of the landscape, in a glass of water, wobble.
a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention
singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table.an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space.
while promoting darkness below the chair, the cat
in its two timing sleep dreams evenly and knows
dreaming to be an administrative problem. his cigarettelit, the loafer, affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue,
places the burnt matchstick in the tea circle; and sees it rise:
as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue
and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice.the burnt matchstick with the tea circle makes a rude
compass. the heretic needle jabs a black star.
tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed
and cashier is where at seams it comes apart.
Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda (excerpt)
They’re serving khima pao at Olympia,
dal gosht at Baghdadi,
puri bhaji at Kailash Parbat,aab gosht at Sarvi’s,
kebabs with sprigs of mint at Gulshan-e-Iran,
nali-nehari at Noor Mohamadi’s,baida gotala at the Oriental,
paya soup at Benazir,
brun maska at Military Café,upma at Swagat,
shira at Anand Vihar,
and fried eggs and bacon at Wayside Inn.For, yes, it’s breakfast time at Kala Ghoda
as elsewhere
in and around Bombay—up and down
the whole hungry longitude, in fact;
the 73rd, if I’m not mistaken.
Ezekiel’s is evidently a found poem—a short anthology of instructions for customers stepping into the Iranian cafés in Bombay. The second of Kolatkar’s, too, is a kind of found poem—a moment in the morning when the breakfast menus of cafés and restaurants in the Kala Ghoda district of Bombay come together in his mind. Ezekiel isn’t interested in the food—he collects the words from the signage on the café boards. The food is turned into an etcetera by giving it space only in the title: it’s an Irani “restaurant,” after all—that’s the only massage to the imagination about food.
In Kolatkar’s breakfast poem, the mind becomes a menu card, almost a food delivery app before its time, one that collects the signature dishes from a neighborhood of restaurants. Everything else on the menu at these restaurants has been turned into etcetera—they are quite obviously there, for there can’t be only one dish per restaurant, but they are hidden as a collective in the proper nouns: Wayside Inn, and so on. In Kolatkar’s “Irani Restaurant Bombay,” it’s as if everything except the sense of sight has been etceterized—it’s a poem about gluttony, not of the tongue but of the eye, taking everything in greedily. The instructions of Ezekiel’s poem and the app-like list of Kolatkar’s do not exist in this one. Though the three poems are records of very similar experiences, it is what has been etceterized that gives each its different axis. It is as if the left hand and the right know what is each other’s etcetera.
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I am thinking of the first person who was forced to coin the word—ityadi in one culture, etcetera in another. What had they seen, what had they felt that had exhausted them into creating this expression? What is it that is making me imagine that this sound—and concept—had come from exhaustion, a relief from cataloging? Doesn’t etcetera have any energy of its own? Is it only something that allows this sleight of hand, a form of condensation? Surely abbreviation has its own energy, even if paraphrase doesn’t? Etcetera is not paraphrase, of course. It comes from a different impulse—the same one that allows different flowers to be collected into a word such as “bouquet.”
I turn to my colleague Naresh Keerthi, a scholar of Sanskrit, to find out more. As he reminds me,
Sanskrit words such as -ādi, -ādya, -mukha, -pramukha -prabhṛti (beginning [with], first, foremost, most prominent), as the second member of a compound, give the sense of “etcetera.” For example, rādhādyāḥ gopyaḥ (Gopis beginning with Radha = Gopis such as Radha), or agastyapramukhā(ḥ) munayaḥ (Sages with Agastya being the foremost = Sages such as Agastya). The syntax of these etcetera terms is usually of the pattern “X-(etcetera term) A” where A is the common noun (sage, cowgirl) and X is the specific example (Agastya, Radha).
What I take from this is that these suffixes that attach themselves to certain words amplify their sense of accommodation. “Adi,” meaning “from the beginning”—the suffix in ityādi that “is a sandhi of the quotative particle iti and the word ādi”—when it attaches itself to “iti,” meaning end, becomes the most capacious space imaginable. It can hold anything. “Write that He is without end,” says Guru Nanak. Why is God never referred to as “etcetera” then?
What does this system of thought—of -adi, -adya, -mukha, -pramukha, -prabhrti—do to those who live in the languages where etceterization is made possible through the attachment of these suffixes? How different is this from, say, “blah blah”? And how does this affect our creative practice?
Naresh also tells me about the Dravidian terms for etcetera:
Tamil—mutaliyāṉa, mutalāṉa; Kannada—muntāda, modalāda; ityādi = ivē muntāduvu; Telugu—modalaina. They all seem to be calques/parallels of the Sanskrit expressions. They all translate to “beginning with.” Words such as Mutal and muṉ mean front, fore, lead. The Hindi word for etcetera is of Persian origin: va gairah, which derives from “gair,” meaning “other.”
That a sense of othering, of marking difference, is coded in the intuitive code of etcetera rises to the surface when one becomes aware of this etymological detail. Other words for etcetera in Hindi include “amuka”—in common with Bangla—which would translate into “such and such a person.”
In both these Hindi words, there is a distinction between centrality and background created by etceterization. In many Indian languages, such as Bangla, the onomatopoeic urge turns the second sound into an etcetera: in “natak tatak,” “natak” means “drama” but “tatak” means nothing; it is just a rhyming sound that holds in it the inexpressible etcetera.
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I am thinking of two literary texts—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s four-line poem “January” and Lydia Davis’s short short story “The Outing.” Here’s “January”:
The gate wide open; chairs on the lawn;
Circular verandahs; a narrow kitchen;
High-ceilinged rooms; arches; alcoves; skylights.
My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.
When I teach Mehrotra’s poem in class, I ask my students to think about the title. Why “January”? Every poem must have a temperature, but the poet couldn’t find a way to give us the time and season—these four lines cannot accommodate anything more. He has to rely on the title to do the work: the etcetera of temperature that is yet of such significance that it must be given its own space in the title.
This is the one-sentence short story by Lydia Davis:
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
The title gives the story its setting—“The Outing.” The word generates expectations—of enjoyment and togetherness—that the story itself frustrates. Without the title, we would get neither the context nor the depth of disappointment. Are “January” and “The Outing” etceteras, then—words that couldn’t be held in the texts themselves but must exist close by, to give meaning and context? Is that how writers write etceteras?
Reading Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies on a long-distance flight—a fact I mention only to restate the obvious: the rituals of air travel involve a constant negotiation with etceteras—I became aware of something I hadn’t before. It is perhaps in the nature of etceterization to bleach away intimacy, I said to myself as I read the narrator’s interpretation and understanding of a 17th-century painting. Outside my window was a continent of clouds—uncountable, various, generic, without the gravitas of individuality. Though the sight brought me calm and delight and wonder, I realized that it had the sense of the etcetera—it wasn’t charged by specificity:
The rooms at the Mauritshuis were small in scale, galleries that felt almost domestic compared to the exhibition spaces at some museums, their size so immense they seemed to force an experience of sublimity upon the visitor. I thought I preferred the intimacy of these rooms, which were better suited to the paintings not only because of the size of the works—some were no bigger than a sheet of paper, the kind of paintings you wanted to approach, that could not be experienced at a distance—but also because of their subject matter.
And two pages later, I realized that I was wrong about the relationship between etcetera and intimacy:
I stepped closer to the painting. […]
I looked back at the painting, this time I saw that the man appeared to be holding coins in the palm of his cupped hand. The palm was discreetly proffered, with the other hand he was gently pulling at her arm, as if to turn her away from her work and toward the proposition before her. I saw the uncommon skill with which the artist had communicated the subtleties of force and resistance—the drama in the pull of his hand on her arm, the stiffness of her posture, the fearful widening of the eyes. […]
I looked at the title card again, to my surprise I saw that the painting had been made by a woman, Judith Leyster.
Reading this, I began to wonder whether it is the nature of art and literature to reward the viewer or reader with the secrets of the etcetera only after a reviewing or rereading? Reading this—reading the narrator rereading the painting—I also began to wonder whether the etcetera has an “intimacy” that becomes available only after a first visit. And since that is a characteristic of the poetic, its ability to make us return over and over again, does etcetera share the same artistic DNA?
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Turning to the natural world as I often do, I wondered what plants and animals might consider etcetera. I couldn’t think of anything. And it has made me wonder whether it is this that differentiates art from what we call nature—that only art, a human creation, needs its etcetera, in a way that no other species does. (I do not know of any other species that has felt the need to twirl their moustache, that playful male etcetera, for instance.) Is it this, then, that lies at the heart of that exhausted binary of nature versus culture?
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Featured image: Frances Hodgkins. Threshing in the Cotswolds, ca. 1909. Sir John Ilott Collection, Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand (1999-0027-4). CC0, tepapa.govt.nz. Accessed November 15, 2024. Image has been cropped.
